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OPEN DEMOCRACY - DECEMBER 2012
Monday, 17 December 2012 / bureau /
Bureau européen de Tariq Ramadan
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Tariq Ramadan教授接受訪問，分析與評論當前中東地區穆斯林社會的現象。這些訪談內容有助於了解當前穆斯林社會動態。
主要訪問要點
1. 阿拉伯覺醒(Arab awakening)過於強調政治層面，而忽略重要經濟議題。
2. 說明何謂土耳其模式與其缺失。
3. 對這些國家造成不穩定的因素之一：極端世俗主義者與Salafist的角色。
4. 朝向市民社會(Civil Society)的多元發展。
We are making a mistake, a very big mistake if we
look at what we call the Arab Awakening only by looking at the whole dynamics
in political and not in economic terms.
Heather McRobie: I’d like to begin with
the concept of Islamic democratic secularism and
the statement in your book, Arab Awakening, that, “at this precise moment
Muslims will only have proven the singularity of Islam when they demonstrate
its universality.” Could you explain what you mean by this, and the concept of
Islamic democratic secularism?
Tariq Ramadan: It’s part of a whole discussion about ethics in my work.
I focus on Islamic applied ethics in many fields, and here I am saying that
coming back to the Qu’ran and the sunnah as our reference point does not mean
that we depend for our ethics on ‘Islam as opposed to the others’. I look to Islamic ethics to find something that can provide
the basis for shared values with other traditions, and ultimately universal
values. Thisties into the point I made in another book, The Quest for
Meaning, that the only way for values to be universal is if they are shared
universal values. My main point is, in this quest for value the aim is not to
express your distinctness from others, but about being able to contribute to
the discussion of universal value. What I’m advocating
is an intellectual revolution – it’s a different mindset concerning the ethical
benchmarks by which we live.
Rosemary Bechler: In Arab Awakening
those Islamic values are deployed both as a critique of western values and Arab
worlds in their present state. Together they amount to a comprehensive critique
of capitalism as a system, a critique which you also find reflected in the Arab
Awakening which is the subject of the book. Do you think these seismic
processes will take that path and build on that critique?
TR: Unfortunately, some of the theses I put
forward in those pages have now been proved all too correct. For example, in
the concerns I voiced at the beginning of the book, when I said that I was
cautiously optimistic, but that there could be a polarisation with secularism,
and that in that polarisation, Islam was avoiding the main questions. The
nature of the state is one thing, but there are other major challenges - what
it will take to tackle the issues of social corruption, for example, social
justice, and the economic system – and what are the
future challenges when it comes to equality between the citizens, in particular
in the field of the job market and equal opportunity for men and for women?
This is at the centre of the question that is the Arab Awakening.
What I see now is that even with the Islamists,
who have been portraying themselves as the alternative to corruption and
dictatorship and in defence of more transparency; there is one respect in which
they have now changed completely. Since the beginning
of the 1920’s, Islamism was very close in positioning in some respects to
‘liberation theology’. But that is no longer the case. Now the most
important example of the last fifteen years is the move from Erbakan to
Erdoğan, creating the Turkish model that has been highly successful in economic
terms, but only in fact by buying into and succeeding in being integrated into
the global economic system.
I don’t see anyone today, whether you
look at the Muslim Brotherhood or Ennahda in Tunisia or people working in
Libya, or even the Salafi, who have a different position on the economy. The
Salafis are now very much involved in politics, having changed their
strategies over the last five years. As we know, though they have their own
very particular take on the whole political discussion - they are obsessed with
the political structure - they don’t talk about economic dynamics either. So
this is why in Saudi Arabia and Qatar they can be very very powerful at the
grassroots level, by being very strict about what is lawful and unlawful in
ethical and political and cultural terms. But they are not talking about the
economy either.
RB: Don’t they talk about the need for
redistribution? One gets the impressions that the Salafi argument is often more
concerned about looking after the poor?
TR: Yes, but within the system. You can be a
very charitable capitalist. Like Sarkozy was saying, we have to ‘moralise
capitalism’, which for me is a contradiction in terms.
But this is my position and my position is that
these questions are not answered or addressed by the movement now. I think we are making a mistake, a very big mistake if we
look at what we call the Arab Awakening only by looking at the whole dynamics
in political and not in economic terms. This brings me back to what
George W Bush said in 2003, when they were talking about democratisation. He
said that it might be the major challenge for them, not to deal with
democracies per se but the challenge of a new economic balance in the region. I
think that this is very important, when you look at the influence of China and
India in the region. These are new players here, and they are very efficient.
They can compete with the US.
RB: Do you see anyone who is talking about
this in the Arab world?
