Prominent intellectual
Oxford is apparently making a dog’s breakfast of the Tariq Ramadan situation. Tendance Coatesy gathered some reporting:
Here is the Telegraph’s report on the latest developments.
Oxford professor accused of sexual misconduct with Swiss minors
An Oxford University professor and government adviser on tackling extremism is facing new allegations including sexual misconduct with minors.
Prof Tariq Ramadan was accused of rape last month by a French feminist author. He has denied the allegation and said he will sue for libel.
He is now facing new accusations from four Swiss women who say he made sexual advances to them when they were studying under him as teenagers in Geneva.
One of the women told Tribune de Geneve newspaper Prof Ramadan made unsuccessful sexual advances to her when she was 14 years old.
Another alleged he had sexual relations with her in the back of his car when she was 15 years old.
The other two women said they were 18 when they had sexual relations with him, but accused him of abusing his position of power as their teacher.
Prof Ramadan was accused of rape by the French author Henda Ayari last month.Since then two more women have accused him of rape. He has denied the accusations and filed a case for libel in the French courts.
In statements posted on Facebook, he claims he is being targeted by “a campaign of slander clearly orchestrated by my longtime adversaries” and says he has been advised by his lawyers not to comment further.
Currently Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford, he was chosen by Tony Blair to work on a task force to help tackle extremism in the UK following the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005.
Not, mark you, Gita Sahgal or Maryam Namazie or any other human rights-oriented activist but Tariq “moratorium on stoning” Ramadan. Why? Because of the inch-deep veneer of “sophistication” and academic cred? Because he’s a dude? I really don’t know.
We learnt this last week, (Cherwell 3rd of November).
Students at the Oxford Middle East Centre have reacted in anger to the University’s response to the mounting accusations of rape against Islamic professor Tariq Ramadan, accusing senior figures of acting “as if nothing had happened”.
Ramadan is currently being investigated by French authorities over two allegations of rape, sexual assault, violence and harassment. Ramadan has described the allegations as a “campaign of lies” and said he is suing the alleged victims for “slander”.
Since the first allegation of rape surfaced two weeks ago, the professor has reportedly taught a seminar in Oxford and been seen “laughing” with faculty members.
In response to requests from students, senior figures in the faculty held a meeting on Tuesday “to address implications for student welfare arising from the allegations”.
The faculty told students they intend Ramadan to continue to both tutor and supervise on his return to Oxford from Qatar – although students may ask for another faculty member to be in the room if they wish.
At the meeting, held at St Antony’s College, several students expressed anger at the “lack of communication” from the University, claiming they had heard of the allegations by “word of mouth” without any acknowledgement from the department.
Director of the Middle East Centre Eugene Rogan repeatedly apologised to students for taking ten days to respond to the allegations, blaming the delay on the fact that the controversy was happening in another country with a different legal system.
This is worth noting,
Rogan reminded students: “It’s not just about sexual violence. For some students it’s just another way for Europeans to gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual. We must protect Muslim students who believe and trust in him, and protect that trust.”
Oh dear god, there it is. He’s Muslim, therefore we have to let him rape girls and women, because otherwise we would be Europeans ganging up on him. As for “prominent Muslim intellectual” – Oxford itself is helping him be a prominent intellectual by employing him. Why him? Why not someone better? Less compromised? Less theocratic? More intellectually honest? Someone who wouldn’t refuse to say that stoning is bad?
Many staff members encouraged those present not to speak to the media about the furore. Professor Rogan told students: “We can’t tell you what you should say. But I encourage everyone to use their moral judgement about how they voice their concerns – not to victimise the women who’ve made the allegations or the men who’ve been accused of things they’ve not yet had the chance to defend themselves against.”
One postgrad said: “There should have been a more open and frank discussion with female students about how to make them feel safer,” she said. “Women won’t come forward here and say how they feel.”
A number of students expressed concern about Ramadan continuing to teach and be present in the faculty. One claimed that immediately following the first allegation, Ramadan was seen “walking and laughing in the hall as if nothing had happened.”
Well, he’s prominent Tariq Ramadan. He’s protected.
University of Oxford: Suspend Tariq Ramadan until allegations of sex attacks investigated https://t.co/3r3UI2ki89
— Gita Sahgal (@GitaSahgal) November 5, 2017
I signed yesterday.
I recently argued with someone over whether Thabo Mbeki was a bad president or not.
One of the issues I brought up was his treatment of SA’s rape crisis. If you don’t know – he basically dismissed research into how it contributed to the AIDS epidemic by saying the researchers were trying to paint black men as being potential rapists.
Eugene Rogan reminds me a lot of that thinking – and how my country has continued to suffer such high rape stats for it.
Mbeki’s concerns about racism have meant grandmothers and children getting raped because he was too precious and offended to deal with reality and do something about it.
Rogan it appears thinks about things in the same way.
