Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan by Caroline Fourest Read Free Book Online

of the goodness of their
hearts, but in order to recruit.

    The Brotherhood's totalitarianism does not appear to have come as much
of a shock to Tariq Ramadan. In the same lectures on "contemporary Muslim
thought," he explains that his grandfather was right to advocate a single-party
system, for the Egyptian people ofhis time did not possess a sufficiently solid
political culture to make the right choice-i.e. to choose an Islamic regime.
As al-Banna put it: "Given the situation, elections were pointless; they served
no purpose, since, if the majority of the population was ignorant, how could
they know what they really wanted?"41 Ramadan quotes his grandfather to
prove how right he was to encourage Islamic education, while at the same
time refusing pluralism and democracy for as long as it took for this education to take effect. That is what Ramadan refers to as his grandfather's "critical attitude in regard to pluralism."
    However hard al-Banna's heirs attempt to portray themselves as a political alternative to the authoritarian and paternalistic governments of the
Maghreb and the Middle East, they are themselves hardly any better. A
regime issuing from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood would be the
first to flout democratic principles once in power. For proof, one has only to
observe the way in which their own movement has functioned over the years.
As Supreme Guide, al-Banna had a very singular notion of what consultation consisted of. He accepted the principle of consultation as stipulated in
the Koran, but without ever taking the risk of making it democratic in practice. Within the official structure of the Brotherhood, the power to take decisions rested, during his lifetime, with the Bureau of Orientation, composed
of twenty members chosen by the Guide. As a pure formality, his choice was
ratified by an Assembly of 150 members, who had the right to comment on
the decisions before voting by a two-thirds majority. But their countervailing power was strictly limited, since it was the Bureau of Orientation that had the last word .... But then the Guide could dismiss any one of its members if he so chose! This does not mean that there were no differing ideological tendencies within the movement, or relatively diverse subgroups. Yet, as
Olivier Carre has explained: All serious rifts ended in blind submission, in
secession or exclusion." 42 These procedures made it possible for the Guide to
exclude systematically those who reproached him for having made deals with
the regime in power or who accused him of nepotism. What a splendid organizational model for a "liberation movement!"

    And that was only the official organizational structure. Tariq Ramadan fails to mention-and thus to criticize-the other method to which the
Brothers have had recourse as they strive to put their program into effect:
infiltration. They have been remarkably adept at taking control of an organization without its being aware of it, often through one of its members who
kept silent on the fact that he belonged to the Brotherhood. It is a technique
that is difficult to expose, especially while it is happening. Luckily, there exists
a number of first-hand accounts that show that this practice existed from the
very outset. One ofthese accounts is provided by Zaynab al-Ghazali, a woman
activist in the service of the Brotherhood, whose memoirs were prefaced by
Tariq Ramadan.43 Thanks to her, we can get an inside view of the Brotherhood's tactics of infiltration. We learn that the members have no scruples
about talking with two voices or even resorting to lies when it can serve their
cause. In 1936, Zaynab al-Ghazali was president of the Association of Muslim Women, the aim of which was to propagate "the Muslim religion and
the resurrection of the umma, which will provide Islam with the power, the
force and the glory that it once enjoyed." The association was by no means
a progressive organization; however, its members