TR: They are talking, in a way they are
trying to find a way to get new partners in the region. For example, one of the
first visits of President Morsi after he was elected
was to China. They are looking at the new relationship between Turkey
and Egypt which is also important. So does this just amount to being integrated
into the economic order, to stabilise the Egyptian economy. It could be. Or
might it be about something deeper than that? I think we have to consider that
it is about a deeper challenge. When I wrote the book I said that for some
young Islamists in Tunisia and Morocco and Egypt - the model is Turkey much
more than Iran. When I visited Turkey people were so happy: they were so
pleased that I had chosen them as the model. So I had to say, ‘No, you are not my model: what I was saying was that you are
the model for some young Islamists’.
’The Turkish road is not my model
because I am critical of the way you are dealing with freedom of expression, of
how you are dealing with the treatment of minorities, and your economic vision.’ But at
the same time, I say, I’m watching what you are trying to do and I think there
are things that are interesting in the Turkish approach, which for the first
time in the last decade has started to shift towards the south and the east,
opening almost fifty embassies in Africa, and having a new relationship with
China. That is just huge.
So it might be that they are accepting
the rules, and understanding that there is a shift towards the east. There’s a
change in Turkey’s positioning vis-a-vis the EU – and now we understand that
this was very smart - they used the EU against their own army. But that doesn’t
mean that they were obsessed with the west. They were trying to find a way to
confront the Turkish army with their own contradictions – “you are talking
about a secular state but then you want a secular military state, and we want a
secular state which is in tune with the requirements of the EU.” So they (AKP) simultaneously use the EU against the army and
meanwhile, they shift towards the south and the east. That’s interesting.
I don’t like this vision that Turkey is
successful because it is as successful as the western powers in economic terms. But I do
think they are trying to find a new space in the multi-polar world, and this is
what I am advocating. I don’t think that Muslims have
an alternative model. An ‘Islamic economy’ or ‘Islamic finance’ doesn’t mean
anything to me. But I do think that in the multi-polar world, it is time
to find new partners, to find a new balance in the economic order. And this
could help you to find an alternative way forward. The
way that Turkey, for example, is now very close to Egypt, and they are dealing
with Malaysia and Indonesia on new terms. We don’t talk a lot about
Indonesia but they are a very important power in the region. So I think we
still have to assess and analyse these dynamics.
H.McR: Many of the
developments this summer in the countries of the Arab Awakening spoke to the
concerns raised in your book. Take developments in Tunisia, such as the
set-backs and delays in constitution-drafting. Do you see this as a reversal,
the sign that the revolutions are derailing? Who will the constitutions of
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya speak to and who will they speak for?
TR: Yes, the drafting of the constitutions is
interesting and the discussions around them revealing in many ways. I take it
as a discussion of very important symbols revealing many different problems. My take at the beginning was to warn that Tunisia might be
the only successful country, the only one to justify us in talking about the
spring, while all the other countries were less successful, if not failing.
Now the point is that even in Tunisia it is not going to be easy, and this is
where we have a problem. The problem is that the constitution should have been
and was an opportunity, exactly as Moncef Marzouki tried to do, to bring
together the secularists and Islamists with so many of the same views. What was
clear was that they would have been able to find agreement, because Rachid
Ghannouchi and Ennahda went so far as to say that they were not going to insist
on putting sharia into the constitution. They accepted that this wouldn’t
happen, but that instead it would have been couched in terms which had an
Islamic point of reference.
Now the problem is that you have two
trends that are in fact objective allies in destablising the whole process of
this discussion: on the one side the very secularist elite
that is doing everything to paint a picture that they are in danger from ‘the
other side’ and on the other hand, the Salafis,
who are constantly putting Ennahda on the spot by questioning their religious
credentials – ‘who are you? What are you doing? You are just compromising everything.’
And the secularists are saying about Ennahda, ‘they are not clear because they
want to please us and they want to please them.’
The secularists are playing a dirty
game. You can be tough on Ennahda’s policy and critical of some unclear
statements which have been made, but they are playing games with this and
pushing in such a direction is not helping the country
to stabilise in such an important year. The constitution is after all
talking about the vision for the future of the country. It is the opportunity
to create a democracy. And in fact all the Islamists,
that is the reformists not the Salafis, now they all say that they want a civil
state, a civil state with Islamic reference points. They are not talking about
an Islamic state, or sharia in the way this was
once understood in the fight against the colonisers, or just afterwards in the
70’s, 80’s and 90’s. They have changed on this. Now, this meant that
there was room for agreement between the different trends. But not any more. It’s very difficult now because we have this new integration
of the Salafis into the political landscape. We have to ask questions –
who is pushing them and who are these people, who in eight months in Egypt can
say ‘democracy is against Islam’, and get 24% in the election. If you read the
Rand Corporation on who supported the Salafis in Egypt,
what you learn is that up to 80 million dollars’ worth of support was poured
into Egypt before the elections by organisations that are not state, they are very precise on this, but Qatari and Saudi
organisations. So it’s very worrying to see that they are getting the
money and they are playing on all the symbols now – religious symbols pitted
against your credentials for power, and the Islamists are being put into a
situation where they can lose everything. I wrote a piece in the New York Times
which said, Winning might be the beginning of losing, because you might win but
you are losing your credibility by being put in this situation of being
constantly challenged on religious terms, where you are not improving anything,
and of course it takes time to reform a society.
