The Flight of the Intellectuals
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- ISBN13: 9781933633510
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, as a replacement for of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) regularly find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely aver to be “moderates.”
How did this take place? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman—“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)—conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled terribly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist thoughts and violence.
Berman’s investigation of the history and scenery of the Islamist movement includes some surprising revelations. In examining Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he shows the rise of an immense and regularly violent worldview, fundamentals of which survives today in the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman also unearths the shocking tale of al-Banna’s associate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated personally with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab support of the Nazis’ North African battle. Echoes of the Grand Mufti’s Nazified Islam can be heard among the followers of al-Banna even today.
In a gripping and stylish narrative Berman also shows the legacy of these political traditions, most importantly by focusing on a single philosopher, who happens to be Hassan al-Banna’s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan—a figure widely celebrated in the West as a “moderate” despite his troubling ties to the Islamist movement. Looking closely into what Ramadan has really written and said, Berman contrasts the reality of Ramadan with his image in the press.
In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds light on a number of modern issues—on the massively reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our own time, on a newly fashionable turn against women’s rights, and on the difficulties we have in discussing terrorism—and presents a stunning commentary about the modern media’s peculiar inability to detect and analyze some of the most treacherous thoughts in contemporary society.
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Paul Berman deserves our thanks for documenting why Islamo-Fascism is indeed a excellent name for radical Muslims. The JIHADI MOVEMENT is truly fascistic, terroristic, and deserving of our unending struggle against it. But beyond that this book is a tiresome and belabored revelation of the feckless immorality of leftist intellectuals. Berman is apologizing for his own juvenile leftism, but who cares? Really intelligent people have long known about the criminal careers of leftists, whether they called themselves MARXISTS, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS, TROTKYISTS, or PLAIN OLD DEMOCRATIC AND LIBERAL PROGRESSIVES. After Koestler, Orwell, and their fellow disillusioned leftists what need do we have of Paul Berman?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
In “Flight of the Intellectuals,” Paul Berman presents an wide critique of the thought of the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan, and his kid-glove treatment by western intellectuals. The book is a trenchant exposure of Ramadan’s trend to speak out of both sides of his mouth, and the acceptance of violence as a political strategy, even among alleged “moderate” voices, that lies at the heart of the Islamist movement in Europe and America. Although Berman is cautious about giving credibility to the concept “Islamo-fascism,” (he backs off from this), he nevertheless agrees that one can know why people might want to use that axiom. He then unfolds, with wonderfully crafted prose, the very real fascist (specifically Nazi) influences on the Islamist movement since the 1930s down to the present day, and how long-suffering the alleged “moderate Muslim” Ramadan is of these principles.
The greater percentage of the book is a critique of Ian Baruma’s article on Tariq Ramadan that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2007. This wide critique of a point writer discussing a leading Swiss Muslim philosopher illuminates Berman’s assessment of western intellectuals’ response to radical Islam, which he describes as “a coverage animated by earnest excellent intentions, but, then again, by squeamishness and dread. And by less-than-excellent intentions.”
Berman clarifies the intellectual line of descent in Ramadan’s thought from Hassan al Banna (Ramadan’s grandfather)through Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini and Sayid Qutb. Berman challenges Ramadan to clarify why he refuses to clearly reject the violent extremism of such facts, and why, when writing of them, Ramadan dances around such a juicy anti-semitism and exterminationist agenda as was embraced by the the Mufti. And why doesn’t Baruma press the point while interviewing Ramadan for his NYT article? As far as Ramadan is concerned, Berman notes that Ramadan’s whole intellectual tradition “is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.”
Along the way, Berman calls our attention to some promising further reading, most notably a novel by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal entitled “The German Mujahid,” translated into English from the original French in 2009. In Sansal’s tale, the sons of a ex- German SS officer who has stirred to Algeria and converted to Islam, learn the truth concerning their father. The dramatic thread of the novel is rooted, significantly, in the harmonious relationship between Nazi anti-semitism and the officer’s new Islamist version of the Muslim faith. The boys come to the “alarming recognition that Nazism and Islamism have something in common.”
