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Fitzgerald: Tariq Ramadan and How He Got His Chair At Leiden

Jan 19, 2008 5:32 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

A Geneva teacher fired for controversial comments he made in an article for a French newspaper will receive SFr255,000 in damages from the canton of Geneva. The canton announced yesterday it is paying the amount to Hani Ramadan, a French teacher from a junior high school (cycle d”orientation) in Meyrin. The sum is the equivalent of two years” salary for the teacher who was sacked in November 2004 after defending the stoning of men and women guilty of adultery. — from this news article

Meanwhile, his more famous, and far more dangerous brother, Tariq, appears in the “Islam” issue of The New York Times Book Review, where he identifies himself as at present a “professor at Oxford.” He is no such thing. He has been a temporary lecturer at St. Antony’s College, in the Middle Eastern wing (the other wing is Russian and East European Studies), which ever since its inception was the fiefdom of the late Albert Hourani, described by J. B. Kelly as “a plump abbot dispensing his favors,” who allowed the place to be a diploma mill for all kinds of doubtful people. The D. Phil. does not require courses, but only a thesis, and every Rashid, Hamid, and Yusuf could get a D. Phil. at St. Antony’s, as long as Hourani was ruling the roost. Now he’s gone, and possibly things are changing there. But not completely, for Tariq Ramadan was given his temporary post.

Now the Arabs have got together, and the most “respectable” of them — the government of Oman — has simply given a large sum of money, not only for a chair, but with a specific non-negotiable candidate, the Arab Muslim candidate, to fill it, at the otherwise respectable University of Leiden. That’s right, the same University of Leiden that has a distinguished history in Islamic studies, where Joseph Schacht, having left Germany in disgust in 1933 (Schacht was not Jewish), ended up for a while, and where C. Snouck Hurgronje has a center named after him, is giving Tariq Ramadan a grand title — “professor,” I presume, or possibly “director” of some “institute” created just for him by fellow Arab Muslims. And that will be convenient. That will allow him to lecture, and to write articles, billed as “Tariq Ramadan, professor at the University of Leiden.”
But don’t believe a word of it. His chair is entirely bought and paid for. It’s to make his propaganda, his presentation, more impressive, more effective, more convincing.

Tariq Ramadan is a worthy grandson of that grandsire who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, Hassan al-Banna, the demagogue who used to whip up Cairene crowds so that, in fits of post-speech enthusiasm, they would then go out and attack Copts and Jews. He refuses to distance himself from his great relative: “he was my grandfather,” he says, his voice full of filial piety. Would that answer satisfy you if instead of Tariq Ramadan, the person being interviewed was, say, the grandson of Martin Bormann?

Why he should be taken seriously, or treated with respect, at this point, this sly creature who wears on his sleeve his slyness, is beyond me.

Now, if I hadn’t set all this out, you might have been fooled. You might have thought “ummmh, so Tariq Ramadan is a full professor at the University of Leiden. And the University of Leiden has been such a center of Islamic studies. Well, well, well.”

Now you won’t. But others, who will not have read about Tariq Ramadan and How He Got His Chair At Leiden, may still be. No one is forcing American Infidels to play the gull, the fool, the sap made fun of throughout history, now buying a bottle of political patent-medicine, now sending money to a Nigerian who apparently needs it in order to obtain the proceeds from his late father’s bank account, which proceeds will of course be shared with the kind American who sends a nominal sum — oh, $25,000 will do nicely for now. But the idiocy of those who refuse to study Tariq Ramadan, who refuse to understand his roots, his friends, his supporters, his aims, his insidiousness — well, unlike the man who sends his life savings to a post office box in Nigeria, the folly in this case affects the rest of us, damages us, makes us all less secure.

And those doing this damage include people who give valuable space, at book reviews, for articles on Islam, to people just exactly like…Tariq Ramadan.

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