A brief embarrassed mention
The BBC on Tariq Ramadan three days ago:
French prosecutors are investigating allegations by two women who say they were raped by Tariq Ramadan, a renowned Islamic scholar and Oxford professor.
One of them, Henda Ayari, told a French TV interviewer that Mr Ramadan had assaulted her in a Paris hotel in 2012.
“He literally pounced on me like a wild animal,” she said.
In a Facebook post Prof Ramadan denied the accusations, calling them “a campaign of lies”, and said his lawyer was suing the women for “slander”.
Just like Trump.
He is a controversial and influential figure among Muslim scholars. He challenges fundamentalist Islam, but some critics accuse him of promoting political Islam.
A Swiss national, he is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
Since 2009 he has been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has also sat on a UK Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion.
That’s fairly typical BBC waffle. Ramadan “challenges fundamentalist Islam” only so far, and it’s not just a few eccentrics who can see that he promotes Islamism aka political Islam aka theocracy. And he’s been professor of contemporary Islamic studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford in a chair funded by Qatar.
Tendance Coatesey has a great deal of background and commentary.
TR appears to be a repulsive creature and if he’s guilty of what’s alleged I hope he will not be at Oxford much longer. However, I feel obliged to point out that I myself am the occupant of a professorial chair at Oxford funded by (and named after) Rupert Murdoch, and that doesn’t make me an apologist for News Corp. Qatar won’t have had a say in the professor’s appointment, just as Rupert Murdoch has never been able to choose ‘his’ professor. Unfortunately, academics, especially in smallish fields where jobs are not exactly plentiful, cannot always choose a position which is not endowed by someone or something politically loathsome (since donors have to be very rich, they are frequently loathsome). I have found out the hard way that many people take it for granted that donors choose the people whose salaries they pay, or stipulate that those people must toe a certain line. In most cases that assumption is false. Reputable universities will refuse to take donors’ money if they demand or expect to have any influence on academic matters (including and especially hiring), and Oxford is, in this respect, reputable. I know people in Islamic studies at Oxford who are genuinely progressive, and there’s a very progressive prof. of contemporary Arabic whose chair was endowed by a Saudi prince. The donor thing in academe is in general bad, IMO, but you can’t judge the individual holders of endowed chairs by their benefactors. (I’m not keen on judging them by their grandparents either: can’t Tariq Ramadan just be condemned on his own (de)merits?)
Debbie,
Yes, I’ve been meaning to get around to making this point. In my experience of academia it’s the university that chooses who occupies the chair and politics have nothing to do with it. Well, other than internal university politics, of course, which have everything to do with it.
For instance, Richard Dawkins occupied the Charles Simoyni chair of the Public Understanding of Science. I’ve met Simoyni and found that he was a bit of a knob. But that doesn’t mean that….
OK, bad example.