The Flight of the Intellectuals [Hardcover]

Paul Berman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2010

Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be “moderates.”

How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman—“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)—conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence.

Berman’s investigation of the history and nature of the Islamist movement includes some surprising revelations. In examining Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he shows the rise of an immense and often violent worldview, elements of which survives today in the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman also unearths the shocking story of al-Banna’s associate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated personally with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab support of the Nazis’ North African campaign. Echoes of the Grand Mufti’s Nazified Islam can be heard among the followers of al-Banna even today.

In a gripping and stylish narrative Berman also shows the legacy of these political traditions, most importantly by focusing on a single philosopher, who happens to be Hassan al-Banna’s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan—a figure widely celebrated in the West as a “moderate” despite his troubling ties to the Islamist movement. Looking closely into what Ramadan has actually written and said, Berman contrasts the reality of Ramadan with his image in the press.

In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds light on a number of modern issues—on the massively reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our own time, on a newly fashionable turn against women’s rights, and on the difficulties we have in discussing terrorism—and presents a stunning commentary about the modern media’s peculiar inability to detect and analyze some of the most dangerous ideas in contemporary society.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An intellectual thriller in the form of a polemic, with Inspector Berman hunting for clues... Maybe Berman's book will start intellectuals talking, and not just about each other. Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, Slate

"Fascinating... This bracing and volatile book is an important one and devastating in its conclusions."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Paul Berman is, just like me and I think many others, surprised—and that’s an understatement—that some liberals choose to defend ideas that are very illiberal and choose to look away from practices that are even more illiberal. Why are they excusing radical Islam? That fascinates Berman and it also fascinates me, what the presence of Islam does to the liberal psyche in the West."
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maclean's

"It has been quite astonishing to see how far and how fast there has been a capitulation to the believable threat of violence.... I join with Paul Berman in expressing utter astonishment at this phenomenon, or rather at the way that it is not a phenomenon."
—Christopher Hitchens

“Berman… has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them.”
—Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review
 
“How do you distinguish a jihadist from a ‘moderate’ Muslim? Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals brilliantly dissects the moral confusion and cowardice that contrives to sway some brave men and women. Must reading for our times.”
—Harold Evans, Daily Beast
 
“Brilliant, uncompromising.”
—Michael Young, Slate

Praise for Paul Berman
“One of our most gifted essayists, a deeply pensive writer with a lyrical talent for imaginative synthesis.”
—The Boston Globe

“One of America’ s best exponents of recent intellectual history.”
—The Economist

About the Author

Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias, The New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism, and Power and the Idealists. He writes for The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Melville House (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633514
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633510
• Product Dimensions: 4.8 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #174,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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122 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book, April 27, 2010

By 

I. Tysoe "Inna Tysoe" (Earth) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flight of the Intellectuals (Hardcover)

According to the New Yorker, when George Packer asked Tariq Ramadan two questions at a recent ACLU-sponsored event in New York "the general picture was surprisingly, reassuringly bright: reconciling Islamic faith with liberal values is easy; the views of Muslims are basically the same as everyone else's; the oppression of Muslim women is a third-order issue." But George Packer's questions were drawn explicitly from or, it seems to me, were hugely influenced by Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals and, as a result, they were uncomfortable questions. George Packer wanted to know why Tariq Ramadan never disassociated himself from his grandfather, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (and who is quoted in Hamas' Charter), from the Mufti of Jerusalem, his grandfather's ally and a man allied with Nazis, or from Sheikh Qaradawi, the man who passed a fatwa allowing women to carry out suicide bombings. George Packer also wanted to know if Tariq Ramadan felt that human rights were universal or if they could be determined by religious authorities. When it came to his grandfather's alliance with Nazi sympathizers, Tariq Ramadan asked the audience to consider the "context". The second question he dodged. And still more questions (this time from the audience) kept coming. Questions about women's oppression; questions about Hirsi Ali. And Paul Berman's book was not yet out.

But it seems to me quite right that this book should have such influence. To begin with, in it, Paul Berman provides the reader with context in spades. Here is Hassan al-Banna (Tariq Ramadan's grandfather) lavishing extravagant praise on the mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Banna declares, "Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle. He is but one man, but Mohammed was also one man, and so was Christ..." (p. 106). High praise for a man who collaborated with Walther Rauff. Walter Rauff was the Nazi who put together the Einsatzgruppe Agypten, a group of seven SS officers (one of whom was liaison to the mufti al-Banna likened to Christ). The Einsatzgruppe Agypten was to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East once Rommel broke through. But the praise for Rauff's ally makes sense in light of what Hassan al-Banna wrote in "To What Do We Summon Mankind?" Here, in the course of arguing that "over the course of history, tiny movements led by charismatic figures have triumphed more than once" (p. 30), al-Banna cited various examples from the history of Islam. He also provided one non-Muslim example: "And who would have believed that that German workingman, Hitler, would ever attain such immense influence and as successful a realization of his aims as he has?" (p. 31) The context then is more than opposition to the formation of a Jewish state (as Tariq Ramadan implied in New York). But there is still more to the story.

