The Prophet of Moderation: Tariq Ramadan's Quest to Reclaim Islam

Most Westerners have a pretty clear idea of what comes to the mind of a Danish cartoonist when he imagines the Prophet Muhammad. They also have a good idea of what comes to the mind of a cave-dwelling Taliban fighter or an al Qaeda operative. Tariq Ramadan, however, is mortified by the caricatures that have shaped public perceptions of the man to whom Allah revealed the Koran in 610. Accordingly, the prolific Swiss-born theologian, who has become both a media star and a lightning rod for controversy, has made it his mission to change the way both Muslims and non-Muslims view Islam.

In the Footsteps of the Prophet is Ramadan's loving portrait of Muhammad, but it is also a biography written with the instincts of a savvy publicist. Beneath the book's somewhat dull exterior -- essentially a highlight reel of the Prophet's sayings and doings over 23 years of revelation -- lies a pointed agenda: to reappropriate and redefine Islam's message and messenger for Muslim minorities and the Western societies in which they live. Muhammad could have hoped for no more sympathetic an advocate than Ramadan to counter all the bad press.

Ramadan aims to weaken the distinction between the Muslim world (dar al-Islam) and everywhere else -- "the lands of war" (dar al-harb). That is, he wants Muslims in the West to see themselves not as an aggrieved minority in hostile territory but as equal members of Western society, with full rights and full responsibilities. To understand the role Ramadan hopes to play, it helps to read In the Footsteps of the Prophet on three levels. First, it is a thoughtful retort to the humanist newspaper editors -- and those "ex-Muslims" whom Timothy Garton Ash has called "fundamentalists of the enlightenment" -- who malign Islam through unfair caricature. Second, it is a theological housecleaning aimed at literalists from Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (founder of the Saudi-based Wahhabi movement) to Ayman al-Zawahiri (al Qaeda's chief theologian). And finally, it is a cautious demonstration to Muslims and non-Muslims alike that Islam is open to interpretation and can be tailored to specific circumstances.

Although he was brought up in Geneva in the 1970s, Ramadan has a notable Muslim lineage: his maternal grandfather was Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his father was Said Ramadan, a founder of the Muslim World League. As an interpreter of the Islamic tradition who works across boundaries as well as within them, Ramadan has made himself indispensable both to religious reform in Islam and to the political integration of Muslims in the West. He has met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and European Union Commission President Romano Prodi and has academic appointments at both Oxford University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. At the same time, however, his antiestablishment modus operandi has led nervous officials -- in Cairo and Riyadh as well as in Washington (and, temporarily, Paris) -- to banish him from their territories. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently denied Ramadan's two-year-old visa application, which would have allowed him to take up an academic position at the University of Notre Dame, on the grounds that he had contributed some $900 to a Palestinian charity later linked to Hamas. (At the time of the donation, the charity was not on Washington's list of terrorist organizations.)

The book's dust jacket calls Ramadan a "Muslim Martin Luther." But perhaps Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth-century German Jewish "enlightenment" philosopher who is considered the founder of Reform Judaism, makes for a more apt comparison. Ramadan seeks reform, not reformation: he urges Muslims in the West to leave the ghetto while retaining their religious identity. Like Mendelssohn did, Ramadan promotes an insider's message of emancipation to followers of what he believes is a revealed religion. Also like Mendelssohn, Ramadan is a product of European society. He hopes his voice -- mellifluous in French, English, and Arabic -- can reassure minority and majority societies alike that full faith is compatible with full social and political participation.

DO AS I DO

One of the main challenges for Islamic scholars in the West is to establish a legitimate fiqh (jurisprudence) for Muslim minorities without diluting Islamic faith to the point where it is unrecognizable or, worse, un-Islamic. Muslims in Europe or the United States who look for religious guidance in their daily lives have few local options. Little is available for those who are uninterested in either the semiofficial religious leadership imported from "homeland" governments or the politicized Islamist movements that have sprung up in opposition to those establishments. There is a British-based fatwa council of sheiks tied directly to the Muslim Brotherhood (the European Council for Fatwa and Research, or ECFR), and "Internet imams" based in Turkey, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf dispense instruction through e-mail and message boards. Fatwas from such sources can have the practical effect of enhancing everyday integration -- by allowing Muslims, for example, to take out mortgages on first home purchases (against a prohibition on interest-bearing loans) or to pray at unofficial times. But these are mere dispensations from otherwise unchanged and universal rules. Their narrow validity does not supplement or replace Islamic jurisprudence in the Muslim world. In the words of one Saudi sheik who sits on the ECFR, they are "legal decisions which remain unknown and inapplicable in the Arab world but which are nonetheless adapted to the Western world."