This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been charged with rape and ordered to remain in custody in France. — Reuters picPARIS, Feb 2 — Prominent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan will face a French investigating magistrate today after two days of questioning over claims by two women that he raped them in French hotel rooms in 2009 and 2012. The claims against the prominent scholar, which emerged in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in the United States, have divided many Muslims, with his legions of fans, as well as his lawyers, saying he is the victim of a smear campaign. Prof Ramadan, who is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood revivalist movement, has also been accused of sexual violence by four Swiss women – his former pupils – who claim he harassed them and forced them into sex when he worked as a teacher in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. Ayari, a self-described “secular Muslim” who used to practice an ultra-conservative strain of Islam that she has since renounced, detailed her rape allegations in a book published last year, without naming Ramadan. Ayari, who lodged a rape complaint against Ramadan on Oct. 20, charged that for him, “either you wear a veil or you get raped.”

“He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she told Le Parisien newspaper. Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, has furiously denied rape allegations from two women that emerged late last year, as the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfurled in the U.S.

Henda Ayari, a feminist activist, says Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012, while an unnamed disabled woman also accused the academic of raping her in a hotel room in Lyon in 2009. Vanity Fair magazine, which met the woman, said her lawsuit against Ramadan described “blows to the face and body, forced sodomy, rape with an object and various humiliations, including being dragged by the hair to the bathtub and urinated on.”

During three hours of testimony in Paris yesterday, the woman — using the pseudonym “Christelle” — recounted her allegations to the judge in Ramadan’s presence. In November, Oxford University announced that 55-year-old Ramadan was taking a leave of absence from his post as professor of contemporary Islamic studies, “by mutual agreement.”

Popular among conservative Muslims and a regular panelist on TV debates in France, Ramadan faces regular accusations from secular critics that he promotes a political form of Islam.
After two days of questioning, influential Islamic academician and Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan is charged with the alleged rape of two women and jailed in Paris.