Tariq Ramadan who is a famous Muslim scholar has been arrested by police in France who are now conducting investigations on allegations of sexual assault rape that have been leveled against him. Mr. Tariq who spends most of his time in France is a Swiss citizen and was on Wednesday evening questioned by detectives and other law enforcement members in Paris. Following the filing of two official complaints by two women, the French law enforcement has opened a preliminary inquiry in 2017. The women complained that Mr. Ramadan violently and intentionally assaulted them. Ramadan has also been accused of making murder threats to one of his female victims.
Ramadan who is now 55 years old has since 2009 served as a professor at Oxford University for contemporary Islamic studies. Mr. Ramadan ha, however, denied the allegations leveled against him strenuously and has since filed a counter complaint about one of his accusers, Henda Ayari who is a writer and whom he blames of slander. Henda Ayari was born in France and claims that she was sexually assaulted, intimidated, harassed and raped by Ramadan in a hotel in Paris back in 2012. The Writer is now a secular feminist who was a former Salafi Muslim. She wrote about the detailed assault by Ramadan in one of her books, “I Chose to Be Free, “which was published in 2016 November in France. However, Ayari gave a fictional name to her attacker.
Ayari would later file a formal police complaint and named the assailant as Ramadan after the #MeToo campaign and the Harvey Weinstein Scandal. On Monday, Ayari wrote on her Facebook page that she filed a formal complaint to law enforcement to demand justice for the assault and aggression to which Ramadan subjected her. She said that times, when women failed to report such cases to the police because of fear, were long gone. The 41-year-old Ayari once described the experience during an interview that was conducted by the French TV station BFMTV in October last year.
She said that despite her being intelligent and having confidence that she could protect herself, she failed herself during the evening that the ordeal happened to her. She said that Ramadan insulted her and told her that she deserved to be assaulted the way he did. She noted that Ramadan had told her that she deserved to be treated disrespectfully as she no longer wore a veil. Ayari said that she was ashamed of the fact that she had provoked Ramadan’s desire and that she was ashamed of it.
