Tariq Ramadan’s article in The New Statesman, ‘Good Muslim, bad Muslim.’
It’s hard to excerpt a Ramadan article and do representative justice to the whole of his points, but I found this interesting:
Those of us who consider ourselves reformists are often attacked in internal Muslim debates for having “gone out of Islam” in our search for context and new understandings of religious texts. In the west, as well as in Asia and Africa, including in some Muslim-majority countries, I have repeatedly been called a kafir (disbeliever), a murtad (apostate) or an impostor seeking to adulterate Islam and destroy it from within. This happens to a large number of Muslim reformists – who, paradoxically, are at the same time considered “fundamentalist” and “extremist” within some right-wing circles in the west.
More troubling, perhaps, and making outside categorisation even more hazardous, is the tendency for some reformist, rationalist or mystic groups to develop, internally, the same dogmatic attitude towards their Muslim co-religionists, casting doubt on their legitimacy in the most categorical and exclusivist fashion. Moderation is multidimensional, and is not expressed only with reference to the west or to “non-Muslims”.
