Tariq Ramadan is a Muslim born in Geneva who is reputed to challenge mainstream Islamic beliefs. He is said to believe that Muslims in Europe have established a new European Islam, although many Arab intellectuals, including Egyptian intellectual and reformer, Tarek Heggy, disagree with this interpretation of his activity.  Tariq Ramadan currently teaches at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, UK.

Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al Banna, one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood. His father was prominent in the Muslim Brotherhood and was exiled by Nasser to Switzerland.  According to Daniel Pipes, Ramadan has, among other things, praised the brutal Islamist policies of the Sudanese politician Hassan Al-Turabi, banned from entering France in 1996, has links to Islamist activists and minimizes the atrocities of 9/11, Bali and Madrid to the point of near-endorsement.

According to Pipes, the Italian magazine, Panorama, interviewed Ramadan in 2004 and posted the result on September 13, 2004.  As reported by Pipes, Tariq Ramadan wrote to the magazine alleging that it had misquoted him, but unbeknown to him, the interview had been recorded.  In response, Silvia Grilli posted The art of ‘explaining’ the killing of Jews which contained a transcript of the interview including his response to the question of whether it is right to kill children and Israeli civilians because they are considered soldiers:

“I don’t believe that an eight year old child is a soldier. These acts are condemnable; therefore one has to condemn them in themselves. But I say to the international community that they are contextually explicable, and not justifiable. What does this mean? It means that the international community today has placed the Palestinians in a situation where they are delivered political oppression, which explains (not justifying it) that at a certain point people say: we don’t have arms, we don’t have anything, and so we cannot do anything other than this. It is contextually explicable but morally condemnable.”

The above shows Tariq Ramadan to be an arch-purveyor of al-takeyya.   According to Gudrun Eissner, Tariq Ramadan has varied experience of being economical with the actualité and further evidence of this can be found here.

Below is a selection of Tariq Ramadan’s statements in ‘Comment is Free’ “in his own words”.

“Let us hope the pope will remind Israeli prime minister Netanyahu (whose party does not recognise the Palestinian state) and his foreign minister Lieberman that there will be no peace without justice and that the Palestinians’ blood has the same value as the Israelis’. Silence on this issue would be to implicitly support Israel: in a time of repression, to avoid politics is politics. Will the pope have the political courage to be a true contemporary religious voice reminding us of the ethical responsibility of the powerful and the equal dignity and legitimate resistance of the oppressed? This was Jesus’ message and it should remain so, in Israel and everywhere around the world.” The Pope must have a message for the Middle East May 9, 2009

“The current massacres are but a confirmation of the well-known: the “international community” does not really care about the Palestinians, and it is as if the state of Israel, with the support of the US and some European countries, has imposed a state of intellectual terror. Among the presidents and kings, nobody dares to speak out; nobody is ready to say the truth. All are paralysed by fear.” An alliance of values January 2, 2009