Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

"Yes, the lead thinker in Europe in terms of where Islam is going is Tariq Ramadan. He’s a brilliant and controversial academic and philosopher who lectures worldwide and has been banned in the certain places including the US. He’s also the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of Muslim Brotherhood, the first great socio-political movement campaigning to give Islam a central role in the forcefully secular state of Egypt, who was assassinated in 1949. In Western Muslims and the Future of Islam or To be a European Muslim, Ramadan speaks to a fascinating demographic – the European Muslim. He has opened up thinking about Islam and its place in modernity and in the West and has tried to haul the Umma-centric view of what Islam should be into something more universal. He believes that if Islam truly does claim to represent the universal truth then there is no way that it can exclude other cultures from participating in that truth. He has thrown down the gauntlet to Muslims, suggesting that Islam must be able to include more than just the strict highly legalistic normative values of the 7th and 8th centuries into its version of what the world and God and truth is, and he has also got up a whole bunch of Western people’s noses because what he is saying is that all the ideas and cultural norms of the West can be subsumable within the ultimate truth of Islam. This idea and the thought of an Arab reconquista of Europe clearly upsets a lot of people. Ramadan is fascinating for walking this tightrope, as well as being a very interesting representative of the new kind of thinking about Islam and modernity that has been emerging from Muslim thinkers."