France’s bitter row over Islamic scholar

The Swiss-born academic Tariq Ramadan is one of Europe’s most influential and original Islamic thinkers, said Davide Piccardo in L’huffington Post (Rome). He is lionised by French Leftists and has a huge following among the country’s Muslims. So it’s truly dismaying to find him caught up in the eddies of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, having been recently accused by several women of sexual abuse. Nothing has been proved, yet he has been forced to take a leave of absence from the University of Oxford, where he is a professor of Islamic studies. But let’s not rush to judgement. Ramadan, a grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, is a “great communicator”, who combines respect for tradition with a modern outlook, seeking a “European way of being Muslim”. His influence has made him a target for right-wing Islamophobes, who’d stop at nothing to discredit him. Personally, I’d “put my hand on fire” to proclaim his innocence.

Actually, the evidence looks pretty damning, said Sylvie Kauffmann in The New York Times. Last month, a woman accused him of raping her in a Paris hotel in 2012; days later, a second woman said he assaulted her in 2009. Since then, more women have made similar allegations. A picture is building of the “double life” that some have long suspected. Caroline Fourest, a journalist who published a critical book about Ramadan in 2004, says she had been approached by his victims, but was not able to persuade them to file complaints. The affair has split the Left down the middle, said Le Figaro (Paris). In 2014, Edwy Plenel, a former chief editor of Le Monde, who runs the investigative news website Mediapart, published a bestselling book in which he defended Ramadan from right-wing attacks and denouncing the “anti-islam climate”. But the leftist satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which has been fiercely critical of Islam – all the more so since the 2015 terror attack in which 12 people were killed – recently published a front page cartoon of Ramadan with a huge erection and the caption, “I am the sixth pillar of Islam”. A later issue caricatured Plenel as blind, deaf and dumb for refusing to denounce him. When Plenel then complained that the magazine was waging an “obsessive” war against Islam, it furiously responded that he was “assassinating Charlie a second time”.

The row has spread to the national assembly, where centrists and conservatives led by former PM Manuel Valls are attacking Ramadan, implicitly siding with Charlie Hebdo against Plenel, said Federico Iarlori in Linkiesta (Milan). The French Left is so obsessed with the issue of Islam that it has let its ideological opponents frame the larger political debate. That has created an ideological desert over which Emmanuel Macron has been able to drive his “armoured battalions”. Alas, the public bickering is so rancorous, it’s hard to see when the divisions will ever heal.