Tariq Ramadan was detained by French police on Wednesday after two women filed rape charges against him.
Ramadan was taken into custody “as part of a preliminary inquiry in Paris into rape and assault allegations”, RTL radio reported, after being summoned for questioning to a Paris police station. He has denounced the accusations as a “campaign of lies launched by my adversaries”.
Now facing investigations in France for the alleged rape of two women, the grandson of the Hassan al-Banna who founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Islamist movement, has filed counter-charges for libel.
One of his accusers Henda Ayari, says Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room in 2012. “He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,” she said. She had detailed the assault in a book published last year, without naming the Oxford academic.
Ayari had filed charges against the 55-year-old Swiss national Ramadan on October 20 already. According to her, his attitude was “either you wear a veil or you get raped”.
She decided to speak out against him publicly after the “Me Too” campaign had gained prominence.
“It was the #BalanceTonPorc campaign that pushed me to reveal his name,” she told the Parisien newspaper last year. France’s version of the “Me Too” hashtag was translated into “Expose your pig”.
On Friday, a second unnamed rape victim accused Ramadan of raping her in a hotel room in the French city of Lyon in 2009. In an interview with Le Monde, the victim said she went straight to a doctor and has medical evidence of her assault. She claims she was later stalked by the professor too.
Ramadan also faces accusations from four Swiss female victims who say he made sexual advances when they were his students in Geneva. One of the women told the Swiss Tribune de Geneve newspaper that the academic made unsuccessful sexual advances to her when she was only 14 years old.
Ramadan has denied any wrongdoing. “These accusations are simply false, and betray all the ideals I have long strived for and believed in,” he wrote on Facebook. He added that he would take legal action “within a few days, in response to the campaign of lies launched by my adversaries”.
But in November, Oxford University announced that Ramadan, 55, would take a leave of absence from his post as professor of contemporary Islamic studies.