Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan (Arabic: طارق رمضان, [tˤaːriq ramadˤaːn]; born 26 August 1962) is a Swiss Muslim academic, philosopher and writer.

[9] The university's statement noted that an "agreed leave of absence implies no acceptance or presumption of guilt",[10] and in 2021 he took early retirement from Oxford on grounds of ill health.

[36] In 2012 the Court of Rotterdam District ruled in a civil law case that the Erasmus University acted "carelessly" by dismissing Ramadan at short notice.

[42] In February 2004, Tariq Ramadan accepted the tenured position of Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, at the University of Notre Dame.

[43] In August 2004, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cited the "ideological exclusion provision" of the U.S. Patriot Act as the grounds for Ramadan's visa revocation.

The consular officer concluded that Dr. Ramadan was inadmissible based solely on his actions, which constituted providing material support to a terrorist organization.

[49] The United States Treasury designated both the CBSP and ASP terrorist fundraising organizations for their alleged links to Hamas on 22 August 2003.

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project and lead attorney in the case, stated: "The government's shifting positions only underscore why meaningful judicial review – the kind of oversight that the district court failed to provide – is so important.

In Professor Ramadan's case and many others, the government is using immigration laws to stigmatize and exclude its critics and to censor and control the ideas that Americans can hear.

They stated that government was required by law to "confront Ramadan with the allegation against him and afford him the subsequent opportunity to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that he did not know, and reasonably should not have known, that the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization."

Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, issued a statement saying, "Given today's decision, we hope that the Obama administration will immediately end Professor Ramadan's exclusion.

"[56] On 8 April 2010, Ramadan spoke as part of a panel discussion at the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City, his first public appearance since the State Department lifted the ban.

Generally speaking, he prioritizes Qur'anic interpretation over simply reading the text, in order to understand its meaning and to practice the tenets of Islamic philosophy.

[62] For him the "Islamic message" to which Muslims are expected to bear witness is not primarily the particularist, socially conservative code of traditionalist jurists, but a commitment to universalism and the welfare of non-Muslims; it is also an injunction not merely to make demands on un-Islamic societies but to express solidarity with them.

In the article he criticizes a number of French intellectuals and figures such as Alexandre Adler, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner, for allegedly abandoning universal human rights, and giving special status to the defence of Israel.

He said that he opposed corporal punishments, stoning and the death penalty and that he is in favor of a moratorium on these practices to open the debate among Islamic scholars in Muslim-majority countries that enforce them.

[72] In October 2007, Warraq participated in an Intelligence Squared debate "We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of Western Values," where he argued for the opposition viewpoint, together with William Dalrymple, and Charles Glass.

"[77] Similarly, an article at the self-described liberal[78] The American Prospect praised Ramadan and his work in particular as an "entire corpus consists of a steady and unyielding assault on Muslim insularity, self-righteousness, and self-pity.

Bertrand Delanoë, mayor of Paris, declared Ramadan unfit to participate at the European Social Forum, as not even "a slight suspicion of anti-Semitism" would be tolerable.

[87] Talking to the Paris weekly Marianne, Fadela Amara, president of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive, a French feminist movement), Aurélie Filippetti, municipal counsellor for The Greens in Paris, Patrick Klugman, leading member of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France, and Dominique Sopo, head of SOS Racisme, accuse Ramadan of having misused the alter-globalization movement's ingenuousness to advance his "radicalism and anti-Semitism.

"[87] Other criticisms have included allegations that an essay attacking French intellectuals was antisemitic[88] and that Ramadan has shown excessive generosity in his rationalization of the motives behind acts of terrorism, such as in the case of Mohammed Merah.

[94][95] In October 2017, secular activist Henda Ayari filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office of Rouen, stating that Ramadan had sexually assaulted her in a Paris hotel.

Ayari had previously described the alleged incident in her 2016 book J’ai choisi d’être libre (in English I Chose to be Free), but had not revealed the real name of her attacker.

Bouzrou told the French paper Le Parisien that he denied the allegations and would file a complaint for defamation to Rouen prosecutors.

The disabled 45-year-old French convert to Islam, known in media reports as Christelle,[97] says Ramadan in 2009 lured her into his hotel room where he assaulted and raped her.

[110][111][112] In April 2018, the Belgian judiciary reported that Ramadan had paid €27,000 three years earlier to a Belgian-Moroccan woman in exchange for the deletion of online posts revealing their affair.

[113] On 13 April 2018, the Swiss newspaper La Tribune de Genève reported that a woman had come forward to the authorities in Geneva and accused Ramadan of a sexual assault involving aggravating cruelty in September 2008.

[115] Later in April 2018, Ramadan admitted that he had been in a sexual relationship with the third rape complainant, who had presented to investigators a dress reportedly stained with his semen, but he insisted that it was always consensual.

Among others the editor Laurent Joffrin, in his Libération, labelled Ramadan's comparison as "ridiculous" and pointed out: "Dreyfus was innocently convicted by false evidence and sent to the prison house.

[16] In May 2023, Ramadan was acquitted by a Swiss court on all charges in relation to a singular allegation of rape and sexual coercion against a woman in a Geneva hotel room.

Tariq Ramadan (at table, right) speaking in Oxford .
Tariq Ramadan signing books. Muslim Arts Museum, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 31 January 2015
Tariq Ramadan at Al Jamia al Islamiya, Santhapuram, Kerala, India on 20 December 2017