Free Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan by Caroline Fourest Page A

accord with his commandments. The
day when this comes about, their institutions will vanish and their legends disappear. Our objective is to reform, to make better, to seek perfection and not to destroy,
devastate or stir up trouble.75
    One can well imagine that the police officer who was interrogating her
did not find her reply all that reassuring. Al-Ghazali herself saw no rea son for him to be skeptical.76 She denied taking part in a conspiracy, but
at the same time indicated that she agreed with Qutb when he called for
the murder of representatives of apostate governments. In the same book
she recounts how the author of Trail Markers had given her the manuscript
of his book before she was taken to prison, where she spent part of her
time in the company of Qutb's two sisters. Even several decades later, when
she was writing her memoirs, she never expressed the slightest criticism
of the man who had served as theoretician for the Islamists that killed in
the name of Islam. On the contrary, throughout the book she expresses her
admiration for his courage and his perspicacity. The fact that Tariq Ramadan wrote the preface for this book is thus not without significance, all the
more so since he endorsed the book in the following terms: "Zaynab alGhazali never went too far ... "77

Trained by the Islamic Foundation
    Because Ramadan has taken pains to protect al-Banna from the criticism to
which Sayyid Qutb was subjected does not mean that he disapproves of Qutb.
In 1998, the very year in which he defended his doctoral thesis on reformist thinking and the "perceptible" shift initiated by Qutb, he left for a year of
study at the Leicester Islamic Foundation, an Islamist institute whose mission was to use England as a base for spreading the doctrines of Mawdudi
and Qutb!
    Founded in 1973, the institute accommodates an Islamic training center
known as the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, a most pompous title
for what is neither more nor less than a university of propaganda. Conceived
at first as a means of ensuring that Muslim students in England had a refuge that would protect them from contamination and keep them from forgetting Islam, the foundation, little by little, became a base camp for promoting
"an Islamic social order in Great Britain." 78 The British environment seemed
congenial to the most radical of Islamists. Adopting a strategy that many
find incomprehensible, Britain gladly welcomed jihadists intent on organizing their projects far from the oppressive surveillance of Arab Muslim dictatorships. Prince Charles himself even provided the Leicester Institute with a certain degree of legitimacy by granting it a prize in recognition of its service in the spread of a religious culture. Apparently searching for any means
to demonstrate his morality, the future sovereign-who is also the head of
the Anglican Church-decided to support any religious movement, however
marginal or extreme, that enabled him to present himself as the defender of
religious liberty-even if it meant lending an aura of legitimacy to the most
controversial Islamic training center in Europe. Thanks to this official recognition, Tariq Ramadan no longer had reason to conceal the fact that he had
been trained there. At the age of 36, he lived with all his family on the Leicester campus, where the alleyways are named after Qutb and Mawdudi. In
the introduction to his book To Be a European Muslim, he thanked the institute for the instruction received there: "If this book has been possible, I owe
it first of all to the excellent working conditions offered by the Islamic Foundation. I owe particular thanks to the president, Professor Khurshid Ahmad,
for the trust he placed in me, and the institute's director, Dr Manazir Ahsan,
for his warm welcome."79 He had every reason to express his thanks. For the
entire year that he passed at the institute, he received a scholarship of Li,ooo
a month, in addition to free