So the question about the Salafi is an important
question as I say in Arab Awakening, and have often repeated since. Now I am
really underlining the importance of this, because we really don’t have very
good memories. Remember – the Taliban in Afghanistan
were not at all politicised in the beginning. They were just on about
education. And then they were pushed by the Saudi and the Americans to be
against the Russian colonisation, and as a result they came to be politicised.
(They are not exactly like the Salafi because the Salafi think that they need
to be re-educated, Islamically-speaking, convinced that they have to follow the
prophet in a very literalist way.) But they too were pushed, so that it’s very
strange now to see the Salafis being very vocal, sometimes violent, and
developing this element now of Salafi jihadists. In
fact these jihadists are acting against the interests of every single country –
in Tunisia, in Egypt, now all of a sudden in north Mali.
So I would say that it is strange to see the
allies of the west pushing such trends that are against the interests of the
country, and at the same time, here we all are, celebrating democracy. The problem with Salafis is that they are religiously sincere
and politically naïve. And they allow themselves to be supported by
people who have no religious sincerity but who are politically very smart,
especially when it comes to their economic interests.
RB: Can we return to our opening question
about ‘Islamic democratic secularism’ – a concept that I first heard about from
Egyptian thinker and activist, Heba Raouf Ezzat, who you cite in your book.
What she was promoting was very much an anticipation of the combination of non-violence
and pluralism and its unforgettable impact on the movement in Tahrir Square. Is
there any chance of that impulse of unity across divisions surviving and being
strengthened in this crisis?
TR: The way it was expressed in terms of
solidarity in the first phase of the massive demonstrations is not going to
survive for long: the people who were thinking this way got perhaps 2, 3, 5% of
the votes. They were marginalised. But still, I think many thinkers and
activists, even in the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, and the
people who left the Muslim Brotherhood to follow Abou
el-Fatouh, these people do have an understanding that the relationship
between religion and the state must be re-thought and re-assessed. They’re not going to use the concept of secularism in any
straightforward way, because the concept of secularism is still far too loaded
in that part of the world. When Erdogan went there and said ‘don’t be scared of
secularists’ the Muslim Brotherhood rejected that outright.
But in fact without using the term, this is
exactly what they are doing. They are moving towards
the very essence of talking about the ‘civil state’ and that is exactly what we
are talking about here. For years they have been talking about civil
society, now they have progressed as far as thinking about the civil state. The
‘civil state’ is what I speak about in the book when I speak about ‘ethics in
politics’, which is acknowledging the fact there are two authorities, two
powers, two ways of influencing power, and that ethics should inspire the
political vision of what is good governance, but that you cannot have an
imposition of religion. I think politics is evolving in that direction, even
within segments of Islamism.
RB: Is the dialogue across national borders also
important, between Muslims in Europe and in the Middle East, for example?
TR: Yes, there are ongoing discussions about
this too. The problem with what we call the ‘Arab
spring’ is that these are very nationalistic experiences. Tunisians are
concerned with Tunisia, Egyptians concerned with Egypt and so on.
But still I have been invited I don’t know how
many times to Turkey, where Turkey has been following very quickly in the
footsteps of what is sometimes referred to as the movement of cyber-dissidents.
They have been training young people and also encouraging them to come into
contact with western Muslims. What they ask me to talk about is precisely
secular democracy and Muslim democracy – this, of course, is what the Turkish
government also needs to be selling to the young Islamists in the Arab
countries. It is this kind of understanding that they also share with someone
like Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia. So you can see
the connections beginning to form. If in the very near future Anwar Ibrahim
succeeds in Malaysia, he is positioned as very close to the Turkish experience,
and many in the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda have a similar perspective. So
there are important relationships across national boundaries.
Remember, after all, that
the name of the AKP in Turkey came from Morocco: after a meeting with the
people in Morocco they started using the same name. So there are deep
connections, and also a great interest in our experience in the west. This is
something that they are listening to – very much so – you cannot imagine how
much the books that I am writing are sought after by people in Turkey, who are
eager to hear what I am saying about our experience of authority, power and the
secular system. So this is very important, and it works especially well because
I am coming from this background – that is also important.
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