News and Commentary

Islamic Scholar Who Is Professor At Oxford Taken Into Custody For Alleged Rapes

   DailyWire.com

On Wednesday, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, 55, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford who is the grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was taken into custody by French police after two women had accused him of rape. One of the women accusing him of rape told French TV, “He literally pounced on me like a wild animal.”

Last November, Ramadan took a leave of absence, although he denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against author Henda Ayari, 40, one of the women accusing him of raping her in 2012. She filed a complaint last October, asserting that the sexual assault scandal surrounding Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had empowered her to make Ramadan’s name known. She recalled him raping her, saying, “He literally pounced on me like a wild animal.”

Ayari had written on Facebook that she had been the “victim of something very serious several years ago” but eschewed naming her assailant because of “threats” by him. Ayari had written of being raped in her book “I Chose to be Free,” but gave the assailant a pseudonym. In the book, she wrote that the rapist slapped her and treated her violently; she told Le Parisien ” I thought I was going to die.”

The second woman, who has remained anonymous, is disabled, and alleged Ramadan beat her while raping her multiple times in a hotel in Lyon in 2009.

Ramadan has advised British governments on Islam and society. He has referred to the allegations against him as a “campaign of lies launched by my adversaries.”

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.

On October 3, 2001, only three weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Ramadan 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.”

Ramadan 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.

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Islamic Scholar Who Is Professor At Oxford Taken Into Custody For Alleged Rapes