Berman identifies duplicity as part of the problem with Ramadan, that is, his tendency both to say different things to different audiences and to speak with such equivocality as to be understood in different ways by those audiences. There is “a dark smudge of ambiguity” that “runs across everything he writes on the topic of terror and violence.” In consequence, Ramadan cannot be trusted to know his own mind, and therefore cannot be trusted when he claims to speak it. Further, his language of accommodation, his project of defining a minority Islam at peace within liberal democracy, emerges as somewhat phony, the more hard-line stance that he advocates from time to time more accurately reflecting his true views. This duplicity is now well documented. The French journalist Caroline Fourest has written a whole book on the subject, with a title that discloses its essential argument, “Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.” Berman contributes to this exposure of Ramadan and offers his own perspective on some instances that Fourest herself writes about.

Another part of the problem with Ramadan lies in his political and family pedigree, which he has not repudiated, but which he misrepresents. It is in his analysis of this pedigree that Berman’s book really takes off. Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a “terrible fact” that Ramadan’s “personal milieu — his grandfather and his father, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition — is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.” Like his grandfather, Berman writes, Ramadan desires a return to a distant age, one characterized by religious purity, in which all dissent will necessarily be absent. It is an imagined past, of course, and an impossible political program. And it supposes the ideal intellectual posture to be “supine.” Furthermore, “in a modern political world shaped by the rise of the Islamists,” Berman writes, “even some of the most attractive of thinkers tend, if they have come under an Islamist influence, to have a soft spot for suicide terrorism. And a soft spot for anti-Semitism.”

On the question of anti-Semitism, Berman writes about Ramadan’s “brief and angry essay” of 2003 in which he attacked a group of intellectuals he designated as Jewish, criticizing them for forsaking their vocation as intellectuals in favor of support for Israel, and of Zionism. Berman demonstrates that the criticism is bogus, three times over. First, Ramadan went looking for Jews and made mistakes — not all the named intellectuals were in fact Jewish. Second, he muddled support for Israel with the recognition of a growing contemporary anti-Semitism, a “new Judeo­phobia.” And third, since he is not himself a Benda-style intellectual, but rather the spokesman for a specific community, it is not open to him to adopt Benda’s universalist perspective. Actually, it is far worse than that. Ramadan’s own “commitment to ethical thinking,” Berman concludes, “turns out to be worthless.” “What is surprising,” remarked one of the intellectuals Ramadan attacked, “is not that Mr. Ramadan is anti-Semitic, but that he dares to proclaim it openly.” (Ramadan would no doubt say in response that he has spoken out against anti-­Semitism before both Western and Muslim audiences.)

Berman, by contrast, 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.