In an interview on Liberty and Morality

Your last book is hot off the press: Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, published in April. Paul Berman is someone I tend to think of as someone on the liberal side of things, though I could be wrong…

No, you’re right.

This book enters a particular debate at a particular moment. This is a moment when large numbers of Islamic immigrants are present in Europe and a debate is taking place in Europe whether there is a fundamental clash of values and whether in fact this immigration may undermine liberal principles in Europe. Where does Berman come in? Why is he on your list?

Berman is on my list because he addresses two subjects that should be and are certainly of great interest to conservatives, but should be of interest to all thinking people. Those two subjects are Islamic extremism and the role of intellectuals in our politics. As you’ve already nicely said, Europe is facing a very serious challenge in connection to the assimilation of large numbers of immigrants who are Muslim. This is true in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain. Moreover, the United States faces a problem because on September 11 we were attacked, and not for the first time, by Islamic extremists who have declared war on the United States, and have declared a kind of war in a way in which they ask for no return of land, no change in our government or no change in this policy or that policy, but seem to be opposed to our very existence as a free and democratic nation. Islam and Islamic extremism, which I don’t equate, are very central issues, it seems to me, for the United States and for Europe today. So that’s one reason why I am interested in Berman’s book.

The second reason I am interested in Berman’s book is because he looks at the role of the intellectuals in confronting this issue. The book, as you know, is a considerable expansion of a huge article that appeared in The New Republic a couple of years ago on Tariq Ramadan. Tariq Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he is handsome, he is suave, he is intelligent, and he has been embraced by many intellectuals in Europe, where he grew up and where he lives, as the model of the moderate Muslim, who provides a way of reconciling the claims of traditional Islam with the politics and the morals of modern liberal democracy. Paul Berman is suspicious. The book was, as was his article, a kind of detective story which closely examines Ramadan’s statements, closely examines the doctrines and the practices of Islamic extremism in order to determine whether Ramadan is the moderate that many European intellectuals take him to be or whether he is a kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing whose ambition is to insinuate radical Islam into the very heart of European civilisation.

Is there also a broader critique here of a double standard in which those advocating multiculturalism and opposing Islamophobia are given every benefit of the doubt, whereas those advocating standards of liberty are raked over the coals by intellectuals?

Well, that’s easy, yes. The final chapters of Berman’s book deal with the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was very severely attacked by Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, two distinguished journalists, as an ‘enlightenment fundamentalist’. She was dismissed as a woman who fled from one dogma, the dogma of extremism, to the dogma of enlightenment, whose attacks on Islam were extreme if not unhinged – whereas Tariq Ramadan was treated with great respect. What Berman attempts to show is that we have very good reasons to be a great deal more sceptical about Tariq Ramadan, although it’s a complicated case. People should read Berman’s book because he draws no easy conclusions about Ramadan.

Themes often emerge in these interviews and in your case, with the exception of Walter Russell Mead, four of your five books, in their very different ways, argue for pushing back against a kind of creeping relativism. They argue for regrounding classical liberalism, enlightenment liberalism as a fighting cause for certain virtues and values that we hold dear.

I would say that is what has interested me about all these books and especially in bringing them here to discuss with you. All five of these books teach us something important about how we, today, are failing to understand, appreciate and defend our liberty.