The ninth and final chapter of the book, which recapitulates the title of the book itself, is worth the fee of the book (and it’s expensive). In this chapter, Berman expresses moral outrage at the cowardly and twisted responses of western intellectuals to a woman of fantastic courage and intellect–Ayaan Hirsi Ali. While Ramadan gathers sychophantic admirers among western intellectuals, Hirsi Ali’s promotion of womens’ rights and individual liberty draws their scorn and ridicule, some of which is itself clearly sexist in scenery. The intellectuals manifest a now-familiar guilt and disgust of their own western civilization, and seem to wallow in the “pleasure of self-hatred.” Quoting Pascal Bruckner, Berman notes that “it is astonishing that sixty-two years after the fall of the Third Reich and sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an vital segment of Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the friends of democracy.”
Berman expresses the view that the Salman Rushdie affair has now “metastasized into an entire social class. It is a subset of the European intelligentsia–its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially, but including additional people, too, who survive only because of bodyguards and police investigations and because of their own precautions. This is unprecedented in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. Dread–mortal dread, the dread of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology–has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.” Thus it is that western intellectual life is threatened by the intellectuals themselves, who refuse to chat about or even acknowledge “the Nazi influence that has turned out to be so weirdly venemous and enduring in the history of the Islamist movement.”
This is a book that should be on the recommended reading list of college students throughout America. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that, for that would require courage far beyond the conventional “multiculturalist” bromides that now place them to sleep.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
You don’t find many theoreticians, politicians or historians these days who are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom of left-wing European intellectuals–most of whom who appear consumed with their own rage and jaundiced viewpoints of the Middle East conflict, cultural antagonisms, and religious extremism. This fellow Berman convincingly skewers the proponents of one-sidedness and exposes their sneaky methods and hidden agendas. A surprisingly thoughtful, concise and well documented treatise.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A very careful and meticulous analysis, it is expanded from the leader’s June 4, 2007 “Who’s worried of Tariq Ramadan?” article in The New Republic.
The article, which is pretty long (I printed 37 pages), is available online for free if you want to check it out before you buy this vital book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
According to the New Yorker, when George Packer questioned Tariq Ramadan two questions at a recent ACLU-sponsored event in New York “the all-purpose picture was surprisingly, reassuringly bright: reconciling Islamic faith with liberal values is simple; the views of Muslims are basically the same as everyone else’s; the oppression of Muslim women is a third-order issue.” But George Packer’s questions were drawn explicitly from or, it seems to me, were hugely influenced by Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals and, as a result, they were uncomfortable questions. George Packer wanted to know why Tariq Ramadan never disassociated himself from his grandfather, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (and who is quoted in Hamas’ Charter), from the Mufti of Jerusalem, his grandfather’s ally and a man allied with Nazis, or from Sheikh Qaradawi, the man who passed a fatwa allowing women to carry out suicide bombings. George Packer also wanted to know if Tariq Ramadan felt that human rights were universal or if they could be determined by religious authorities. When it came to his grandfather’s alliance with Nazi sympathizers, Tariq Ramadan questioned the audience to consider the “context”. The second question he dodged. And still more questions (this time from the audience) kept coming. Questions about women’s oppression; questions about Hirsi Ali. And Paul Berman’s book was not yet out.
But it seems to me reasonably right that this book should have such influence. To start with, in it, Paul Berman provides the reader with context in spades. Here is Hassan al-Banna (Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather) lavishing extravagant praise on the mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Banna declares, “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle. He is but one man, but Mohammed was also one man, and so was Christ…” (p. 106). High praise for a man who collaborated with Walther Rauff. Walter Rauff was the Nazi who place together the Einsatzgruppe Agypten, a group of seven SS officers (one of whom was liaison to the mufti al-Banna likened to Christ). The Einsatzgruppe Agypten was to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East once Rommel broke through. But the praise for Rauff’s ally makes sense in light of what Hassan al-Banna wrote in “To What Do We Call together Mankind?” Here, in the course of arguing that “over the course of history, tiny movements led by charismatic facts have triumphed more than once” (p. 30), al-Banna cited various examples from the history of Islam. He also provided one non-Muslim example: “And who would have believed that that German workingman, Hitler, would ever attain such immense influence and as successful a realization of his aims as he has?” (p. 31) The context then is more than challenger to the formation of a Jewish state (as Tariq Ramadan implied in New York). But there is still more to the tale.
