Islamic Professor Taken into Custody for Rape Charges
The prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody by French police following accusations of rape.
A judicial source confirmed to Reuters that Ramadan was taken into custody on Wednesday. A preliminary investigation was opened after two women filed police complaints against him late last year, accusing him of rape.
Ramadan, a senior research fellow of St Antony’s College, took a leave of absence from the university last November after the two women filed complaints. He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against the author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.
In October, Ayari, 40, who heads the women’s organisation Les Libératrices, filed a complaint with prosecutors in Rouen, France, alleging rape, sexual violence, harassment and intimidation by Ramadan. She said she was assaulted by him in a Paris hotel room in 2012.
Ayari said she had described the rape in a chapter of her book, I Chose to be Free, published in France in November 2016, giving her attacker a made-up name. In the book, Ayari describes a sex attack by an intellectual in a Paris hotel room after a conference, saying she fought back but was insulted, slapped and treated violently. (Read more from “Islamic Professor Taken into Custody for Rape Charges” HERE)
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