Despite attempts, including petitions signed by the most prominent of US academics working on the ME, the government chose to say and do nothing.
Yesterday it more or less ended with Ramadan resigning his appointments at Notre Dame.
There is a direct and aggressive assault on thought on behalf of the American Empire. The last MESA presidential address by Laurie Brand at the San Franscisco meeting in November cogently argued such a line. When it is published on the web, it will be posted.
Academics, intellectals, and thinkers have for centuries struggled with various types of governments about their ideas. Now the world’s latest Empire has joined the rather poor company of governments that oppose intellectuals.
After 9/11 there was a moment to deepen understanding, spread lines of inquiry, and increase integration. The Bush administration missed the chance by opting for the conservative more long-term detrimental route. Shame on them.
Some of my Egyptian friends happily rushed to say that “America is not allowing Tariq Ramadan to teach there” so as to flaunt the US mistake last fall. Unfortunately, a fact not revealed in the Egyptian press is that Ramadan has not been allowed into Egypt since 1995.
The sad part is that I bet a high majority of Americans do not even know this is going on. Oh….the empire does not have to disclose what is not happening.
It is ok though – these is an ebb in government-intellectual relations. Academic disciplines will continue. Thankfully, hard-working, serious thinkers that push the envelop would not have it any other way….from where ever they find the space and tolerance to practice their trade.
Keep thinking…it pisses them off.
tariq ramadan is a bad example to show american policy. ramadan was interviewed by the swiss paper weltwoche a while ago and started to shout at the interviewers, because they were crtically questioning his points of view. this man is neither an itellectual, nor in any way able to take part in a dialogue. this man spreads a doctrine, but does not want to be questioned.
moritz
I disagree completely with your comment but am glad you made it. I think Ramadan is a perfect example of US policy.
With all due respect, I feel you tried to muddle my argument by emphasizing what kind of person Tariq Ramadan may or may not be rather than what the US administration did.
The purposes of my posting was not to support or defend Tariq Ramadan’s personality, ideology, or intellectual abilities. That was Notre Dame’s job.
Rather, I wished to highlight that Ramadan’s case is yet the latest of the Orwellian-like attempts to control thought and debates in American universities.
The fact that Notre Dame chose him to teach at the university and Homeland Security got in the way and prevented Ramadan from coming is the problem. I could careless if Ramadan is a nice guy or not. Ramadan or anyone else a university chooses to lecture, share ideas, and contribute to a university environment should be allowed to do so. The onus for universities to bring in the right people is the universities’ business, not the government’s.
Your line of argumentation makes it….”well I agree there are problems but since Ramadan is disagreeable then so what this time”. The real question is the US admin paranoid that Ramadan may be able to advocate a more nuanced version of Islam. Or, is it just as simple that they blocked him because his grandfather was Hassan al-Banna.
Either way this is a satisfactory and scary example of US policy towards the academy.
For more see Laurie Brand’s Presidential Address at MESA in SF last November. It is available at http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/Bulletin/Pres%20Addresses/Brand.htm
The citation is as follows:
“Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire,” 2004 MESA Presidential Address, Forthcoming, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol 39, no.1, (Summer 2005).
Also see:
Joel Beinin, “The New American McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East,� Race & Class 46 (no. 1, July-September 2004):101-15.
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No hard feeling Moritz – I enjoy disagreements as much as agreements.
hi josh,
i realised, that i didn’t make my point as clear, as i could have.
tariq ramadan has a swiss passport. therefor he has the right to live in this country. tariq ramadan has interesting opinions. and from an academic point of view, it is interesting to read his books, because he pronounces many things other people would not write. for every student it would be interesting to sit in a lecture held by tariq ramadan. you would get a quiet nice picture of what you could call the european way of islamism.
still, there is different institutions, which have different jobs to do. the universities job is to get the most interesting people to teach their students. but it is not their job to check, if there is a security risk if that person comes to their country. that is the job of the ministry of interior (in any normal country) and that of the forsaken HLS in the US. if the responsible ministry believes the person to be a risk for internal security and to spread certain ideas in radical circles it does have the right to reject the visa request of that person. you might agree or disagree with the choice the ministry of HLS has taken. probably tariq ramadan is an islamist, who in the end, does not pose a thread. but you can’t question, that the ministry does have the general right to take such a decision, because otherwise it would be local universities and professors for whatever who should decide who is safe or not safe to come to a specific country.
of course immigration policies are always connected to other policies and interests. these connections are part of what different parties stand for. i personally disagree with strict immigration policies, because i usually am the one profiting from liberal immigration. but i did not like the dcutus of your article. “the empire attacking academic freedom” filed in “human rights”. you know, the german translation of empire is “reich”. besides the US do not really fit the concept of an empire altogether. if you chose to use polemic vocabulary, you might prefer to mark in the title, that it is an “opinion piece”. i don’t think either that tariq ramadan has the right to teach in the US and especially not a right connected to the fact,t hat he is a human being. you also have this paragraph “Academics, intellectals, and thinkers have for centuries struggled with various types of governments about their ideas. Now the world’s latest Empire has joined the rather poor company of governments that oppose intellectuals.” here you say that tariq ramadan is an intellectual. he might be intelligent. but being an intellectual is more. that means you are ready to take part in an intellectual academic dialogue. tariq ramadan is not.
