Lessons from the Cold War about reforming Islam

Date: 22/06/06

Two of the best-known Muslims in Europe met for the first time last week. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an apostate: three bodyguards protect her from the radical Islamists who want to kill her. Tariq Ramadan is a pious, in some ways rather conservative, Muslim who has no bodyguards yet.

But I wouldn't be surprised if he gets some soon. He wants his co-religionists to be active and peaceful citizens of modern Europe. Some see him as the leader of a reformation that would lead to a nice, cuddly Euro-Islam. Radicals loathe him for that; many secularists still think he is creepy and sinister.

Tariq Ramadan is a pious, in some ways rather conservative, Muslim who has no bodyguards yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if he gets some soon. He wants his co-religionists to be active and peaceful citizens of modern Europe. Some see him as the leader of a reformation that would lead to a nice, cuddly Euro-Islam. Radicals loathe him for that; many secularists still think he is creepy and sinister.

Hirsi Ali (a Somali-born refugee) and Ramadan (a Swiss-born Egyptian aristocrat) debated at a conference in Sweden organised by the wealthy and iconoclastic Ax:son Johnson Foundation. It was gripping stuff (though I'm biased, as I was chairing it). Hirsi Ali said Ramadan was duplicitous. He responded by calling her, in effect, a publicity hound, more interested in impressing western audiences than changing Muslim thinking.

Both were impressive: Ramadan is formidably articulate, almost demagogic. But behind his charm, he's prickly and humourless. He didn't like it when Hirsi Ali (who has a wicked sense of humour) started teasing him.

The conference participants' sympathies divided pretty evenly. But I was struck by a historical parallel. I've always been suspicious of prominent, vulnerable reformers since I made the terrible mistake, briefly, of being a fan of Mikhail Gorbachev. The danger is that you get besotted with a particular personality and end up sacrificing the people who actually share your views in order to protect someone who agrees with you only a little bit.

I see Ramadan as a kind of Gorbachev figure: he's eloquent, sympathetic and exposed. It's tempting to help him: we wanted Gorbachev to make the Soviet empire safe and we would like Ramadan to do the same for Islam. But Hirsi Ali is more like Andrei Sakharov. She has suffered physically because of her beliefs. She believes passionately in democracy, free speech and the rule of law, with no ifs and buts.

So I find it worrying that Hirsi Ali is leaving Europe for America for safety and freedom - rather as dissidents left the Soviet Union. I would have been delighted if Ramadan had, for example, begun his remarks by deploring the attacks on her, endorsing her right to say what she likes and offering to attend the launch of her next book or film. He didn't: he speaks out strongly for freedom and the liberal order in principle - but seems much less eager to do it directly to a potential victim of Islamist extremism sitting just next to him.

Another echo came from the question of Koranic authority. Hirsi Ali says that until Muslims explicitly move away from the idea that the Koran is the literal and revealed truth, Islam will not be compatible with liberal democracy. Ramadan tries to blur the issue, saying that the Koran must be read "in context" (though he doesn't, quite, say whether that means that wife-beating is always wrong, or only sometimes).

That recalled the Congress of People's Deputies in December 1989. Sakharov took the podium and bluntly told Gorbachev that Article Six of the Soviet constitution, which guaranteed the Communist Party's monopoly of power, had to go. Gorbachev silenced him harshly, saying: "Let's not put pressure on each other by manipulating public opinion." Sakharov died a few days later.

But he was right: truthful words beat blurry ones, even if those who defend powerful old thinking find them uncomfortable.

• Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Author reports on a panel discussion at a seminar on 'Threats to the Secular State and Society - The Case of Europe and Islam', organised by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Avesta Manor, Sweden, 16.6.06.