Tariq Ramadan, St Antony's College, Oxford University
What would you say are the key lessons for the management of diversity within a democratic framework, as you have experienced them in your own society?
What I think is really important, in fact it's coming from my experience in the USA, in Europe and even in the Third World countries, in Africa, is that if we want to deal with diversity, we need to come up with a balanced approach of commonalities and dealing with diversity. And the commonalities are really first to agree on something which is clear, simple, and with which we have to be consistent. It is the legal framework within which we are all as members of a structure in society that we all agree on. So it could be a constitution or the legislation, and I say the rule of law and we can add all the democratic principles. But mainly the rule of law and consistency when you speak about citizenship, to treat every single citizen and even the president the same way.
So these are the commonalities and out of this we can nurture a culture of rights, a culture of responsibility towards the framework or towards this community or society. Within this legislation there is room for accepting diversity. For example, the rule of law is telling us freedom of conscience, freedom of worship and then from here you can deal with cultural diversity and religious diversity.
So commonality and accepting differences. But we can only deal with this if there is a sense of belonging and confidence and trust, and the point here is that we very often have the discussion at the national level with government, but what we really need is local initiatives, building the sense of belonging, the spaces of trust.
I really think that my experiences is something which is a concomitant process which is at the local level people working and not gathering the people in the time of crisis, but building with them out of relying on projects and platforms and works on the social ground. Social equality against discrimination and letting the people reach out and coming together. We need a national movement on local initiatives.
At the same time we also need the government to push in that direction and to go along with this process. What we have very often now is politicians working in the very short term. They are dealing with the next election and we have the conflict of two timings. One which is the long run to get this base of trust and the other one is to win the next election, and then it's really difficult. But I really think that the important thing is local initiatives and having the long run policies that are needed in our societies.
What in your view is the nature of the relationship between Islam and democracy?
If we are concentrating our discussion on the concepts, we say okay democracy is coming from the West, it's a Western term, and then we have Islam. I think we have to extract the principles from the concepts the principles and there is no problem in Islam with of democracy when it comes to the five I mention: rule of law, equal citizenship, universal suffrage, accountability and separation of power. When it comes to the Islamic teaching we don't have a problem, in fact from the very beginning we can see that these were promoted even with the Prophet when people were making the difference between him as a Prophet and him as a leader and saying: is this your decision or is it revealed, my decision is wrong, we have to assess your decision. So there is something here which has to be promoted as the principles.
Now as I am always saying, there is a need to promote these universal principles without imposing the models. It's not only coming from the West. The problem is that some of the Western thinkers or politicians want to impose a model onto the Muslim or Islamic majority societies, and I think this is wrong. Let the people find their own model. But it's also something which is historical when it comes to the intra discussion among Muslims, that some are idealising some models in the past, saying this is the only one and we have to come back to Khalifa, we have to come back to this. It's absurd, it's not scientific.
I say no, what you have to do with history is to take the principles and to find a new history goal, a model with the same principles for your time. There is no faithfulness without evolution. So we have two critical discussions here with the West as to what we want as the model of democracy, and with Muslims as to what we want to promote as a modern way to deal with new challenges.
What do you think are the key challenges facing the advance of democracy around the world?
I really think that it's consistency from the people who are democrats. To be able for example to say “look, our democracies are promoting values that sometimes they forget for the sake of geo-strategic reasons”. So for people in Africa for example, they say okay, you are for democracy when it suits you. So here we have to listen to this, the people are not hating America, or hating the British government for nothing. They are not hating them, in fact they are not hating the values or the culture or the civilisation. They are frustrated by the policies promoted by this government, forgetting their values in order to get some interest. So we have to deal with this.
And the second issue, which is an internal challenge, is consistency with our own values when it comes to our own citizens and saying, yes we have to push the people to integrate, but when they are integrated and they don't get their rights, they go to secondary identities to go against their own country. And we had a very important report from Pew two weeks ago saying that the most resistant people towards citizenship and democracy in the USA are African Americans. You cannot go to the people and tell them: You have to culturally integrate, you are not in your country.
They are even close to the native Americans, but they don't get their rights in jails. In the inner city they go back to a secondary identity, sometimes they convert to Islam and they use the secondary identity against the common identity which is a citizenship which they don't get as all the other citizens and they say: “We are second class citizens, so we will be first class resistant”. This is something which is really important for us, so this is one of the main challenges.
And we have to be very cautious in our democracies for example Islamizing social problems. Let social problems be treated as social problems. If you don't have policy you start bad politics, so you start by centralising, you know it's cultural, it's Islamic and when in fact it's not, it has nothing to do with this. We have to come up with real social policies to address the people, for example in the suburbs in Paris, when they were saying: We want to be treated as citizens, and the answer they got: You are still Arabs and you have to integrate.
We are integrated because we are doing exactly what the French citizens are doing. So listen to the strong social discourses without making it a problem of identity. And our obsession with identity is a self-fulfilling prophecy that by pushing the people to get an exclusive identity, they then rebel against something which is not in fact the other structural racism and discrimination that we have to face.
Interview with Tariq Ramadan, a speaker at the Democracy and Diversity Round Table, Oslo, 12 June 2007. Interviewer: Mark Salter, Senior Programme Officer at International IDEA.
