On Tuesday, the University of Oxford announced that Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, 55, has taken a leave of absence after multiple rape and sexual misconduct allegations were levied against him.
Ramadan, who is Swiss, has denied two allegations of rape made by French women; he has also denied allegations in Swiss media of sexual misconduct he allegedly committed against teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s.
The university stated: “By mutual agreement, and with immediate effect, Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies, has taken a leave of absence from the University of Oxford,” adding that duties will be reassigned and he will no longer appear on campus.
The university stated that the allegations against Ramadan had caused “heightened and understandable distress” and its primary goal was to ensure “the wellbeing of our students and staff.” The university was clear that it had not assumed Ramadan was guilty, writing, “An agreed leave of absence implies no presumption or acceptance of guilt and allows Professor Ramadan to address the extremely serious allegations made against him, all of which he categorically denies.”
Ramadan has referred to the allegations as a “campaign of lies launched by my adversaries,” and lauded Oxford’s statement, saying it “has defended the principle of the presumption of innocence without minimizing the seriousness of the allegations against me.”
According to Yahoo News:
Since the rape allegations, Ramadan had continued to teach at Oxford and was seen “walking and laughing in the hall as if nothing had happened,” one student told the local Cherwell newspaper. The university’s Middle East Centre held a meeting last week during which faculty members said they intended for Ramadan to continue in his role, the student-run paper wrote on Friday.
Both women accusing Ramadan of rape aver that they met him for religious advice; Muslim feminist activist Henda Ayari told Le Parisien she “thought I was going to die” when she was allegedly attacked in a hotel in Paris in 2012. The second woman, who has chosen to remain anonymous, is disabled, and alleged Ramadan beat her while raping her multiple times in a hotel in Lyon in 2009.
Ramadan’s attorneys have charged that the women may have colluded.
Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movements, the Egyptian Islamist Sheikh Hassan Al-Bana. On October 3, 2001, only three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote in Le Monde seemingly attempting to sway blame for the attacks away from Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: “We must ask the real question: Who stands to benefit from these operations? It is inconceivable that any ‘Arab or Islamic’ cause would benefit from it.” He insinuated that the U.S. government was the beneficiary, since the attacks gave it “a pretext to revoke public freedoms in the U.S. and to wage a Crusader war against the Islamic world.”
In 2004, speaking with an Italian magazine, Ramadan said of an eight-year-old Israeli boy murdered by Palestinians: “This deed in and of itself is worthy of condemnation, but it is understandable under present circumstances. … It is forbidden to attack civilians, but the U.S. government policy leaves the Palestinians no other choice.”
He wrote in 2013:
Islamism—or “political Islam”—is not dead. Those who have proclaimed its demise, or trumpeted the advent of a “post-Islamist” era, are wrong, as events in Africa, the Middle East and Asia clearly show. Islamism is not about to disappear, or even to fundamentally mutate.