Understanding Tariq Ramadan

What I Believe from Kinokuniya

It wasn't easy.

I picked up the book after a week of hiatus from work. I wanted to understand this man, his thoughts and principles really badly. After all, as I said over on Facebook when he was in the country for a couple of days, Tariq Ramadan is my kind of a rock star.

But his books so far have been very thick and frightening. I must have ADD as a kid, my attention wavers every two seconds or so, and hence I was scared that I would forget their contents every time I put them down for the day and have to start over, over and over again.

Thus, when fellow book lovers and avid readers on Goodreads -Malaysia recommended this latest little book 'if you don't have the time but want to understand this man', it was the first book I grabbed from Kinokuniya on my first day back at work.

The buying part was easy, but the reading part was not. As I am writing this, I have not yet finished the whole book. Okay, not exactly. I am on the Appendix II, which I think can be safely concluded that I HAVE finished the book. I actually started to 'get' Ramadan after I decided to educate myself on the latest Islamophobic-hype in the US. Only after that I understood his visions and missions.

I must say that Tariq Ramadan is a thinker, an intellectual as he is rightly called. He does not only recognized, acknowledged and highlighted the source of Islamophobia (he didn't excatly call it that, but that was how I understood it) in the West, but he proposed a manifesto (entitled A New "We") and the 7C's on how to overcome it.

Ramadan claimed that it is not Islam per se that threatened the Westerners, but it's actually their fear of the return of religion. After all, Europeans have had a bad bout with religion; it was the cause of the Dark Ages across the continent hundreds of years ago. Thus I think it was contradictory of the Pope Benedict XVI to claim that Europe (and the West) has always been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian because if it were not for the heavy borrowings from Muslims scholars and intellectuals, the Renaissance might have never surfaced. That is also, Ramadan further affirmed, is the proof that Islam and Muslims have always been a part of Europe.

He also dissected the hidden hands in advocating Islamophobia - the lazy politicians who failed to offer solutions to immigration issues, the feminists who cannot fathom the fact that women can be religious AND liberated, the homosexuals who claim Muslims are uncool for condemning their sexual orientation and of course, the Zionists who are fanning the anti-Semitic accusations towards Muslims.

What a great little black book. Yes of course there are things I didn't agree with him, but those required more readings on his works. Thus, now I am dreading Radical Reform, Ramadan's other book, on my bookshelf which is borrowed from my best friend, Afni. Maybe some things would happen to make it relevant, aye?