Instead of taking sides and pulling punches, Western Muslims should denounce all wrongdoing, a pundit argues
By B.C.
IN AN ideal world, Muslims in the Western world should be able to watch events in their faith's heartland with a critical, dispassionate eye, and exercise a benign influence. After all, Western Muslims are freer to gather information from all sides, and to speak their mind, than their co-religionists in Muslim-majority lands. And that sort of thing does occasionally happen. I once attended a conference in Kuala Lumpur where many speakers drearily defended the idea of criminalising blasphemy, until a soft-spoken Dutch Muslim woman, of Turkish origin, argued brilliantly in favour of freedom of speech as the best way for each religion to defend its corner. She was the star of the show.
But according to one well-placed commentator on the world of Islam, developments in Egypt have created some sharp divisions within Muslim communities in the West, especially in North America; and neither side in an increasingly polarised debate has distinguished itself.
With my apologies for over-simplifying an elaborate argument, H.A. Hellyer, a British analyst and fellow of the Brookings Institution think-tank,identifies one camp which is highly sensitive to the misdeeds of the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore condones bad behaviour, including terrible human-rights abuses, by the present regime in Cairo, which overthrew a Brotherhood-minded government last year. Another camp, he writes in the United States-based Islamic Monthly, is rightly appalled by the present rulers' massive human-rights violations and plays down those perpetrated by the Brotherhood when it held power.
In the first camp, according to Mr Hellyer, who is also a research associate at Harvard University's Kennedy School, are the many Muslims in North America and elsewhere who take their cue from an eminent Egyptian scholar who shows quite an emollient face to the Western world. The scholar is Ali Gomaa (pictured), a former grand mufti of Egypt who has been sharply critical of the Brotherhood and correspondingly supportive of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.That distinguished greybeard also has some standing in the Christian world, as an inter-faith dialogue partner and one of the few senior Muslims who has said people should be free to leave Islam if they choose.
Mr Hellyer, who divides his time between Britain, America and the Arab world, also looks at the different position taken Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University who enjoys a lot of prestige among Muslims in the West, especially the young and politically engaged.
Mr Ramadan is certainly no friend of the present regime in Egypt. Back in the summer, he made waves in the Western Islamic scene by pointedly declining to attend two important annual gatherings: one held in Detroit in August by the Islamic Society of North America, and one in Toronto called Renewing the Islamic Spirit, which has just ended. Mr Ramadan eschewed the first gathering on grounds that his hosts were too compliant with the American government, and the second because its politically quietist ethos amounted, in his view, to condoning Arab autocrats in Egypt and elsewhere.
Does all that imply Mr Ramadan is less critical of the Brotherhood, which his grandfather Hassan al-Banna founded, than an objective observer would be? He would indignantly deny any such bias and he is especially irritated by critics who assume that his ideas flow automatically from those of his forebear. Today he angrily told his 1.2m Facebook admirers that Mr Hellyer had distorted his position over the two conferences.
Anyway, it is Mr Hellyer's view that the Swiss-born professor has been relatively lenient in his attitude to the Brotherhood, focusing mainly on the movement’s tactics and strategy. (Given that people are entitled to disagree on what an appropriate level of criticism would be, the leniency or otherwise of Mr Ramadan’s stance must also, surely, be a matter of open and reasonable debate.)
Whatever view one takes of Mr Ramadan, the article laments that the majority of onlookers outside as well as inside Egypt have a favourite side in that country, whose misdeeds they are prepared, at least partially, to airbrush away. What Mr Hellyer longs to see is the emergence, at least in the wider world, of rigorously independent voices who are willing to denounce human-rights abuses by all sides. As he sees things, those who aspire to tell hard truths, especially in the name of morality and religion, should call all manner of despots or faults to account.One figure he admires is Emad Effat, an Egyptian Muslim jurist who was critical in equal measure of ex-President Hosni Mubarak, of the military council which took over, and of the Muslim Brotherhood. But that outspoken mufti paid a heavy price; he was killed in clashes with the army in November 2011.
