Tariq Ramadan's Interview in Der Spiegel

Fjordman in his blog brings an interview by Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim scholar.

Below is my analysis:

SPIEGEL: Is a tendency toward violence inherent to Islam? Isn't it true that many Muslims view jihad as an elementary part of Islamic identity?

Ramadan: Are the Crusades an elementary part of Christianity? No. Every community has the right to self-defense.

Ramadan doesn't answer the question and doesn't deny the 'accusation'. The answer ("no") is given to a completely different question ("Are the crusades an elementary part of Christianity?"). The next statement has no relation to the question.

SPIEGEL: Your words are like those of a rationalist, an enlightened theologian with purely intellectual ambitions. But in political reality, in France, Great Britain and the United States, you are suspected of secretly promoting the expansion of Islam and sympathizing with violence. Have you been eating chalk? Are you speaking with a forked tongue?

Ramadan: Oh yes, I am one of the most maligned Muslim intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan, the slippery trickster. They talk about people like me the way they used to talk about the Jews: He is Swiss and European, but his loyalties also lie elsewhere. He says one thing and thinks something else. He is a member of an international organization -- in the past, it was world Jewry, today it's world Islam. I am disparaged as if I were a Muslim Jew.

Again, Ramadan doesn't answer the question. He makes fun of it instead.

SPIEGEL: Could that have something to do with your family history? Your grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, was the founder of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, an organization that envisioned an Islamic fundamentalist transformation.

Ramadan: Thoughts are not genetically inherited traits. I admire my grandfather for his anti-colonial fight against the British. He was very involved in education for girls and women. His five daughters -- my aunts and my mother -- all attended university. And the organization he founded was very progressive for its time. However, I am highly critical of the Brotherhood, with its affected, conspiratorial behavior, its hierarchical structures and its oversimplified slogans.

Here we finally get an opinion from Ramadan - he's highly critical of the Muslim Brotherhood.

I will try to have the full interview analyzed within the next few days.