France’s ‘Muslim Rose McGowan’ and the Jailing of Tariq Ramadan

Hailed by some as a voice of moderation and compromise, suspected by others of playing an extremist’s double game, the Oxford professor is locked up on charges of sexual assault.

When a Paris appellate court ruled last week that Europe’s most charismatic Muslim leader may have to stay in prison for at least a year awaiting trial on rape charges, it was a strange victory for France’s most unlikely feminist.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way for Henda Ayari, 41, whose Rose McGowan-like accusations of rape and cries for justice on social media set in motion the arrest on Feb. 3 of the man she once put on a pedestal: the Swiss-born Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan.

Now she’s under police protection because of Ramadan’s furious supporters.

Ramadan is the most high-profile figure to be held on charges stemming from France’s #MeToo movement, which sometimes uses the French hashtag #balancetonporc or, “call out your pig.”

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