'Third way' speaks to Europe's young Muslims

But by the 1980s, it was clear the newcomers were in France to stay. They began to debate what it means to be a Muslim in the West - a situation that the Islamic world has seen as incompatible. With some 5 million Muslims, the largest number in Europe, France has been struggling to understand and integrate this ever-growing population, only half of whom are citizens.

Ramadan asks Muslims to go back to the sources of their faith- - the Koran, sharia - and reread them to find ways to live comfortably in the secular West. In his 1999 book, "To Be a European Muslim," he wrote: "Whereas one might have feared a conflict of loyalties, one cannot but note that it is in fact the reverse.... Loyalty to one's faith and conscience requires firm and honest loyalty to one's country: Sharia requires honest citizenship."

That means engaging in the political process, talking to political parties, and making clear requests for rights as citizens.

"That doesn't mean it's easy," he says. "Even for a Jew, even for a Christian, even for anyone who has some values, who wants to be faithful to his or her values. It's difficult to have a spiritual life in a modern society."

For Ramadan, jihad is not a war against non-Muslims, but "a spiritual effort to remain faithful to values. "You can't base policy only on confrontation," he says, referring to the volatile choices of another European Muslim, Belgium's Dyab Abou Jahjah, because confrontation eventually only "promotes and nourishes a rooted feeling of victimization."

While Ramadan wants Muslims to integrate into and learn from Europe, he also asks that Europeans work to accept the Muslims among them. Many of Ramadan's followers believe that racism and a fear of Islam contribute to the high unemployment rates among young people in their communities - hitting 30 percent in some of the banlieues. One way toward better understanding, he says, is to promote "inclusive memory" - recognizing the commonalities and overlap between Muslim philosophy and Western philosophy - so that Muslims "feel part of" and invested in "the present."

To reframe the dialogue between Islam and the West, Ramadan proposes that Muslims, rather than seeing the West and Western democracy as "anti- Islamic," view democracy as "a model respecting our principles."

Accordingly, France, in the spirit of democracy, should be more flexible on such issues as the right to wear a headscarf - a decade-long area of contention between religious Muslims and the French government. Girls and women are not allowed to wear the scarf to school, as France believes it contradicts the laws of laïcité, or separation of church and state. By keeping girls who wear the scarf out of school, Ramadan says, the state pushes them toward Koranic schools - thus separating them and their families from public schools and the mainstream. The result could be insularity and ultimately, perhaps, radicalism.

Like any spiritual figure in a secular country like France, Ramadan has his critics. Some, like Olivier Roy, an expert in the Islamic World at National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) say that Ramadan's philosophy is ambivalent because it doesn't offer anything to Arabs who choose not to practice Islam, who simply want to be French. Some worry that his admonition to return to Islam's sources will inevitably lead to fundamentalism.

Others disagree. "I think that people don't understand what he wants to do. They put on him the image of Hassan al-Banna, but they don't really listen to what he is saying." says Ms. Cesari.

Page: 1 | 2