Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim intellectual who has been one of the foremost exponents, at least to non-Muslims in Europe and North America, of Islamic reform, has been convicted of rape.
It is impossible to overstate how shocking this is for those who have praised Ramadan to the skies for so very long. For many years, Tariq Ramadan was the darling of the Western intelligentsia. In 2002, Salon hailed him as “the Muslim Martin Luther.” In 2004, Time Magazine listed him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world today. In 2012, Foreign Policy included him on its list of the top 100 global thinkers “for telling us that Islam and democracy can go together — just when it matters.”
Now those accolades, and the many others that Ramadan received, stand as mute witness to the left’s tendency to shower with honors those who tell it what it wants to hear. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported Tuesday that Ramadan has been “convicted on appeal of rape and sexual coercion by a Geneva court.” This has been a long time coming, as Ramadan has faced numerous accusations in recent years of “masking violence and radicalism behind a mild facade.”
For years, Ramadan dismissed such allegations as “racism” and “Islamophobia.” In a Dec. 2019 video, he claimed that the accusations against him were all an attempt to discredit him and thereby “neutralize the Muslims.” He added: “We have to be clear that there is discrimination, stigmatization, racism that is at stake in the whole issue. And I was a symbol. To destroy me meant, let the people understand: If you want to be vocal you have to face the reality. It happened to Tariq Ramadan now, it could happen to anyone in the future.”
Even worse, RFI reported in 2020, after two more women accused him of rape, that “supporters of Ramadan, who is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford’s St. Anthony’s College, have called the accusations against him part of a ‘international Zionist plot’ to blacken his name.” Of course!
It couldn’t have been that a cosseted Muslim academic, hailed and feted all over Europe and the United States despite the abject vacuity and sinister disingenuousness of his thought, began to indulge his worst impulses, now, could it? He couldn’t have been tempted to do so when it became clear that, in light of his value to Western authorities as a “moderate Muslim” who seemed to prop up their fantasies about the jihad threat, he would be allowed to get away with virtually anything – could he?
“Virtually anything” is actually an understatement. One of his accusers said he subjected her to “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.” His sadism appears to have been, if one allegation is true, closely intertwined with his celebrated Islamic piety: another one of his accusers said he told her he was raping her because she didn’t wear a hijab. In a similar vein, as more and more women began to accuse him of rape, one of those accusers has already been beaten and threatened.
His public persona was shot through with duplicity. French journalist Caroline Fourest’s illuminating book "Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan" states that this much-lionized putative “Muslim Martin Luther” was actually anything but a reformer: in reality, Ramadan was “remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy mapped out by his grandfather, a strategy of advance stage by stage” toward the imposition of Islamic law in the West. Ramadan is the grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Fourest was the first to reveal, back in 2017, that Ramadan had at least four other victims besides the first woman who came forward, Henda Ayari. “A request for religious advice turned into a compulsive sexual relationship, sometimes consented to, often violent and very humiliating, before ending in threats.”
Fourest had evidence. “I presented it to a judge. But Tariq Ramadan scared him too much…. I am well-placed to know the violence of the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood when one stands up to ‘brother Tariq.’”
“It was a plot,” Ramadan insisted. “It was a political set up. And this could happen to anyone.” The worst part of this duplicitous whining is that even now that Ramadan has been convicted, there are hordes of deluded leftists who will fall for it.
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