There is how al-Banna thought Muslims ought to live, for example. Paul Berman quotes from al-Banna’s “Toward the Light” on this issue and I will select a few of Berman’s quotes: “the imposition of severe penalties for moral offenses,” “the prohibition of dancing and additional such pastimes,” “the bowdlerization of songs,” “punishment for all who are proved to have infringed any Islamic doctrine or attacked it” (p. 44) and so on.
Tariq Ramadan’s father propagated al-Banna’s thoughts and persons of the Muslim Brotherhood thinkers in Europe and Asia, first as editor of al-Banna’s magazine and later in his own magazine al-Muslimun. Thoughts like Hassan al-Banna’s notion about “the art of death” and “death is art” (p. 32). Al-Muslimun also introduced Urdu-language thoughts of Mawdudi’s sister movement to an Arabic-language audience” (p. 34). And, after a while, these thoughts enabled “Himmler’s Islam” to emerge victorious from its battle with “its arch-rival, the Islam of generosity and civilization” (p. 97). Certainly that is the position of Muslim liberals like Abdelwahab Meddeb (and Paul Berman makes reasonably clear that Muslim liberals have ever been Tariq Ramadan’s fiercest opponents). So that is Tariq Ramadan’s family tree; his context. But Tariq Ramadan is not his family tree. Still, since in his “The Roots of Muslim Renewal,” Tariq Ramadan spends some two hundred pages writing about his grandfather in a “gusher of adulation” (p. 36) that context matters.
Consider: here is Tariq Ramadan condemning terrorist attacks against civilians in all-purpose but building an exception for terrorist attacks against civilians who take place to be in Israel (p. 195); here is Tariq Ramadan endorsing the Taliban (p. 194); here is Tariq Ramadan denouncing as Jews and as “knee-jerk defenders of Israel” six intellectuals whose crime lay in pointing out that violent anti-Semitism in immigrant neighborhoods in France is on the rise (pp. 157-8); here is Tariq Ramadan campaigning to cancel Voltaire’s play “Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet” and campaigning to add a touch of creationism to the teaching of evolution (p. 16); and here is Tariq Ramadan refusing in a televised debate to denounce the stoning of women (pp. 214-215). This is not an exhaustive list but it gives you an thought of the sort of consequences that arise from Tariq Ramadan’s context. And then Paul Berman points out something else.
He points out that a fantastic many Western intellectuals assure us that Tariq Ramadan is a moderate; even a liberal. These intellectuals decry Ramadan’s detractors; especially if persons detractors take place to be Muslim. These Western intellectuals, Berman clarifies, have adopted Islamists’ categories of judgment. And by Islamist’s lights, it is possible, I suppose to see a man like Tariq Ramadan who (unlike his brother) does not explicitly favor stoning women to death but who would prefer to debate the issue, as a kind of moderate. Far more moderate than Hirsi Ali who opposes such things, certainly.
Here, I reflect, Paul Berman misses a fantastic opportunity. He does not point out that the largest mistake many of us make is thinking that Muslims are any more pious than anyone else. It seems to me that, based on the evidence Paul Berman himself provides in his book, Muslims are no more likely to make their day-to-day decisions based on their faith, than most Christians. Consider: if Muslim girls were as devout as so many Western intellectuals seem to assume they are, would they sneak even a peek at a book titled Infidel? And yet Paul Berman suggests that they do peek.
This is not the only argument I have with this book. The opinion I have with the book are, in fact, part of its charm. It is a book that makes you reflect. And, if only for that reason, I urge you to read it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5