Ratonis
In “Flight of the Intellectuals,” Paul Berman presents an extensive critique of the thought of the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan, and his kid-glove treatment by western intellectuals. The book is a trenchant exposure of Ramadan’s tendency to speak out of both sides of his mouth, and the acceptance of violence as a political strategy, even among alleged “moderate” voices, that lies at the heart of the Islamist movement in Europe and America. Although Berman is cautious about giving credibility to the concept “Islamo-fascism,” (he backs off from this), he nevertheless agrees that one can understand why people might want to use that phrase. He then unfolds, with wonderfully crafted prose, the very real fascist (specifically Nazi) influences on the Islamist movement since the 1930s down to the present day, and how accepting the alleged “moderate Muslim” Ramadan is of these principles.
The greater percentage of the book is a critique of Ian Baruma’s article on Tariq Ramadan that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2007. This extensive critique of a specific writer discussing a leading Swiss Muslim philosopher illuminates Berman’s assessment of western intellectuals’ response to radical Islam, which he describes as “a coverage animated by earnest good intentions, but, then again, by squeamishness and fear. And by less-than-good intentions.”
Berman clarifies the intellectual line of descent in Ramadan’s thought from Hassan al Banna (Ramadan’s grandfather)through Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini and Sayid Qutb. Berman challenges Ramadan to explain why he refuses to clearly reject the violent extremism of such figures, and why, when writing of them, Ramadan dances around such a lurid anti-semitism and exterminationist agenda as was embraced by the the Mufti. And why doesn’t Baruma press the point while interviewing Ramadan for his NYT article? As far as Ramadan is concerned, Berman notes that Ramadan’s whole intellectual tradition “is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.”
Along the way, Berman calls our attention to some promising further reading, most notably a novel by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal entitled “The German Mujahid,” translated into English from the original French in 2009. In Sansal’s story, the sons of a former German SS officer who has moved to Algeria and converted to Islam, discover the truth concerning their father. The dramatic thread of the novel is rooted, significantly, in the harmonious relationship between Nazi anti-semitism and the officer’s new Islamist version of the Muslim faith. The boys come to the “alarming recognition that Nazism and Islamism have something in common.”
The ninth and final chapter of the book, which recapitulates the title of the book itself, is worth the price of the book (and it’s expensive). In this chapter, Berman expresses moral outrage at the cowardly and twisted responses of western intellectuals to a woman of great courage and intellect–Ayaan Hirsi Ali. While Ramadan gathers sychophantic admirers among western intellectuals, Hirsi Ali’s advocacy of womens’ rights and individual liberty draws their scorn and ridicule, some of which is itself clearly sexist in nature. The intellectuals manifest a now-familiar guilt and disgust of their own western civilization, and seem to wallow in the “pleasure of self-hatred.” Quoting Pascal Bruckner, Berman notes that “it is astonishing that sixty-two years after the fall of the Third Reich and sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an important segment of Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.”
Berman expresses the view that the Salman Rushdie affair has now “metastasized into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia–its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including other people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Fear–mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology–has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.” Thus it is that western intellectual life is threatened by the intellectuals themselves, who refuse to discuss or even acknowledge “the Nazi influence that has turned out to be so weirdly venemous and enduring in the history of the Islamist movement.”
This is a book that should be on the recommended reading list of college students throughout America. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that, for that would require courage far beyond the conventional “multiculturalist” bromides that now put them to sleep.
Rating: 5 / 5
