Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity. Tariq Ramadan

we cannot lie, they betray as we cannot betray and kill as we cannot kill. Our exactness before God is, in their eyes, our weakness. This apparent weakness is our real strength.”

      This strength was his energy up to his last days. He remained deeply faithful to the message. I owe him the understanding that to speak of God is, before anything else, to speak about love, the heart and fraternity. I owe him my learning that solitude with God is better than neglect with men. I owe him the feeling that deep sadness never exhausts one’s faith in God. His generosity, his kindness and knowledge were as many presents. I thank God for giving me the gift that is this father, at whose side I discovered that faith is love. Love of God and men in the face of all trials and adversities.

      Hasan al-Banna taught: “Be like a fruit tree. They attack you with stones, and you respond with fruits.” This he himself learnt very well; he made it his own in the most intimate sense of the word. Observer of the world, distant from the crowds, in the solitude of his place, after years of fighting without respite for God’s sake, against treachery and corruption, his words had the energy of the sources and of the rabbāniyya (of the essential link with the Creator). He never ceased to speak about God, the heart and about the intimacy of this Presence. He had learnt the essential, and he called for the essential without re-routing.

      He was laid to rest next to the one who taught him the way, Hasan al-Banna. May God have mercy on them both. A return from exile in death because despots fear the words of the living. The silence of the dead is nonetheless heavy of meaning, just like the supplications of those who are subjected to injustice. One must, nonetheless, say this word of truth even if it is bitter. Thus have we been commanded by the Prophet (pbuh): “We are to God and to Him we shall return.” God called to him a man, on the 4th August 1995, a Friday, just before dusk. A man, a son, a husband, a brother, a father-in-law, a grandfather, my father. The sole merit of those that remain will be to testify, day after day, their faithfulness to his memory and teaching. To love God, respond to His call, accompany men, live and learn how to die, live in order to learn how to die. This against all the odds.

      Said Ramadan spent 41 years in exile, almost an entire lifetime. What remains are his words, his outlook and his determination. This life is not the Life. May God receive him in His mercy, forgive him his sins and open for him the gates of Peace in the company of the Prophets, the pious and the just. I ask God to enable me to be for my children as my father was for me.

       Tariq Ramadan

       Foreword

       A man, a womanat the heart of modernity

      To observe and understand it, our world seems inaccessible. The days pass and confirm the folly of men. Carried, here, by technique and noise, they live on speed, computer science, music and cinema. Burdened, over there, by hunger and weariness, they survive on expectation, hope and in silence. Modern times have, for our memories, a concern for image, and also the infinite neglect of reality and meaning.

      In the East as in the West, our epoch gives rise to the greatest famine ever noticed on earth. Tortured bodies echo the suffering of minds. Bodies and hearts are thirsty for humanity. Poverty, straying, dictatorships and wars stifle and stammer the dignity of several billions of men and women every day. Solitude, individualism, moral misery, and lack of love eats into the being of all those whom comfort should have made content. Where is the way? Where are we going? How to be a woman, how to be a man today?

      So how, at the heart of this agony, do we respond to our hearts and protect the spirituality which makes us be? How, on the precipice of so much imbalances, do we bring forth the balance and harmony that will appease our hearts? How do we remain faithful to the pact of origin when modernity renders us so unfaithful to our humanity?

      Memory of the first morning:

      And when thy Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves, ‘Am I not your Lord?’They said, ‘Yes, we testify…’ (Qur’ān, 7:172)

      This testimony lives in the depths of hearts; it speaks and calls to us. Our heart is our hope; spirituality is our way:

      It is not the eyes that are blind, but blind are the hearts within the breast. (Qur’ān, 22:46)

      This is looking, in one’s depth, for strength of sight, real sight. It is being with God in order to read the signs, live with His remembrance in order to fill oneself with humility, to give the night its light and pray loudly in infinite silence:

      Behold We shall cast upon thee a weighty word; surely the first part of the night is heavier in tread, more upright in speech, surely in the day thou hast long business. And remember the Name of thy Lord, and devote thyself unto Him very devoutly. Lord of the East and the West; there is no God but He… (Qur’ān, 73:5–9)

      To give life to one’s heart is so difficult. The daily running of the world steals us from ourselves, to the point, sometimes, of rendering our personality double and tearing us apart. I have this memory, so present in my eyes; an image in Tunisia, Egypt, India, the USA, Europe, in the East as in the West. Friday and all days of the week: the tearing apart of the Muslim world is there.

      The crowd, the community, the fervour, the hope and the best of intentions. The most beautiful day of the week, the day of all symbols. The sermon, the reminder to meaning, the wet eyes, the tears of the heart. The world of Islam is vibrating in this end of the twentieth century as it was vibrating at the beginning of the seventh; God is witness of this strength of faith. The mosques open up, the roads are mosques, and the earth is a mosque. The Umma is here; the rich and the poor, the computer scientist and the unlettered, witnesses of the same testimony looking to quench the same thirst.

      Saturday, Sunday, Monday and the rest. Five hours of the morning, noon, or even four hours. Sleep is so heavy, the jobs so preoccupying. So many silences on Fridays and so many words on other days. So much truth and then so many lies; so many hopes and then so much groaning; so much will and then so much laziness. There was here a memory, what remains is forgetfulness. There was so much, but what remains is so little. During the days of the week, daily life has its excuses that have reason for our faithfulness. Our epoch is one of torture. Spirituality is a trial.

      On Friday as on other days of the week, our wounds are deep. There are some who, observing the vanities of this world, will adopt the ways of mysticism. Far from the world, ambitions and conflicts; and nourished by the light of the only Light. In the West, it was even considered that such was “real Islam”, “the other Islam”; the one that forces respect, when it is an Islam that attacks minds. One must live far in order to live better; abandoning men in order to come closer to God. Our epoch seems to give reason to the meaning of this exile.

      The Sufis, through their contemplation, their inward exile and their shunning of the world have followed and are still following the example of the Prophet (peace be upon him) who used to spend entire nights in prayer, meditation, in beautifying his memory, deepening his gratefulness and perfecting his worship of Him. The tears, born out of meditation, make the signs in the universe appear. The presence of the sacred is revealed:

      Surely in the creation of the heavens and of the earth and in the alternation of night and day there are signs for men possessed of minds who remember God, standing and sitting and on their sides, and reflect upon the creation of the heavens and earth… (Qur’ān, 3:190–1)

      At the heart of our daily existence, which is agitated and drowned in the most overwhelming occupations, this is tantamount to taking a step backwards, exiling oneself to one’s centre, looking for the strength of one’s memory, loving and acknowledging, thanking and praying in the noise, looking for silence and living with strength the meaning of the words “Be on this earth like a stranger or a passer by.” ¹

      This spirituality, and its requirements, is at the heart of our daily existence. It is a question of denying nothing of our being, neither our body, nor our spirit, nor this life nor the Next. The trial of spirituality is a trial of balance; it is the way of the “just middle” as it is the way of all difficulties.