Tariq Ramadan is furious about the way he has been cast aside by the Rotterdam city government. The Islamic scholar was fired from his job as integration adviser on Tuesday because of a talk show he hosts on Iranian state TV.
The Rotterdam city government on Tuesday decided to sever all ties with Ramadan after learning that he hosts a weekly programme on PressTV, an English-language TV station funded by the Iranian government.
Ramadan was appointed as ‘integration adviser’ for the city of Rotterdam in 2006; he is also a visiting scholar at Rotterdam’s Erasmus university. The city has decided that Ramadan’s work for PressTV is “irreconcilable” with his positions in Rotterdam.
Ramadan, on the phone from Morocco, said he had already spoken to a lawyer to fight what he called a “short-sighted judgement”. Ramadan said he was not consulted by the Rotterdam city government prior to the decision. “Panic rules in the Netherlands, thanks to politicians such as Geert Wilders,” Ramadan said. “Instead of listening to both sides of the argument and base its decision on facts, I received an sms from the city board saying I would be informed after their meeting. I had to hear from a journalist, no less, that the municipality planned to get rid of me. Is there such a thing as decency and consultation in this country?”
Ramadan disagrees with the city and university that his work as the host of the weekly talkshow Islam & Life interferes with his advisory function in Rotterdam. The scholar said his TV appearance does not mean he supports president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“When I agreed to host a television program on Islam and contemporary life, I chose the path of critical debate,” Ramadan wrotein an open letter in NRC Handelsblad on Tuesday.
Rik Grashoff, the Rotterdam city executive responsible for culture and participation (referring to the participation of ethnic minorities in society) said Ramadan was “an outstanding scholar who has greatly benefited Rotterdam as an integration adviser”, but who made “one great error of judgement”.
Dik Douwes, professor of Middle Eastern history at the Erasmus university also praised Ramadan, “but we can not explain this link with the regime, especially to our students who are from Iran.”
Grashoff, of the Green party GroenLinks, denied that the decision was a political one, aimed to save the ruling coalition in Rotterdam. The right-wing liberal party VVD already left the coalition over Ramadan in April. At the time he was accused of inflammatory statements against women and homosexuals, but a city investigation concluded that the allegations were unfounded.
Rotterdam’s largest opposition party, the populist Leefbaar Rotterdam, has been against Ramadan as a consultant from the start and had been trying to force his resignation for three years.
The Swiss-born philosopher and theologist of Egyptian descent is one of Europe’s best-known Islamic scholars. Aside from his position at the Erasmus University, he is also a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford. He was banned from the US in 2004, just before he was due to accept tenure at Notre Dame University in Indiana, on the grounds that he had given money to a charity linked to Hamas.