There is how al-Banna thought Muslims ought to live, for example. Paul Berman quotes from al-Banna's "Toward the Light" on this issue and I will select a few of Berman's quotes: "the imposition of severe penalties for moral offenses," "the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes," "the expurgation of songs," "punishment for all who are proved to have infringed any Islamic doctrine or attacked it" (p. 44) and so on.

Tariq Ramadan's father propagated al-Banna's ideas and those of the Muslim Brotherhood thinkers in Europe and Asia, first as editor of al-Banna's magazine and later in his own magazine al-Muslimun. Ideas like Hassan al-Banna's notion about "the art of death" and "death is art" (p. 32). Al-Muslimun also introduced Urdu-language ideas of Mawdudi's sister movement to an Arabic-speaking audience" (p. 34). And, after a while, these ideas enabled "Himmler's Islam" to emerge victorious from its battle with "its arch-rival, the Islam of generosity and civilization" (p. 97). Certainly that is the position of Muslim liberals like Abdelwahab Meddeb (and Paul Berman makes quite clear that Muslim liberals have ever been Tariq Ramadan's fiercest opponents). So that is Tariq Ramadan's family; his context. But Tariq Ramadan is not his family. Still, since in his "The Roots of Muslim Renewal," Tariq Ramadan spends some two hundred pages writing about his grandfather in a "gusher of adulation" (p. 36) that context matters.

Consider: here is Tariq Ramadan condemning terrorist attacks against civilians in general but making an exception for terrorist attacks against civilians who happen to be in Israel (p. 195); here is Tariq Ramadan endorsing the Taliban (p. 194); here is Tariq Ramadan denouncing as Jews and as "knee-jerk defenders of Israel" six intellectuals whose crime lay in pointing out that violent anti-Semitism in immigrant neighborhoods in France is on the rise (pp. 157-8); here is Tariq Ramadan campaigning to cancel Voltaire's play "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet" and campaigning to add a touch of creationism to the teaching of evolution (p. 16); and here is Tariq Ramadan refusing in a televised debate to denounce the stoning of women (pp. 214-215). This is not an exhaustive list but it gives you an idea of the sort of consequences that arise from Tariq Ramadan's context. And then Paul Berman points out something else.

He points out that a great many Western intellectuals assure us that Tariq Ramadan is a moderate; even a liberal. These intellectuals decry Ramadan's detractors; especially if those detractors happen to be Muslim. These Western intellectuals, Berman explains, have adopted Islamists' categories of judgment. And by Islamist's lights, it is possible, I suppose to see a man like Tariq Ramadan who (unlike his brother) does not explicitly favor stoning women to death but who would prefer to debate the issue, as a kind of moderate. Far more moderate than Hirsi Ali who opposes such things, certainly.

Here, I think, Paul Berman misses a great opportunity. He does not point out that the biggest mistake many of us make is thinking that Muslims are any more pious than anyone else. It seems to me that, based on the evidence Paul Berman himself provides in his book, Muslims are no more likely to make their day-to-day decisions based on their faith, than most Christians. Consider: if Muslim girls were as devout as so many Western intellectuals seem to assume they are, would they sneak even a peek at a book titled Infidel? And yet Paul Berman suggests that they do peek.

This is not the only argument I have with this book. The arguments I have with the book are, in fact, part of its charm. It is a book that makes you think. And, if only for that reason, I urge you to read it.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful and Well-Documented, May 20, 2010

By 

Cary B. Barad (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flight of the Intellectuals (Hardcover)

You don't find many theoreticians, politicians or historians these days who are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom of left-wing European intellectuals--most of whom who appear consumed with their own rage and jaundiced viewpoints of the Middle East conflict, cultural antagonisms, and religious extremism. This fellow Berman convincingly skewers the proponents of one-sidedness and exposes their sneaky methods and hidden agendas. A surprisingly thoughtful, concise and well documented treatise.

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very careful and meticulous analysis., May 12, 2010

By 

Fouad Boussetta (Montreal, Qc, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flight of the Intellectuals (Hardcover)

A very careful and meticulous analysis, it is expanded from the author's June 4, 2007 "Who's afraid of Tariq Ramadan?" article in The New Republic.
The article, which is pretty long (I printed 37 pages), is available online for free if you want to check it out before you buy this important book.