Tariq Ramadan, ‘one of the seven most important religious innovators’ of the 21st century, and rapist

Before Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was convicted of rape, and before the rape accusations were made against him both in Geneva and in Paris, Tariq Ramadan had been the Islamic world’s golden boy. He was once hailed as a “towering intellect” and a “leading Islamic scholar.” In 2000, TIME called Tariq Ramadan “one of the seven most important religious innovators” of the 21st century; in 2004, TIME named Ramadan as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” In Internet polls, Foreign Policy magazine listed Ramadan as one of the “100 top global thinkers” in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. He’s not on those lists anymore. He’s been fired from Oxford. And those speaking engagements that used to provide him with a great deal of extra income — and access to women who after his lectures would accept his invitation to visit his hotel room for a further discussion of “Islamic morality” — have all dried up.

Alongside the Swiss case, a Paris appeals court ruled in June this year that Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016, a decision his lawyers have challenged.

The scholar spent more than nine months in pre-trial detention in 2018, but was released in November that year….

Ramadan said he had not carried out “a single act, behaviour or sex act that was not discussed beforehand” with the women.

Ramadan wants everyone to believe that his rapes were consensual sex, but all of his French accusers have testified as to his extreme brutality — his beatings, cursing, and choking them almost to the point of their losing consciousness, all of which gives the lie to his claim of “consensual sex.” He wanted to dominate and humiliate them. It was not “consensual,” but “against their will.”

Now he’s been sentenced to three years for the rape of one woman, identified as “Brigitte,” a convert to Islam, when she was in her 40s. There are known to be four Swiss women, all of them Ramadan’s former students in the lycée where he taught, who are waiting to have their cases heard in court. And in Paris, three women— a fourth has not yet made up her mind whether to take part — who claim he repeatedly raped and brutalized them will soon have their cases heard. If convicted of those three rapes of French women, and then of the sexual assaults and rapes of his four former students in Geneva, he may be in prison for at least the next twenty years. That should give Ramadan plenty of time to memorize the Qur’an, and engage in prison Daw’a.

Ramadan is not suffering financially, despite his legal woes. Oxford University continued to pay his salary for several years after charges of rape first surfaced in 2017; by now that must have stopped. But Ramadan has been receiving $40,000 a month from Qatar ever since the charges of multiple rape first became public — that is, close to half a million dollars a year.

Ramadan and his lawyers have spoken about a “plot” — presumably by the “Zionists” — to “gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual,” but all three of Ramadan’s French accusers are Muslims. And “Brigitte,” whose case against Ramadan was just decided, is a convert to Islam.

Quite a comedown for a former Oxford Professor who was described by TIME as a “towering intellect.”

Ramadan is not just a convicted rapist. He also has ties to the terror group Hamas. “French Court Rules Rape Charges Remain for Oxford Scholar Tariq Ramadan,” by Simon Kent, Breitbart, July 22, 2018:

He was banned from entering the United States by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 after it was alleged he donated to the Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP/Palestinian Relief Organisation) from 1998 to 2002. The U.S. government considered the ASP a group that funded terrorism by giving some of their donations to the anti-Israel terrorist organisation Hamas which is proscribed in the U.S.

Ramadan’s U.S. travel ban was later lifted by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010 during the Obama administration.

It’s hard to see how even Ramadan, who has been so adept at shedding his snake-skins, can recover from this latest rape conviction, and from the further rape cases about to be filed in France. In the past, Ramadan always managed to overcome setbacks. Soft-spoken and sinister, he puts one in mind of the figure of Treachery in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale”: “the smiler with the knyf under the cloke.” After leaving his post at a lycée in Geneva, he somehow managed to obtain an appointment at the University of Leiden, but after he was accused of being a “radical Islamist” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he did not take it up. Ramadan landed on his feet, however, by then being made a guest professor of Identity and Citizenship at Erasmus University and for the city of Rotterdam. He was again dismissed, this time by both the City of Rotterdam and Erasmus University, from his positions as “integration adviser” and professor, because both the university and the city’s leaders felt that the program he hosted on Iran’s Press TV, Islam & Life, was “irreconcilable” with his duties in Rotterdam. But then again, he landed on his feet with a Qatar-funded professorship at Oxford. And that is where he remained until the rape scandal erupted.

Frère Tariq, a damning book by Caroline Fourest about Ramadan’s forked tongue, his defense of the Muslim Brotherhood, his refusal to condemn either stoning for adultery or the killing of apostates, has further devastated his already tattered reputation. He claims there is “Zionist plot” against him. But the women in Paris who have publicly charged Ramadan with extreme violence and rape are all Muslims. They were not there to “gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual.” They came forward, obviously with palpable fear, and only dared to do so years after the sexual violence and rapes had occurred, for they had been frightened by the threats Ramadan made, that “if they dared say anything” about what he had done, harm could come to them. He threatened to blackmail one victim with compromising photos he possessed. Henda Ayari reported that he made physical threats not just to her but, even more terrifying, threatened to harm her children.

Ramadan has long been deserted by his former friends, who have not merely left him, but put out scathing messages. There is, for example, Stephane Lathion, a Swiss specialist in Islam who spent years accompanying Ramadan on his trips across Europe, who told the Tribune de Geneve that he had heard various rumors and suspicions about his former close associate’s behavior over the years.

Lathion told the paper: “I’m not surprised to see testimonies coming from everywhere. Not only are the reported facts shocking, but they also reveal the discrepancy between his attitude and his discourse on a moralising Islam, which advocates sexual relations in the exclusive context of marriage.”

He continued: “Tariq Ramadan is a predator who has abused his power as a teacher, preacher and intellectual to seduce women and girls, who have suffered.”

This “towering intellect,” one of the seven “most important religious innovators, as well as ” “one of the top 100 global thinkers” of the 21^st century, now faces a world of woe. He’ll likely be in prison for decades, And though he didn’t see it, he certainly had it coming.