NB: In the article at the link below, Tariq Ramadan attempts to explain and justify his community’s operating system and unifying ideology, which is that godawful and stagnifying religion known as Islam.
https://tariqramadan.com/an-international-call-for-moratorium-on-corporal-punishment-stoning-and-the-death-penalty-in-the-islamic-world/
Ramadan is a salesman for Islam, He makes I think a valiant attempt to urge his fellow adherents to reform it, but that is a futile task given that the single author of the Koran expressly forbade it.
“My father rode a camel. I drive a motor car. My son flies a jet plane. His son will ride a camel.”
– Sheik Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
In other words, after the oil runs out we go back to the camel age (cf the horse and buggy days.)
And why might that be?
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Muslim invaders swept through to the gates of Vienna. The Islamic clerics made it their business to conserve the high culture of the classical states that founded European Civilisation. But the Islamic world, which eventually stretched in a huge arc from Nigeria to Java, went into a long period of intellectual stagnation, with free inquiry repressed to a far greater degree than it was under Mediaeval Christianity. Freedom to think independent of clerical interference and supervision is an essential for progress in science and technology. It failed to appear in the Islamic world.
My guess is because of the political clout of the Islamic clerics: preachers of the world’s most godawful religion.
See especially https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/02/why-calling-for-an-islamic-reformation-is-lazy-and-historically-illiterate/ ($)
#metoo, only today.
A rather disappointing attitude from Eugene Rogan, he’s using the standard defence of accusations of Islamophobia. However, the odious Ramadan is entitled to the presumption of innocence
One of Rogan’s books, ‘The Arabs’ has one of the most concise histories of the devastating effect of Zionism on the Palestinians.
Omar @2
Yes. The essential difference between the two civilsations is Islam’s stagnation after a promising start during the first millennium. Even promoters of the idea of Islam’s “Golden Age” such as Prof. Jim Al Khalili concede that Muslims did little with the developments that reached them before the West. Europeans transformed their civilisation within a few generations.
Whether Europeans were just lucky or is there some intrinsic aspect of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian civilisation that allowed them to escape from the dead hand of theocracy is the eternal question.
RJW:
I choose as my texts for this sermon Genesis 2: 16-17: “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (KJV)
Some years ago now there was some sort of atheist anti-theological discussion on this site which was turning into a bit of an echo-chamber in my then view. So I (jokingly) intervened in it in the guise of a polytheist.
Reflecting on that later, I came to the conclusion that the evolution of religions from animism to monotheism involving progressive reduction of spiritual objects of veneration most likely was driven by a desire on the part of the clerics over the ages for increased political power. Thus the glorious blooming of philosophy, included in which is science and rationalism in all fields including the humanities, was the pioneering achievement of the polytheistic Ionian Greeks, including speculative work beginning with Thales of Miletus (c. 624 – c. 546 BC) and the work of the mighty Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–495 BC), widely credited these days for his work on the mathematical basis of music, as having been the father of experimental science.
Polytheism also probably involved minimal intellectual and educational influence on the general population on the part of priests, as veneration of the separate gods must have been largely an unceremonial and personal matter for each devotee, there presumably being insufficient economic base to support much of a hierarchy of professional clerics.
It took a people without a homeland of their own, the gypsies of their time and place, to produce the greatest monotheism of the lot, which in time took over as the main religion of the Roman Empire. That produced an inviting ecological niche for would-be clerics, who then proceeded with their project to stifle all independent competing thought. Tradition credits Moses as the author of Genesis, as well as Exodus, Book of Leviticus, Numbers and most of Book of Deuteronomy, but modern scholars increasingly see them as a product of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Moses was probably born in the late 14th century BC.
And think on Exodus 34:13; “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: (images: Heb. statues)
14 For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:”
Here Yahweh through his priests, or far more likely his priests in the guise of Yahweh’s spokesmen, acknowledges the existence of other, competing gods, and acknowledges their presence on the same existential plane as himself: the monotheistic project being still at that stage a work in progress.
And what was the forbidden fruit? It was the “fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.”
And who are the people who deal in questions like “what do we mean by ‘good’?” and “what do we mean by ‘evil’?”. They are such horrible types as the Ionian philosophers. So a warning to all: if you walk down their track, you will surely die.
In other words, the Original Sin pinned on Eve closely followed by Adam was philosophy, included in which is the domain we call science.
Tradition credits ‘Moses’ as the author of Genesis, as well as Exodus, Book of Leviticus, Numbers and most of Book of Deuteronomy, but modern scholars increasingly see them as a product of the 6th and 5th centuries BC: ie ‘Moses’ as individual or committee was roughly contemporary with the Ionians, and probably aware of their ideas. Jewish philosophy has ever been a handmaiden to Jewish religion, and never reached the heights attained by the Ionians.
Omar,
I’d agree with your comment that “polytheism probably involved minimal intellectual influence on the general population”, certainly in contrast to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Priests, in Greco-Roman societies seemed more like bureaucrats than preachers. The gods weren’t exemplars of morality, their behavior in the myths was often appalling. So the so-called ‘pagans’ were free to develop secular ethical systems without the interference of imaginary deities. As far as I understand, that process also occurred in China, Confucianism also doesn’t need a bearded old man in the Sky to enforce morality.