Tariq Ramadan, the once internationally prominent Islamic intellectual, theologian and academic, was on Thursday placed under formal investigation in France for the fifth time over rape allegations.
Ramadan, 58, was first placed under investigation for rape in February 2018 after separate complaints filed by two women, and again in February this year in two cases brought against him in separate complaints from two other women.
Under French law, the placing of a person placed under investigation requires that a magistrate is satisfied there is serious and concordant evidence of them committing a crime.
He is also the subject of another ongoing investigation in Switzerland over allegations by a woman that Ramadan raped her in a Geneva hotel.
Ramadan, a Swiss national and the grandson of Hassan al Banna, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, has vigorously and consistently denied the rape accusations, which he has dismissed as being “a campaign of calumny” launched by his “longstanding enemies”.
Until the allegations of rape and violence first emerged in public in 2017, Ramadan was perceived by many as an influential leader of Islamic intellectual thought. Feted by some media (in 2004, Time magazine declared him one of the “100 most influential people in the world” ), he was a regular conference speaker, with the prestigious post of professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, and was a visiting professor at universities in Qatar and Morocco, while also engaged as a senior research fellow with Doshisha University in Japan.
A polyglot and the author of more than 30 books published in French and 15 in English, his rise to fame and academic recognition during the 1990s was as the figurehead of a new generation of activists and gave him a large audience across the Muslim world. But he was also a highly controversial figure who drew fire from critics, notably in the West, for holding an ambiguous position with a covert agenda of radical Islam.
He was placed under investigation on Thursday for the multiple rapes of Mounia Rabbouj, 47, who in March 2018 filed a complaint against Ramadan for nine rapes she alleged took place between 2013 and 2014 at various locations in France, and also in London and in Brussels. Ramadan has said that he and Rabbouj had “consenting” relations.
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In her statement, Rabbouj described Ramadan’s behaviour in similar terms to the accounts previously given by the first two plaintiffs. These included a period of exchanges on social media at a moment, said the women, when they were experiencing a trying time in their lives, which was followed by physical meetings when, the three allege, he sexually and violently assaulted them.
“I delivered myself to him, telling him of my past hurt,” said Rabbouj, who previously worked as a paid “escort” for men, in an interview with Europe 1 radio station in March 2018.
In her complaint, Rabbouj said her first meeting with Ramadan was in early 2013 at a hotel room in Brussels, when she said the Islamic scholar forced her into violent sexual acts, which she claims occurred again at her home in Lille, northern France, and other cities including London. During the scenes, she said, Ramadan beat and insulted her and made her adopt humiliating physical positions. She said over the months he made threats to keep her under his thumb. “It was necessary [for Ramadan] that I obey him, that I be available 24 hours per day, that I do what he wanted me to do, take photos in submissive positions, on my knees, to ask him for forgiveness, and to call him ‘master’,” her statement read.
In it, she said she finally broke away from the relationship after a particularly violent meeting with Ramadan in Lille in June 2014. “I thought I’d die,” she added of this last encounter with the scholar. “I had difficulty in pronouncing that word – rape,” Rabbouj continued. “Today, I’m able to say it and I don’t want other people to suffer that.”
Under questioning on June 5th 2018 following Rabbouj’s complaint, Ramadan admitted having adulterous relations – he has a French wife and four children – with Rabbouj as well as other accusers. He passed to the investigation more than 300 video clips and more than 1,000 photos as evidence that his relationship with Rabbouj was one of mutual consent. At the time, while the public prosecution services had recommended that he be placed under investigation in the case, the magistrates in charge of the probe were apparently unconvinced.
After he was finally placed under investigation on Thursday over the alleged rape of Rabbouj, Ramadan’s lawyers, Nabila Asmane, Ouadie El Hamamouchi and Philippe Ohayon, told French news agency AFP that “there is no new element” in the case, adding that the move was “purely for form” in order to soon hold a verbal confrontation between him and Rabbouj before the magistrates.
“The code of criminal law procedure does not recognise the placing under investigation [of a person] purely for form, only for serious and concordant evidence, which the judges have today fully recognised,” responded Rabbouj’s lawyer Éric Morain, speaking to AFP, adding that the move was “obviously satisfying” and “a strong turning point”.
“The investigations have demonstrated how much the account of my client was as reliable as it was consistent,” said Morain.
Henda Ayari, a former Salafist, was the first woman to lodge a complaint against Ramadan for rape, which she did in October 2017. She said the events happened in 2012 when she was taking part in a congress held by the Union of Islamic Organisations of France. “I had lost the custody of my three children,” she said in an interview with French daily Le Parisien that same month. “I was alone, without money, without a place to live, without work. A social services worker advised me to take off my veil to find a job. I followed her advice, but I felt guilty [...] Tariq Ramadan brought me the answers that I was looking for.”
The second complaint for rape was also filed in October 2017 by a woman identified in French media only by the name of Christelle. Aged in her forties, Christelle had converted to Islam and was handicapped after a car accident. She said in her complaint that she was raped by Ramadan several times and that he had slapped her about the face, on her arms and breasts, and also punched her in the stomach, before forcing her to perform fellatio and sodomising her. She said that after that he again beat her and raped her with an object. In her statement to police, revealed by French dailies Le Monde and Le Parisien, she said: “I didn’t understand anything, I had tears in my eyes […] I cried out in pain, shouting ‘stop!’.”
Ramadan was placed under investigation over both complaints in February 2018. He was subsequently placed under investigation in February this year over two other separate complaints for rape, one concerning events in 2015, and the other in 2016. Photos of the women were found in a computer belonging to Ramadan. Both women said their initial relationship with Ramadan was one of his intellectual domination before he subsequently subjected them to assault in hotel rooms.
“I asked him to be gentler but he would say to me ‘It’s your fault, you deserve it',” said one of the two women in her statemznt describing her relationship with Ramadan in 2015.
Ramadan was placed in preventive detention between February and November 2018, after which he was bailed under strict conditions, including that he remain in France, surrender his Swiss passport, give surety of 300,000 euros and make no contact with his accusers. The bail conditions were recently made a little less strict, when the requirement that he repors to a police station once per week was reduced to twice per month, while he was also authorised to travel to Geneva when summoned in the now two-year investigation into his alleged rape of a woman in the Swiss city.
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- The French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse