Middle East Law and Governance 2 (2010) 253273

brill.nl/melg

Review Essay The Post-Legal Ethics of Tariq Ramadan: Persuasion and Performance in Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation
Andrew F. March
Yale University, New Haven, United States

Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. By Tariq Ramadan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 384 pp. ISBN: 0195331710. $29.95.1 Who is the real Tariq Ramadan? Whenever a question like this is posed of anyone, it is very hard to remain on the safe side of inanity. Does any minimally interesting person have a single core identity or single perfectly transparent and consistent motivational setin short a single self ? Nonetheless, this has been a very popular parlor game for some Western intellectuals, with a set of alarmists claiming that a close, or even esoteric, reading of Ramadan reveals him to be an apologist for the Sala reformism of his grandfather, thus linking him to Sayyid Qutb and Ysuf al-Qaradw.2 Certain Western defenders of Ramadan take his overtures to Western societies more seriously, even if they concede that his is still a form of fundamentalism. There are at least two important stories which both versions of the popular, journalistic treatment of Ramadan obscures. The rst is about how Ramadan,

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All further page references to this book will be through embedded citations in the text. See Caroline Fourest, Frre Tariq: discours, stratgie et mthode de Tariq Ramadan (Paris: B. Grasset, 2004) and Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2010).

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI 10.1163/187633710X500757

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far from being a crypto-radical or fundamentalist, was able to construct an Islamic ethics for European citizenship almost perfectly along the lines of what a Rawlsian or Habermasian liberal might wish for entirely from sources and concepts provided by the classical Islamic legal tradition.3 Thus, even if we go along with the What-is-this-Ramadan-up-to-anyway? line of inquiry, we nd that the alarmist answer simply bears no similarity to the substance of Ramadans writings or entirely neglects their most important features. The second is about how in the decade between his earliest English-language book and his most recent, Ramadan has produced a rather stunning shift in theology and meta-ethics. The radical pretensions of this shift are not easy to misshe touts them in the books title and on almost every subsequent page. The shift in eect amounts to a radical displacement of Law from the center of Islamic normative inquiry and its substitution with a much more elusive conception of ethics. This displacement involves an insistence on a number of bold and provocative uses of certain theological claims, namely that the Qurn and the Universe constitute two fully co-equal Books or even Revelations and that context and the Real are full sources of Law. While the concepts of Law and jurisprudence thus do not entirely disappear in Ramadans most recent work, there is an unmistakable downgrading of the status of Islamic jurisprudence in its traditional forms as the preeminent Islamic normative discourse. There is a free intermingling of the concepts of Law and ethics, and where he does persist in referring to Law as the outcome of the critical thought he is proposing, the term has lost virtually all precision and correspondence to what the term means in all preceding Islamic discourses. However, he brings about this shift partially through the novel use of a number of core concepts from classical legal theory, which he made central in his earlier works (namely masl ah a and maqsi d al-shara)a trick which I refer to elsewhere as using Law as a vanishing mediator. * I, however, want to use this essay to look beyond even this more contextual interpretation. Even if it is more or less accurate to say that Ramadans thought is changing from one book to the next and that this latest is his most radical yet, insofar as it has pushed him beyond the framework of Law into something

This is what I argue in Reading Tariq Ramadan: Political Liberalism, Islam and Overlapping Consensus, Ethics & International Aairs, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 2007): 399-413.

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more like religious integralism or post-juridical religious ethics, there is still a puzzle. Briey, the puzzle is this: In comparison with his explicit theoretical, theological and methodological broadside on traditional, mainstream understandings of legal and moral theory, his applied ethical vision is much more elusive and risk-averse. In the areas he addressesmedical ethics, culture and the arts, women and gender roles, ecology and economy, and society, education and powerhis reections tend to reect the same urgent yet optimistic sensibility of generic humanism and pious wholesomeness familiar from his earlier works. Although his views and emphases are not what an average, moderately traditionalist jurist-scholar might come up with, in these chapters Ramadan does not go out of his way to single out widely-held juridical positions for rebuke and rejection, except for the basic idea that Islamic juridical reection represents the purest and most eective form of Islamic ethical reection. His ecumenical applied ethics seems designed to alienate as few potential constituencies as possible both within the Muslim and nonMuslim populations, or rather, where he does alienate a conservative Muslim conscience it is by reiterating what he argues in his methodological, theological and attitudinal reections. All of this leaves one wondering why it is so urgent for him to take the risks he does in areas of theology and method, potentially alienating conservative Muslims. Indeed, this has also fueled the esoteric interpretation of Ramadan. Since even in Radical Reform Ramadan does not single out Qaradw for rebuke or nally call for the abolition of the h udd punishments, Paul Berman argues that he must still be loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood vision for Muslim societies and merely blung with his calls for reform. Let us imagine something like a Reformers Dilemma. This Dilemma posits that moral communities are bound together both by abstract background philosophical or theological commitments, and by more concrete applications of those commitments in the area of applied ethics. A reasonable conjecture is that, since disagreement over less central and constitutive practical or applied doctrines occurs against a backdrop of agreement over more central and constitutive abstract commitments, challenges to those more abstract, foundational commitments will be more costly than challenges to any given practical or applied belief. This, at least, is a reasonable model for understanding moral pluralism and public argumentation as it traditionally plays out amongst Sunni Muslim communities. Muslim scholars and intellectuals are often able to articulate new or minority positions on most areas of applied jurisprudence at much lower social cost than on common theological or methodological doctrines.

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Accepting the above assumptions only as an ideal-typical model, it is intuitive to assume that persons arguing within a certain community for innovative or unpopular applied ethical views will make risky and costly demands in the realm of method or foundations only when necessary to justify the applied, practical argument. Thus, it might be intuitive to assume that a believing Muslim public intellectual, for example, will open up deep questions of theology and legal method which are very costly within a wide Muslim community only when he has reached the limits of what can be attained by way of substantive moral reform from within mainstream theological or jurisprudential assumptions. Consider an analogy to Rawlss assumption behind the idea of a political liberalism. Deep metaphysical arguments are divisive (costly). But deep metaphysical agreement is not always needed to arrive at practical agreement. We should thus avoid abstract philosophical arguments in public whenever possible, only retreating to them when all less costly attempts at agreement have failed. In my view, however, the exact inverse of the above scenario is what is going on with Ramadans Radical Reform. Here his ideas are relatively undemanding on the conscience of the wider Muslim community in terms of the actual norms or behavior he advocates, while very demanding in terms of the reasoning for that behavior. Ramadans bold proclamation for the need for radical reform of Islamic law and ethics, as well as common Muslim attitudes, alongside his willingness to call into question very basic principles of Islamic law and theology, could potentially alienate a conservative Muslim audience. One would assume that he would only expend this kind of theological capital in order to justify equally challenging and novel points of applied ethics. However, in my opinion, the specic practices and attitudes about behavior in the world, which he then calls for (Part IV, Case Studies), are not particularly radical or challenging, either to a conservative Muslim or to a well-meaning non-Muslim, interestingly enough. Ramadans eagerness to tout radical reform of methodological issues and common attitudes without needing to take those risks in order to extract substantive reforms on the other, applied side is an interesting feature of his aspirations and worthy of discussion in its own right. I want to say something about this puzzle here, although I will not propose a decisive answer to it. Perhaps a simple answer does exist. Perhaps his aspiration is a long-term cultural and institutional reform of the sphere of normative public reason in Muslim societies, whereby the divide between the two cultures of religion and science is collapsed. Perhaps he feels that popular enthusiasm for the ethical attitude he outlines, even if it is not in any unavoidable

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conict with contemporary jurisprudence, requires a deeper shift in general understandings of the sources of normativity. Perhaps he is interested in a psychological shift that reduces the Identity Motive of asserting loyalty to the Shara as an act of self-distinction from non-Muslims. Perhaps I am not giving the radicalism of his applied ethics its due. Or perhaps this is a book intended for a non-Muslim audience. But solving this puzzle in any of the above ways exposes the category mistake of still searching for the real Tariq Ramadan by trying to pin his thought down in terms of consistency, argumentative coherence and his place in the Islamic intellectual tradition. The potential answers to the puzzle outlined above all point to the imperative of reading Ramadans works not (only) as acts of argumentation, but as acts of persuasion or as a certain kind of performance; and moreover, as acts of persuasion within multiple communities, multiple publics. It is this dimension of the present work on which I want to focus in this essay. * First, though, what is the argument of Radical Reform? The book consists of four main Parts, three of which are concerned with issues of method, foundations and attitude in Islamic reform, and one of which elaborates the consequences of such reform in a series of case studies. Ramadan declares immediately in his Introduction that he intends to advance three fundamental propositions: First, the contemporary Muslim world (both East and West) must reconsider the terms and modalities of the reform process (isl h , tajdd). His main distinction here is between mere adaptation reformreacting cautiously and defensively to the social changes initiated by outsidersand transformation reforma self-condent, unsentimental internalization of core principles and commitments, which allows Muslims to act on the real, to master all elds of knowledge, and to anticipate the complexity of social, political, philosophical, and ethical challenges (3). Second, us l al-qh needs to be completely reconsidered in its contents and geography. Ramadan declares in no uncertain terms that the textual component of revelation is insucient to ground the relationship between human knowledge and applied ethics. Instead, Muslims must regard the Universe and Nature as co-equal sources of knowledge about Gods overall purposes (4). Third, traditional religious scholars, the text scholars (ulam al-nus s), must be placed on no more than an equal footing with context scholars (ulam al-wqi ) in a recongured landscape of epistemic and moral authority for the Islamic

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Universe of reference (4). The ultimate demand is for a new geography of the sources of us l al-qh [which] should lead to integrating the Universe and social and human environments into the formulation of the ethical nalities of Islams message (5). This is heady stu. Ramadan is not going out of his way to present his conception of reform or renewal as that which is already called for by Islam and the existing methods of change and evolution. His rhetoric is exactly the opposite. He is going out of his way to decry all such cautious, timid, reverent approaches, including his own to this point, as mere adaptation reformor responding defensively to a world created by others (30-33). If the point of reform and ijtihd is to produce a certain renewal for the Muslim world, then he decisively declares that limits have been reached to the method of remaining within the terms of traditional legal and moral theory (34). His entire point is to provoke and confront the conservative Muslim conscience in no uncertain terms. The book is shot through with a constant critique of literalism and formalism of all kinds in Islamic thought. Ramadan accepts the distinction between what is thbit (rm, absolute and unchanging) and what is mutaghayyir (variable) in religion, but is reluctant to place in the former category anything but the basic principles of creed and the ve pillars of religious practice. Moral obligations can, in principle, be absolute but in all cases their concrete implementation necessarily takes changing forms according to the environment (18). All that can be regarded as thbit in the social world are principles; no specic rules, models or practices should be confused with the principle (not proof-text) underpinning them. Modesty, therefore, is an immutable obligation on a Muslim, but Ramadan seems open in principle to endless variation on how it can be fullled. Justice, equality, rights and human brotherhood are timeless political obligations on the religious community, but Muslims must not confuse the Prophets specic ways of achieving them in Medina with religious norms themselves. The greatness and exemplarity of the city of Medina do not lie so much in its form proper as in the adequacyat that particular moment in historybetween the eternal principles stated and the historical implementation elaborated by the Prophet (19-20). Law in the social world should thus be seen primarily in terms of rules of exclusion everything is permitted except for what is specically forbidden, and only then if the prohibition can be proven to be an unchanging principle rather than a contingent manifestation of a more abstract principle. After a review and synthesis of what Ramadan regards as the three main preceding schools of jurisprudence (the Sh deductive approach, the

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H anaf inductive approach and the maqsi d school), in Part III he introduces his own proposal for a new geography of the sources of law and jurisprudence. Placing our contemporary moment on par with Shis in the 9th century and Shti bis in the 14th century as historically-momentous junctures in how Muslims approach revelation; he writes that the Universe, the social and human context, has never been considered as a self-standing source of law and of its production (82). Only through recognizing that secular, profane knowledge about the natural and social world is itself a source of Law, and not merely an object of the Law or a factor in arguing to the Law, will Muslim scholars regain the condence and accompanying creativity that will enable them to outline a contemporary applied Islamic ethics based on justications other than necessity (darra) and need (h ja) (82-3). So what does it mean for the Universe, and the social and human context to be sources of Law (noting, of course, that he now uses law and applied ethics completely interchangeably)? Ramadans rst move is to ground Islamic ethics entirely in nature, a move as unambiguously inclined towards a theory of natural law as could be found in an Islamic context. Noting that the Qurn frequently invokes the universe and the natural world as signs of Gods creation, he suggests that the Universe is a space thatreveals the meaning of Creation (88). Seeing the Book and the Universe thus as Two [equal] Revelations, just as a Muslim devotes himself to understanding the former, so must the heart be able to observe signs, reason must strive to understand the natural order, extract its meaning, and identify nalities.Both the Universe and the text only reveal their order, structure, and meaning through the complementary mediation of human reason (89). This is not merely a question of observing Gods consistency, or understanding natural physical laws, but absolutely a matter of a meta-ethical stance:
The Universe is a gift, the aims of its creation is good, and the essential, and natural, nalities of Nature are what is good for and benets human beings. That is what many verses in the Quran recall. They ask you [the Messenger] what is lawful to them. Say: All things good and pure (al-tayyibt) are lawful to youThis day, all things good and pure are made lawful to you [Q. 5:4-5]. The lawful naturally corresponds to what is good and Nature oers itself as the essential and primary space of what is good and right, pleasant, and permitted.O you people! Eat from what is on earth, lawful and good! [Q. 2:168]. Those verses and many others are what led jurists to consider Nature and its order with a basically positive outlook.This open, positive outlook on the worldas well as on human nature in generalis important because from the outset, it qualies the Book of the Universe, its Revelations, its dierent orders, and the way it should be considered or interacted with By understanding with

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their hearts and analyzing with their reason, people discoverit is revealed to themthat the goals of the created Universe are as close to their hopes as the order of the good and protable for them and their future. (89-90)

Elsewhere Ramadan writes: The rst prerequisite [for a visionary ethics] consists in clearly establishing that those sources [of law, jurisprudence and ethics] are not simply scriptural but also the Book of the Universe and with it, all the sciences that strive to understand it better and improve human beings actions and conditions in their specic social contexts (120). The text sciences are no more Islamic than the sciences of the Universe (128). This is not an eort to convince Muslim readers that nothing challenging or novel is being advanced, or a rehashing of the familiar doctrine that Islam is the natural religion (dn al-tr a), which has already harmonized Shara and human needs and capacities. It is a clear statement that knowledge from outside the Text is an independent source for reasoning to morality and for interpreting the Text in the rst place. But what ethics or method is commanded here by the grounding of morality in nature? The rst is an attitude of gratitude and responsibility for the natural world and Gods permissiveness (90). More intriguingly, however, Ramadan argues that taking nature seriously means taking certain phenomena as acceptable because they are natural, in addition to being anticipated by God in the Qurn. Specically, he directs attention to the phenomenon of diversity and pluralism, not only of persons and nations, but of normative frameworks. In the realm of transient cultural, social, and political realities that correspond to the manifold choices of human communities and never remain xed and denitive [t]he rule here is that there is no single rule, no natural law standardizing the historical fates, cultural systems, social fabrics, or collective psychology of human communities (95). Following from the fact that the unity of creation and nature does not result in a unity of norms and laws, Ramadan then insists on the (variable) social context (al-wqi ) as a source of law. While he is eager to emphasize how much of a break this is from the traditional understanding of Law and authority (never, indeed, is the Universe, the unfurled Revelation, considered in its own right [by the ulam ] as an autonomous complementary source of law and its elaboration), his justication for this is not primarily theological, which would mean the ulam were wrong all along, but historical. It is only now that society and science have become so complex that text scholars cannot claim to know how scriptural morality ought to be translated into practical norms. The evolution of the experimental and social sciences compels us

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to clearly acknowledge natural and universal laws and the constant or circumstantial principles of human action in history as full-edged sources of Islamic law and jurisprudence (120). Furthermore, precisely because knowledge of human cultures and societies is by denition uncertain and indenite (za nn is how he deliberately refers to it, invoking a category from exegesis and jurisprudence), the ulam recoil from it, as if the complexity of human reality opened such a vast range of indeterminacy that faithfulness to the Way could be endangered (108). His solution to the fear and mistrust of the social sciences is not to force the religious scholars to become experts in context and reality. He decries their half-hearted, simplistic and supercial attempts to issue fatwas on medical matters or to issue rules for an Islamic economy, and calls paradoxical and counterproductive all forms of utopian, illusionary, often nave religious, philosophical, and ethical thought (150). Rather, he seeks to elevate social and natural scientists to full parity with the text scholars, thus shifting the center of gravity of religious and legal authority (122). The Islamic community of moral argumentation and justication now consists of experts in the Revealed Book and the Book of the Universe, each with their own internal methods and standards of proof (neither accountable to the other), who collaborate rst on identifying higher ethical principles and objectives and then on elaborating specic applied ethical norms expressed as maqsi d for individual areas of human activity (sciences, ecology, culture, economics, politics, gender, education, etc.). (See his chart on p. 129.) Fatwa and ethics committees should now be comprised of equal parts religious scholars, equal parts scientists, engaging in a collective ijtihd on matters of applied ethics. Even this wider community of authority, however, is no longer meant to be searching for the closest approximation of certain, true rulings, but merely contingent statements of judgment about how the overall maqsi d of religion are best advanced here and now. In invoking the maqsi d, Ramadan is clearly drawing on the traditional centrality, legitimacy and prestige of this concept. But he replaces the traditional maqsi d framework (ve or six darriyyt, followed by the h jiyyt then the tah sniyyt or tazyniyyt, and so on) with a multi-tiered, multi-dimensional scheme. Shara is now based on two co-equal purposes and objectives: the protection of religion (dn), dened as a conception of life and death stemming from recognition of the One and of the Way, and the protection of welfare (masl ah a), in the sense of the common good and the interest of humankind and of the Universe. (Does the Universe have interests?) Protecting and promoting these two founding pillars is in turn dependent on

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respecting and protecting three further fundamental objectives: Life (h ayh), Nature (khalq/ta ba) and Peace (salm). The whole of the Islamic message, through verses, the Prophets (or the Prophets) practices and the recognition of the Universe as a sign and gift, refers to those three essential, a priori goals. From here Ramadan introduces a third level consisting of the protection and promotion of 13 further maqsi d more directly linked to humankinds being and action: Dignity, Welfare, Knowledge, Creativity, Autonomy, Development, Equality, Freedom, Justice, Fraternity, Love, Solidarity and Diversity (138-9). He does not stop there. The realization of these interests must be specied according to whether they apply to the inner self, the life of the individual or social life. The Shara, then, is said to call for the promotion and protection of 23 further maqsi d. Related to the inner being, an ethics of the heart calls for the cultivation of Education, Conscience, Sincerity, Contemplation, Balance and Humility. Related to the life of the being, or the individual, Ramadan identies Physical Integrity, Health, Subsistence, Intelligence, Progeny, Work, Belongings, Contracts and Neighborhoods as maqsi d. Finally, the welfare of societies and groups requires the protection of the Rule of Law, Independence, Deliberation, Pluralism, Evolution, Cultures, Religions and Memories. When all is said and done, Laws purposes have metastasized from the original ve necessary interests to 41 (see chart on 143). Ramadan does not deny the self-consciously contemporaneous, even contrived, nature of this list. Contemporary times compel us to return to the texts and extract objectives that may have appeared secondary in the past (140). And he is insistent that even this is only a partial, contingent account of the Sharas purposes. New scientic knowledge, shaping a new outlook on human beings or Nature, might lead us to extend that list, since this must always remain a dialectical elaboration: starting rst from what the texts say about higher objectives, then from what social and human contexts reveal (and sometimes impose), we must return to the texts with a renewed, deeper understanding about the meaning and implementation of the aforesaid rulings (139). A more traditionalist Muslim intellectual might be forgiven for any skepticism about Ramadans avowed order of operations for arriving at an authentically religious set of provisional xed points. * As I suggested earlier, one would expect the theological capital Ramadan expends in the rst three Parts to be a necessary investment in the realm of applied, practical reform. What kinds of ethical positions and attitudes does

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Ramadan call for in his nal Part IV on Case Studies? He discuss six areas of life and action: Islamic Ethics and Medical Sciences; Culture and the Arts; Women: Traditions and Liberation; Ecology and Economy; Society, Education, and Power; and Ethics and Universals.

Islamic Ethics and Medical Sciences In this rst area of moral action, Ramadan suggests that acting in accordance with his two master maqsi d (Dn and Masl ah a, see above) is an extraordinary challenge that demands much more than we are doing today (182). But he is by and large not that critical of what Muslim scholars and medical professionals have already been doing. He approves of the Islamic Code of Medical Ethics, arms the dominant positions on contraception and abortion and endorses the existing collaboration between jurists and doctors in end of life issues such as euthanasia and organ donation. Moreover, he nds armation for most of what he calls for in the writings of the classical jurists. Ibn Qudma, Ibn H ajar al-Asqaln, al-Ghazl and Jafar al-S diq (note: Ab H anfas and Mliks teacher! (169)) are all invoked here as giving positions on the ethics of examining the opposite gender for medical purposes, contraception, abortion or a womans right to pleasure and to preserve her beauty in line with what Muslims today ought to arm. The elaborate and provocative scheme he lays out in the preceding Parts of the book enter mostly as a way for him to show how his many forms of the maqsi d have always been or ought to be operative, or to show how medical knowledge (stages of fetal development, precise point of brain death) impacts juridical decisions. Abortion can be considered when protecting a persons health, development, autonomy, welfare, education, or dignity (173; emphasis in original). In considering the ethics of euthanasia, the aim has always been, in the light of the requirements of the Islamic conception of life and death (al-dn), and of humankinds al-masl ah a, to protect rst life then personal integrity and dignity, while preserving conscience, autonomy, balance, development and welfare as best as possible (174; emphasis in original). His most critical comments come in the area of AIDS treatment, noting that many Muslims have not been able to get over the moral component of lifestyles associated with AIDS in order to fulll their humanitarian obligations. However, on the hard question of whether to distribute needles and condoms his justication for doing so is squarely along the lines of the kind of cautious, juridical, adaptation reform he spent the rst Parts of the book

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criticizing. These practices are justied not only on the basis of the higher objectives of the Way, which require people to protect the individuals life, dignity, integrity, personal development, health and inner balance (as always, he italicizes his own maqsi d ), but also on the grounds of such qawid qhiyya as akha al-dararayn (choose the lesser of two harms) and al-darra tubh al-mah z rt (necessity makes the forbidden permissible). It is not hard to imagine an adaptation-reform jurist like Qaradw reasoning in the exact same way. The point here is not to suggest an esoteric reading of Ramadan which would show him to be a radical, fundamentalist ideologue after all, because in the end he is not so far from the mainstream jurists (note: the rulings of the jurists he is arming are all evidence of the moderate, pragmatic strain within Islamic law); but rather the point is to ask why he goes out of his way to stress his own dissatisfaction with the conservative methods and attitudes of mainstream Islamic thought if it seems he is actually not so dissatised with the present state of applied Islamic ethics.

Culture and the Arts Ramadans discussion of the ethics of culture and the arts reveals less of an obvious indebtedness to the juridical tradition than in the case of medical ethics. He is willing to attribute the inuence of their surroundings and times to such canonical scholars as Ta bar, Ghazl, Rz, and Qurtu b, especially in the writings on women and culture, and even to suggest that such situatedness has had considerable, and sometimes harmful, inuence (191). He is also ercely critical of the juridical attitude of formalistic moralism or crude instrumentalism in the area of art, especially in the hands of Salaf literalists, whom he does not tire of criticizing. He also takes a much more liberal stance on the question of censorship and suppression than virtually any jurist would (art should not be muzzled, stied, and ultimately banished (199)). And, as usual, he is critical of the identity motive, or the cultural tendency to seek to Islamize practices through supercial and formalistic symbolism. However, even here his reections are far too vague and general to discern whether his eorts to reform meta-ethical methods are really necessary. He reiterates common tropes about Islams traditionally embracing attitude towards diversity in language and culture, under the radar of specic religious norms. He notes that most jurists have come out strongly against female genital mutilation, and merely suggests that it is necessary to go further and change the underlying social norms where this is practiced, enlisting not only jurists

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but also anthropologists, ethnologists, psychologists, physicians and social workers. He criticizes the eect of global capitalism on culture, taste and diversity, sounding much like a secular liberal or leftist (he takes his bearings from Umberto Eco here on the carnivalization of life). He calls on artists to appreciate their own obligation to advance higher ethical goals and values (he once again gives his own general maqsi d, suitably italicized, as the benchmark here). As far as Islamic art is concerned, he opposes both supercial instrumentalism and the fear of transgressing norms, wishing instead for an approach to art more along the lines of virtue ethics, where Islamic values infuse an artists motives and sensibilities. To be sure, this is an approach rmly beyond Law, and often at odds with it; but is not clear how radically at odds with the aims of jurisprudence this attitude is, and whether it points to the replacement of Law which he seems to call for in the earlier Parts.

Women: Traditions and Liberation With respect to women, Ramadan insists that his methodological approach is directly responsible for certain consequences in the area of applied ethics, and itself upsets some preconceptions and questions certain boundaries of religious legitimacy and power (207). He recognizes that disrupting settled expectations in the area of gender and the family means interfering with the groundwork of social structures, of cultural symbolisms, of gender roles, of the position of the family unit, and of authority and power relationships (207). However, while Ramadan is not advancing an apologia for traditional or patriarchal Shara norms, and his views are certainly controversial for conservative Muslims, his tactic is the opposite of that in his methodological sections. The point here is to defuse the sensitivity around the Shara norms and the status of many practices, while acknowledging the need for change and reform. Ramadan wishes to focus on a distinction between what is authentically religious and what is merely cultural, and to dene the religious in terms of the long-term and comprehensive advancement of the most essential maqsi d. To be clear, this is not an evasive apologia for Shara, but nor is Ramadan provoking an antagonism with more traditional Shara-minded scholars or lay Muslims when one can be avoided. Thus, the early Muslim text scholars were indeed inuenced by certain patriarchal prejudices. But this is only because they were not women and could not understand from within how the latter experienced interpersonal

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relations and integrated social dynamics (213). The deeper moral aims (maqsi d ) related to female emancipation are to be found not only in the Text but also in the very rulings of those early text scholars. He acknowledges the deep patriarchy in traditional understandings, but speaks about them in a general way, referring for example to how some existing texts are sometimes read and interpreted without considering chronology and context (214), instead of listing verses and naming names ( la the approach of Muslim feminists like Amina Wadud or Asma Barlas). His rst goal of female liberation consists of producing a discourse on womanhood that restores the link with meaning rather than single-mindedly focusing on norms (217). His call to integrate women into mosque management committees will certainly be rejected by many; but he does not discuss issues of joint prayer or female leadership of prayer. (Again, the point is not for this author, or any non-Muslim author, to suggest that any genuine Islamic reform must result in mixed prayers or female prayer leaders, or to suggest that Ramadan would obviously be scandalized by such practices. It is to point out the gap in his willingness to be provocative in the area of theology and method as opposed to the area of practical ethics.) Where possible, Ramadan avoids discussing specic norms. Of course, this is the point of his radical methodological reform: Islam is not primarily about formal legal rules, but about living ethically according to purposes and consciousness of the Universal. But this largely means that religious formalism is not picked apart and deconstructed norm-by-norm, but brushed aside as insucient or even harmful as a practice of understanding priorities. Therefore, the point of reform in the area of gender and the family is to change the way spouses deal with one another, to restore meaning to the norms and injunctions that are repeated by scholars, to have religious leaders discuss the many challenges of motherhood and fatherhood in modern economies rather than merely remind the spouses of their duties and in particular stress the role of the wife, threatened by the colonization of global Western culture, (227) and in general, to adopt a more global approach regarding the issue of women in the Islamic Universe of meaning (228). As I have argued elsewhere, Ramadans motive is to dissolve law and its frame of mind in favor of holistic ethics, rather than to elaborate the new world of social practices he wishes to see. If conservative scholars or lay Muslims are alienated by his views, it will be entirely because of his general skepticism about the status of norms and rules, rather than specic counternorms or proposals he advances.

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Ecology and Economy This section is also largely a critique of the mentality of formalism and the widespread silence of Muslims (especially religious leaders) on issues such as the environment, consumption, animal welfare and wealth distribution. Again, Ramadan nds that Muslims remain more concerned with the technicalities of ritual slaughter, obeying dietary guidelines and constructing supercially Islamic economic and nancial institutions, as well as silly Islamic products like Mecca Cola. In all of these areas, Ramadan wishes instead to see deep, self-condent and long-term reection on ethical goals based on a prioritization of the central purposes of religious action, as exemplied by his tiers of maqsi d. Muslims, as recipients and custodians of the Two Revelations, should be at the forefront of an ethical movement for a better custodianship of the earth and nature, including animals, and for a more just and egalitarian distribution of wealth. Instead of adapting to global capitalism through the Islamic branding of products (from Islamic banking to Mecca Cola), Muslims should be the ones at the forefront of an ethical critique of the environmental and distributive excess of neoliberal economics. Society, Education, and Power Things get a bit more interesting in this section. While Ramadan understands the tendency of post-colonial Muslims to see secularism as associated more with colonialism and dictatorship than with religious freedom, pluralism and democracy, he is ruthlessly dismissive of the reactionary trend in modern Islamic thought to insist formulaically on h kimiyya and the lack of a distinction between sacred and secular spheres in Islam. His move here is not only to show that the jurists have always regarded social relations (al-mumalt) in dierent terms than worship, nor even that the mumalt now need to be expressed in terms of Ramadans maqsi d, but that Muslims must accept the basic Enlightenment conception of the division of authority.
The point is truly to distinguish between two powers, two orders of authority, and hence, two intellectual attitudes: that which, in its relationship to the divine, submits to revealed truths in the name of the heart, and that which, in the name of its autonomy and freedom, claims its rights and its share in the communitys decisions. The confusion of orders occurs when the mind longing for divine truths turns into a dogmatic mind and wishes to impose

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its truths on the political and social community. What endangers political pluralism is indeed, on the one hand, the imposition of a religious power whose legitimacy is seen as transcendent, and on the other, emergence of a dogmatic mind deaf to other peoples beliefs. (262-3)

Ramadans alternative, for both the East and the West it seems, is for something like an inclusive, public sphere where all citizens are encouraged to bring their non-dogmatic, non-doctrinaire ethical motivations to bear. While Ramadan distances himself from Rawls (in my mind, based on a common misunderstanding of Rawlss specic use of the term public), it seems that what he wants is a thick common understanding of a robust, social democratic political morality buttressed by mutual expressions of coherence between that morality and metaphysics on the part of various religious citizens, or much akin to what Rawls called an overlapping consensus. He wants to show how the public sphere can be pluralist and inclusive while remaining enchanted for religious citizens. As with the environment and social justice, he believes that Muslims are religiously situated to do exactly what they are presently failing to do: vocalize a deep, principled critique of managed democracy, the markets domination over politics and the media, and the manipulation of fear in the realm of security practices, such as surveillance and intimidation. Ramadan is not seeking to avoid making enemies here. He is singling out the entire Islamist tradition that runs from his grandfather to Qaradw (not to mention the more radical and violent groups) for stinging rebuke. But that is not to say he never holds back. The best case of this restraint is his famous call for a Moratorium (talqsuspension) of the h udd punishments. Of course, this is the most popular smoking gun used by those on the right against Ramadan. If he was really a reformer he would call for the abolition of the punishments, not a mere tactical moratorium! This is, of course, not my argument (he obviously is trying to be a real reformer). But if the smoking gun argument gets something rightthat the moratorium is tacticalit also gets something more important wrong: it is a tactical maneuver vis--vis Muslims, not non-Muslim stooges. Ramadans approach (274-7) to the issue is not that taken up by such reformers as Abdullahi An-Naim or Mohammad Hashim Kamali to theorize what a new Islamic family or criminal law might look like. That is, Ramadan is not trying to solve the problem of the criminal law; he is trying to dissolve it. This is not about argumentation so much as about persuasion, as if to say: Lets stop asking whether the h udd are valid and must be implemented or reformed and then implemented. Instead, lets

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focus on which deeper purposes and aims we need to prioritize, and gradually forget that the h udd are even a problem at all. Thus, we can see that his applied ethics could in principle be more challenging to a Muslim audience (he could declare the h udd null and void or propose specic new ones), but that is only because he does not want to detract attention from his larger methodological and attitudinal project. In other words, might we have a situation where someone like Mohammad Hashim Kamali is much more challenging in applied terms and much less challenging in methodological, theological and attitudinal terms, whereas Ramadan is the reverse? Ethics and Universals This nal section is something of a rearmation of his method of reading the Text and a reassertion of his turn to what can only be called a form of natural law. The Two Books (the Qurn and the natural world) must be read in light of one another and the strictly normative approach of the jurists has only served to restrict the exercise of autonomous analytical intelligence and to make the question of meaning [of religion and the Law] pointless (297). Ramadan calls for a reconciliation with philosophy (300), pointing to the examples of Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn and Muhammad Iqbal, as well as with Susm, provided normative principles are respected (no sacralization or worship of the shaykh, no accepted breaches of practice, no encouraged superstitions) (303). He criticizes both the Muslim reaction to Pope Benedict XVI and the Danish cartoons, as well as the reigning ideology of fear and politicization of civilizational history in the North and the West. He arms a serious and respectful inter-faith and inter-communal dialogue, but wants to look beyond that to the universal problem of our time: allying spirituality and intelligence, meaning and understanding (311). * If this is the argument of the book, what is its rhetoric? Who is the audience for a book like this? Who is meant to be persuaded? I suggested at the beginning of this essay that there is a puzzle at the heart of this book, namely a very costly and demanding theological and attitudinal project in the service of a much less demanding, less alienating applied, political project. That suggestion could be shown wrong in two ways: First, the theological, methodological, attitudinal demand is the practical, applied

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demand and thus they amount to the same thing. Ramadans demand to suspend the search for norms in various areas is an alienating, radical demand, even if what he wants is not the same as that desired by an Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji. Second, what he does want is plenty radical and demanding: a shift from moral rigorism to social justice and inclusion. Is there still a puzzle here? Is the radicalism of his reform project reected in his applied ethics? As I tried to argue, I think we still need to acknowledge a gap between the verve in his rhetorical attack on the idea of juridical reasoning from his evasiveness in singling out specic Shara norms for replacement. Of course, that is exactly his point: he does not want a new qh, a reformed qh, but rather he wants a post-qh Muslim consciousness. But let us ask the question in this way: if we can assume that the conservative jurists and theologians could not live with his method and attitudinal shift, could they in equal measure not live with the actual political world he describes? Could one not get to his policy recommendations in the areas of ecology, economics and even gender either through Law or while saying nothing about Law? Thus, it seems to me that it has to be the case that what I am calling the theological, methodological and attitudinal project is where the action is for him in its own right. Of course, the project is to help Muslims live better in the world and to make more ethical decisions, but he is not looking for the shortest path from A to B, if A is here and B is a reformed family law or a suspension of the h udd or more social justice. There are shorter, less costly paths to all of those goals. In turn, when discussing his applied vision, Ramadan is not shy about elaborating goals or emphasizing the need for his theological, methodological and attitudinal reforms; but he also does not spend a great deal of time criticizing and deconstructing particular classical Shara rules. Rather, he criticizes the obsession with those rules, with the formalist emphasis on Shara rules as the identifying marker of Islamic ethics. His tactic is not to confront and deconstruct Shara rules, but to dissolve the Shara question. This can be seen in many of his rhetorical devices and moves. His broad strategy is to insist that what he is doing is already called for in Shara discourses. Two main sets of concepts are in operation here: rst, the idea of reform and renewal (tajdd, isl h , ijtihd ); second, the idea of Shara as masl ah a and more importantly the maqsi d. The idea is to suggest and imply, or simply try to get away with, the idea that in a way Islamic law calls for its own suspension, its own replacement, or its own transformation into something else. If the real demand of tajdd and isl h , or the real meaning of

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masl ah a, is to live in the world Islamically and coherently, then in a way it is more Islamic to shed the skin of qh rules, even if this means that secular knowledge is on par with religious knowledge. A second main tactic is to appeal to Muslim pride and the desire for independence and authenticity. From the beginning Ramadan seeks to show that his conception of transformation reform is actually more Islamic than the cautious, conservative adaptation reform of other jurists and his own previous work. If adaptation reform, using legal devices like taysr and masl ah a to rationalize the real, in fact involves taking the world as it is (read: as nonMuslim modernity has created it), then transformation reform is in fact more demanding of the world, more demanding of secular modernity since it refuses to take it on its own estimation (32-3; 37-8). He refers to this as Islamizing modernity (145-148) and an ethics of liberation and resistance (151), but this has to be read as a rhetorical appeal to Muslim pride and selfrespect. He makes clear beyond any reasonable doubt that this is not the Islamizing of modernity of Qutb and Mawdd (rationalizing Shara for modern application); it is about a new kind of Islam where the boundaries with non-Muslims are irrelevant and Muslims accept political responsibility for the collective direction of history. Then, there are many small acts of persuasion which demand to be read rhetorically. One sub-set of these involves Ramadans use of language and translation. Shara is the Way to faithfulness including the legal order (2); the legal part of that order is dethroned already in how he translates the word. Also, we might ask about his constant use of the Way instead of Shara. As translations go it is unimpeachable, but is there something in the act of translating and referring to it in English that serves not only to disassociate Shara and Law in the consciousness of his audience, but also to de-fetishize the term, to reduce its aura and majesty, its totemic status for Muslims? Is it not easier to talk about rethinking what the Way requires of us than to talk about changing the Shara? His translations are also often rich. He extracts the surplus of meaning from technical terms which have many cognates in other languages like English. Thus, tajdd is not only renewal but also rebirth and regeneration (12). Us l al-qh is not just the discipline of the sources of the Law but the fundamentals of the religion at large (27), which shifts the term from a question of sources and methods to one of values and commitments. Qurnic yt are not just signs of Gods revelation, but signs of the laws of the Universe and nature (88). Ijtihd is generalized from a narrow ambit within legal reasoning to a general way of living ethically in the world, although he is careful not

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to throw all authority and credentials out the window, in a tacit rejection of ijtihad as understood by someone like Irshad Manji (23, 27). The Qurns reference to ulam is generic and includes all those who have some learning, whether about the Universe or about the text (104). The Sunnas emphasis on particulars and details means that the diversity of cultures, customs, and social realities through space and time is very directly emphasized (97). Ramadans multilingualism, in short, is not just a feature of his political career and renown, but is also a core rhetorical device. Finally, Ramadan does not violate all taboos; he still leaves some boundaries uncrossed. He is happy to discuss reconciliation with philosophers and Sus, but he does not raise old theological ashpoints for the sake of it. While he certainly points to Nature in a way unusual in Islamic discourses, he does not press issues of ontology and Gods free will (are moral values objectively true and independent of Gods will?). He does not invoke the Mutazilites as a symbol for modern Islamic rationalism, and in fact refers briey to this objective reality, willed by the Creator, albeit in reference to social diversity (94). He is respectful, reverent even, of the legal scholars (they have always approached the founding texts with the deepest respect and devotion (82)). Their contribution does not rest on an original theological error; instead we must see how their legal theories contained the seeds of the reforms he is calling for today. So who is the audience for this kind of rhetorical project? It is clearly not the conservative Islamic religious scholars he criticizes, or their followers. None of them is going to buy, for example, Ramadans use of the famous story of Mudh being sent by the Prophet to judge in Yemen, classically used to justify qiys and moderate ijtihd, to conclude that at the very founding of Islam is a mandate for renewal, revival, and consequently, reform of our reading and understanding of religious ethics at large (25). Ramadans arguments are not meant to meet and refute the massive edice justifying classical legal theory and theology, or technical arguments about the place of Law and how to use its individual components. Besides, Ramadan is too busy criticizing their timidity and formalism. If Ramadan comes from their ranks, was literally born into them, he has decisively left them with this book. A cynical answer is that this is a book for non-Muslims, or maybe a vanity project with no clear audience in mind. It is, after all, published by Oxford University Press (no longer Lyons Tawhid press or Leicesters Islamic Foundation press for him) in English. It does, after all, have a huge, frontcover picture of none other, and multiple instances of the genealogy of Islamic

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reform being told in the rst-person singular (I tackled this issuelimits have been reachedIt seems obvious that I had to go furtherwhat I propose in the present work is clearly a new step (1-3)). A less cynical answer, though, is that this is a theology for educated, lay Muslims who feel attached to their tradition (or want to) but are pluralists in their outlook, experiences and objectives. Such Muslims, short of a radical (re-)conversion, are not going back to the fold of a pious, rule-following orthodoxy. At the same time, they do not want to completely collapse their tradition into a form of Western secularism, and certainly not lose any language for a critique of Western policies and globalization. Either they are too self-conscious about owning up to a form of cafeteria Islam or mere cultural Islam, or they want some theological heft behind this lifestyle. To such Muslims, a work like this might very well have enough Qurn and Sunna, and enough reference to the tradition to sound serious, especially given who it is coming from. Moreover, it is not merely a disembodied, random citation of verses out of context, but a framework and a theory of how it all ts together. As far as such reformist theories go, a move to Universalism and Nature, alongside an elaborate reconstruction of the maqsi d, probably stands as good of a shot as any reformist vision of competing with more orthodox and traditional conceptions of Islamic political morality. Comparisons are always dangerous, but if the untapped market is some analogue to post-legal Conservative or Reform Judaism for a population that enjoys and appreciates its secular civil rights but does not want to dissolve into the cultural other, it is very likely that post-legal Islamic political morality will play out on the terrain of Islams harmony with nature and its privileging of certain core, social Purposes. Ramadan may just be the intellectual best suited to portray this de facto social reality of large numbers of Muslims no longer fully comfortable with legal formalism as a liberation.