Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
European campaigns to ban burqas, the Swiss vote to bar new construction of minarets and attempted terrorist acts in the United States have renewed questions and concerns about the compatibility of Islam with Western society. Swiss-born scholar and philosopher of Islam Tariq Ramadan has written and spoken on the subject, generating widespread debate and reaction.
The U.S. State Department recently overturned his six-year ban from the country, allowing him to visit and speak in the U.S. How have his experiences influenced his views on the reform of radical Islam and the bridging of cultural differences? What can Western Muslims do to balance faith and modernity? And what lies ahead for the future of Islam in Europe, the U.S. and the rest of the world? Ramadan addressed these questions and related topics at a press luncheon hosted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Ramadan is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford’s St Antony’s College. He is also the president of a Brussels-based think tank, European Muslim Network, and the author of more than 20 books, including What I Believe, published in November 2009. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2009. Continue reading A Conversation With Tariq Ramadan
“We in America fought a culture war, and we lost”
Ronald Bailey | From the October 17, 2001 issue of Reason Magazine
Irving Kristol, “the godfather of neoconservatism,” offered a concise and somewhat myopic view of the intellectual contributions of neoconservatives to the broader conservative movement in his
Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday. Kristol once famously defined a
neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Kristol focused on neoconservative contributions to social policy, political thought, culture, and economic policy, while declining to address foreign policy because he said there was no settled neoconservative foreign policy viewpoint. (This is a strange omission, because surely the heart of neoconservatism was its fierce anti-communism and the willingness to confront Soviet expansionism with American power around the world.)
Continue reading The Voice of Neoconservatism
There are tectonic stresses building beneath the surface of our society that threaten a global earthquake unlike any we’ve seen in recent history. Global warming is accelerating; fossil fuels are being rapidly exhausted; critical eco-systems have been severely damaged; and the income gap between rich and poor is increasing rapidly. The root cause of [...]
Hervé Le Bras
L’une des originalités du rapport Attali est d’adopter des objectifs démographiques explicites en proposant d’abord d’encourager la mobilité internationale des Français, ensuite d’élargir et favoriser la venue des travailleurs étrangers ; et enfin d’agir pour que l’écart d’espérance de vie entre les plus favorisés et les plus défavorisés soit réduit [...]
Laurent Palou Lacoste
Nous devons la force acquise par l’évocation du spectre du « choc des civilisations » à une conjonction, celle intervenue entre un article de Samuel Huntington publié en 1993 sous le titre « The Clash of Civilizations » dans la revue Foreign Affairs1, et un événement traumatisant, les attentats du 11 [...]
