Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, once the darling of European Islamism, finds himself alone and abandoned. Ramadan, who faced repeated rape claims over the years, is now facing three years in a Swiss prison without a friend in the world. Ramadan’s abandonment comes after the Criminal Appeal and Revision Chamber of the Court of Justice in the Swiss canton of Geneva overturned a lower court’s 2023 acquittal on a rape charge from 2008.
“Elements collected during the investigation have thus convinced the chamber of the guilt of the accused.”
“The Criminal Appeal and Review Chamber found that several testimonies, certificates, medical notes and private expert opinions were consistent with the facts reported by the complainant. The evidence gathered by the investigation thus convinced the chamber of the defendant’s guilt,” the court said in a press release. Ramadan had 30 days from the time of the August 28 ruling to appeal his case to the federal court.
The conviction represents a nadir for Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, and one of the most prominent Islamist thinkers in his own right. His formerly eminent status won him positions such as a professorship in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University. The New York Times called Ramadan among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. The Muslim 500, a directory of those Muslims deemed by the Jordanian The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, lists Ramadan as among the most influential in the world.
Not everyone was so enamored of Ramadan. Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of the bestselling book Who Killed Daniel Pearl, claimed 20 years ago that Ramadan was an “intellectual champion of all kinds of double-talk” with a “racist vision of the world.” Caroline Fourest excoriated Ramadan for his oblique defense of his grandfather’s ideas in her 2008 book, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan. “Far from expressing any reservations regarding the fanaticism that is an integral part of al-Banna’s ideology, he accuses those who would point to the unsavory aspects of his political and family heritage of conspiracy or post-colonial racism,” she wrote, adding that Ramadan would then encourage his readers to “take inspiration from al-Banna’s message—which he describes as a ‘step-by-step philosophy,’ a ‘profound philosophy,’ ‘philosophy without violence,’ but a ‘demanding philosophy.’”
This strategy was on display when he told his audience at the 13th Annual MAS-ICNA Conference in 2014 that they should wage a “cultural jihad” against America and that Americans should renounce their culture and become Muslims.
“This is a cultural jihad: Stop being too much Arabs and become Muslims; stop being too much Asian and become Muslim. And for the Americans, stop idealizing the American culture and become Muslim,” Ramadan said.
The Bush administration revoked Ramadan’s visa in 2004 because he financially contributed to a French Hamas-supporting charity, “Comité de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens” (CBSP), which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2003.
Things began to go south for Ramadan in 2008 when a woman publicly accused him of raping her in a hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland.
The victim filed the claim against Ramadan in 2018, a decade after the alleged incident. The woman, identified by the alias “Brigitte,” a Muslim convert, claimed that Ramadan engaged in “torture and barbarism” against her. Brigitte reported that Ramadan subjected her to “brutal sexual acts, beatings, and insults” and raped her three times. This allegedly included him engaging in sexual coercion to the “point of suffocation.” Her lawyer, François Zimeray, told Agence France Presse that memory of the incident has psychologically scarred his client for the past 15 years.
Ramadan claimed that “Brigitte” invited herself up to his hotel room and let him kiss her before she ended the encounter. Her attorney claimed that Ramadan had something akin to Stockholm Syndrome over his client.
It looked like Europe’s articulate Islamist beat the rap when, in May 2023, the lower court acquitted Ramadan, citing contradictory testimony, evidence, and love messages sent by the woman after the encounter. He also claimed that the charges against him are a conspiracy against him because he is a “prominent Muslim intellectual.”
The appeals court threw out the not-guilty verdict, declaring that “Elements collected during the investigation have thus convinced the chamber of the guilt of the accused,” the court said in a statement, adding that “witness testimony, certificates, medical notes, and private expert opinions are consistent with the facts presented by the plaintiff.”
During the early years of the legal wrangling, Ramadan enjoyed substantial support from his fellow Islamists in the West. The Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va.; the Turkish government-controlled Diyanet Center in Lanham, Md.; and the Aafia Foundation all held rallies to support Ramadan in 2018 after the rape accusations against him became public. They stood by him throughout his 2018 nine-month pretrial incarceration.
“We know that every Muslim leader in the West has a sign on his back and forehead saying [they are] a target. If not by Western intelligence, by those who are afraid of Islam and there are some who are Islamophobes,” former Dar al-Hijrah imam Sheikh Shaker Elsayed said at the time. “Do not let your leaders fall. When they do, our community falls right behind.”
Mauri Saalakhan, a Black American imam who posted effusively in Ramadan’s defense in 2018 and claimed he had been falsely accused, is silent today.A search of social media indicates that other Islamist institutions in Europe aren’t coming to his defense either. (Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia, which previously came to his defense, declined to comment on Ramadan’s conviction when queried by Focus on Western Islamism.)
Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AFID), said the ostracism of Ramadan by his former Islamist allies shows that even Islamists who promote an ideology of “misogyny and dehumanization of women” have their limits. They will defend terrorism because they know “the Left somehow dismisses that evil.” But Islamists in the West know that misogyny is a nonstarter for their Left-wing allies in the West, Jasser concludes.
Ramadan, who will likely appeal the conviction in the Swiss court, faces similar charges in other courts. The French Court of Appeals in Paris ordered Ramadan to stand trial for allegedly raping three women. French Muslim activist Henda Ayari claimed in 2017 that Ramadan tried to choke her in 2012 when they met in her hotel room in Paris. “He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” Ayari told a French newspaper. She alleged that Ramadan wanted her as his sex slave and threatened her children after she cut off contact with him. She filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office in Rouen in October 2017 in connection with the incident. A judge in Paris decided in June 2023 that the claim could proceed to trial. Three women there have accused Ramadan of rape. Claims by a fourth are under consideration.
The women who have accused him were in awe of his academic credentials, but say they found a dark side of him when he physically assaulted them and non-consensually forced himself on them sexually.
Another accuser said “When I cried to him to stop, he slapped me and attacked me. I was afraid he would kill me.”
The once formidable Islamist leader now finds himself alone and abandoned by the people who once stood by his side.