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Tariq Ramadan’s Tryst with Modernity Toward a European Muslim Tradition s aj ja d r iz vi In the introduction to a significant recent collection of essays on the concept of religion, Hent de Vries writes: ‘‘Religion’’ may—or may not—be here to stay. As a ‘‘concept’’ (but which or whose exactly?), from one perspective it might seem to be losing its received reference (the transcendent, the world beyond, and the life hereafter) and its shared relevance (a unified view of the cosmos and all beings in it; a doctrine of the origin, purpose and end of all things; an alert, enlightened or redeemed sense of self; a practice and way of life), if it had not done so already. Yet from another perspective, it continues to claim a prominent role in attempts to understand the past, to grapple with the present , and to anticipate, if not to prophesy, the future.1 This sums up the theme of this volume and provides the crucial context for understanding modern Muslim public intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan, whose thought I will address. Sociologists of religion, and even some specialists in religious studies, have continuously expressed surprise in recent years that the themes of tradition and modernity, once seen as phases within societal and epistemological development, just keep coming back. Traditions most notably expressed in the idiom of religious and cultural beliefs were so many aspects of false consciousness that needed to be overcome. God-talk, once considered obsolete in the social and human sciences, has similarly returned with a vengeance. The Weberian shift from enchantment to disenchantment, from a theocentric reality to an anthropocentric Enlightenment, even post-Enlightenment world, has failed to bring about the secularization that displaces faith from the public and privatized spheres. A number of thinkers have therefore attempted to reassess classical secularization theory and reconsider key features of it.2 First, what 209 210 Sajjad Rizvi is the role of religion in the public sphere? Following Habermas’s most recent position, do we grudgingly allow religion to hold public space to avoid ‘‘trouble’’ as long as it cedes authority to critical and secular reason, or do we concede that faith-based, even fundamentalist and isolationist theocratic positions within a liberal democratic bargain are worthy of our societies, as Swaine argues?3 Second, to what extent has the condition of modernity actually facilitated the perpetuation of multivocal disciplines and practices of tradition embedded in exegetical communities of meaning?4 Third, does the overarching monism of modernity give way to disaggregated notions of multiple and alternative modernity?5 So much for political theology—and in fact it is precisely a politicized notion of religiosity and soteriology that plagues much modern Islamic thinking and indeed broader thought relating to the category of religion. Alongside this, even in theology, one experiences the return of the messianic and apocalyptic, the God beyond being and within the realm of possibility, concepts that force us to rethink what we even mean by religion, by belief, a stripping away of ontotheology in favor of the immediacy of experience.6 The basic notion that our fundamental intellectual values are barely veiled and secularized modes of theological thinking has been extensively aired, whether they pertain to the political or to the metaphysical.7 Even secularism qualifies as a form of religious commitment, while from the opposite direction, European thought on religion and secularity is provincialized by examining the constructed nature of both from the margins.8 This return with a vengeance of God, expressed within a seemingly secularized idiom with greatest irony, is evident in the work of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.9 Neotheism clashes and finds fertile ground for its ideas due no doubt in part to the fundamentalism of the neo-atheism of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.10 The return to God, the revival of tradition, and the calibration of modernity in the imagination are at least partly due to the focus upon Islam. So the question that arises is how Muslim thinkers in the contemporary period (re)think their intellectual traditions, their inherited modes and articulations of phronesis (practical wisdom), and their ethical engagements in a world of alternative modernities. In a sense, the themes have changed little in the past two centuries of Islamic modernism and liberalism: a concern with equity, the rights of women, and the oppressed; concerns for social justice; the need to rethink basic texts and approaches to texts; and a reassessment of the...

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