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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]
All these fears, all these suspicions, all these rejections, if not this hatred. Islam is seen as the religion of the other, based on expansion, violence, discrimination, machismo, etc. And Muslims are stigmatised and suspected, they belong to another humanity, they are “not from among us”…
It will be necessary, one day, to get out of this blindness, these truncated certainties and these findings which are as simplistic as they are dangerous… It will be necessary to see and recognise, in the heart of the Muslim diversity, that the vast majority of the latter advocate, with their faith and their practices, humanistic values, brotherhood, generosity, solidarity and love.
I have been repeating it for 30 years … thanks to the work that Muslims are undertaking with themselves – facing their own shortcomings and because of the very fact that they are stigmatised – they are, and will increasingly, be an added value to the West and the world. There is no question of converting our fellow human beings, but to recall the shared principles, dignity, justice, solidarity, forgiveness, peace and, everyday, to live by the common values.
Do not mistake the enemy …. our common enemies are dictatorship, exploitation, corruption, injustice, misery and hunger … but not you, not me, not between us… We are from the same humanity, sharing the same hope.
