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Professor Tariq Ramadan is a man of no need to introduction. He holds MA in Philosophy and French literature and PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Geneva. In Cairo, Egypt he received one-on-one intensive training in classic Islamic scholarship from Al-Azhar University scholars. Tariq Ramadan is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St Antony’s College ). He is also teaching at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford. He is at the same time a Visiting Professor in Qatar (Faculty of Islamic Studies) and in Morocco (Mundiapolis) and a Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan).[/symple_box]
In the West it is by now a well established and common procedure. It has to do with creating “the Islamic problem or question” which is like an intellectual jail where the Muslims are imprisoned, with their intellectuals, imams, women, etc. This very jail could indifferently be called “democracy”, “secularism”, “women”, “values”, “homosexuality”, “visibility”, etc., etc., etc.
Within that jail, it is expected from the Muslim interlocutor that he strips himself from some of his principles, values and practices to the point of being still imprisoned but, furthermore, emptying himself, naked and powerless. Imprisoned, colonised, body and mind.
What is added to this alienation is that the imprisoned-colonized is complacent, smiling to his guardian who, through the manufactured procedure of “the Islamic question”, celebrates him, promotes him, even decorates him. He actually hopes, from within his jail, that his guardian will give him his cell’s key… Factitious freedom of the mind.
The major problem of the Western Muslim, imprisoned-colonized, today, is the same as, yesterday, the colonized African, South-American, Arab, or Asian… His major problem, we said, is himself who has accepted to empty himself from himself, ending up naked, with any intellectual modesty left.
From the United States, Canada to Australia, all the way through Europe, the rationale is the same. Here come the times of the free colonized intellects.
Liberation will invariably start with a conscientious and courageous reconciliation with the self.