“The sad part is that I bet a high majority of Americans do not even know this is going on. Oh….the empire does not have to disclose what is not happening.” well said (i really like the style of that sentence). but you imply indirectly, that the government stops media from publishing on the subject. but even, if you live in the US you do have access to “free media”. problem is not, that the government does not run around naked and yell “ha ha, we surpress academia”. problem is, most people, even if they did, would ask “so what?”.
“from where ever they find the space and tolerance to practice their trade. ” here you seem to be generally speaking and if you would be, i could agree. but this article is still on tariq ramadan. for a long time we were basically ignoring radical islamic (and christian) tendencies in europe for the sake of tolerance. but it does not make sense to be tolerating the intolerant.
look, i don’t like the actual american government. i don’t agree with many of their policies etc. but (i believe) it is not the right decision to formulate this kind of radical tolerance towards anything in the name of academia etc. just to be the proper antithesis of mr bush & co. i had quiet a lot of contact with islamists, even some who would use violence to realize their goals. you won’t change their opinions by being a nice guy.
looking forward to your reply,
moritz
Dear Moritz,
Thanks for the reply. We are going to have to agree to disagree on this. The problem with HLS is that it is far to conservative about who it lets in. It stopped Cat Stevens for goodness sake. This is a guy who wrote “Peace Train”.
There is a lot of Islamophobia in the US and I think Ramadan is one example that people can learn from – be they approve or disapprove of his style or ideas.
Notre Dame cannot and should not doing the country’s intelligence work and determining who has access to the US. However, HLS is preventing non-threats from entering based on politics when instead it should be about what the law says. There are processes and they should be followed. Then after they exclude/block people, they also refuse to disclose the reasons why. You can have it both ways in Bushworld, but in the other world you cannot.
Perhaps you are right and I am wrong about Ramadan’s intellectual prowess. But Ramadan was not denied entry because of this. And so what if they block him as a non-intellectual this time. The next time it will be an intellectual.
I am well aware and do not expect the American or any other government from coming out and “tell on itself” and intentions. However, I reserve the right to criticize the hell out of any governments’ decisions. Bush & Co have had three years to do something after 9/11 and it is all about war, marginalization, and exclusion. Perhaps it is time to try a new approach.
Dear Moritz,
I forgot to address this issue….
America may not dominate physcial territory like the British or Roman empire did when they had holdings all over the world.
Nevertheless, the US has its military, economic and political reach everywhere. Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the US military had 752 military installations in more than 130 countries.
The Defense’s budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations.
MNCs and their investment capability are beyond doubt. They can cripple a country economically.
Indeed, in a book I very much disagree with, Nial Ferguson argues, “in terms of economic resources as well as of military capability the US not only resembles but in some respects exceeds the last great Anglophone empire,” (Ferguson, Colossus, 2004, p.19)
Besides if that is not enough, Bushie says the US is not an empire and we all know reality is different outside of his bubble.
Happy holidays!
i’m not even sure if our opinions are so far away from eachother. i would crticize the ministry of HLS as well. i just did not like the way you took to do so. but the cat stevens example really made me smile. i wonder if they (HLS) really still have control over what they do. a friend of mine wanted to got on holydays to the US with his parents and his bother. they all travel on indian passports. his father is a quiet wealthy buisenessman here in switzerland. they actually granted visa to everyone except for him. the reason given? he’s indian and studying computer science! oh right. i still have not managed to make a proper connection between the two things. as you may imagine the family decided to skip their US vacation for now. besides, he is a quiet good student. he is planning to do a phd. he wanted to go to the US, but now he is looking for a place in the UK. things like that happen everyday. other academics leave the country because there is too much hassle with the visa. european universities already see the applications going up. students/phd students/professors from all around the world, who would have gone to the US before come to europe now. all of this has a huge negative impact on academia in the US. but if you look at it, how much is really intentional. i doubt bush intentionally harms research and science in the US. it rather seems to me, that it is a sideeffect of a really malformulated policy, dedicated on a different question.
moritz
on the empire argument. all things you quote make the US a super power. factually it makes the US the only present super power. but the difference between a state and an empire is, that the state has a border and defines itself by its power monopoly inside its own border, while accepting other states have a power monopoly within their borders. an empire is a dragon always attemting to extend its borders and swallowing whatever neighbours there are. at the same time the empire is often held together by a central power, but it still has to acknowledge, that there is other local powers. the empire is therefore often better charactericized by the term power oligopoly. definitions are always clear, reality usually vague. but i guess by following these definitions the US is rather a state than an empire.
moritz