Large amounts of ink (well, electrons) have been spilt over the web in the past few months to discuss the #MeToo movement. It seems this blog will eventually join the crowd, although a bit belatedly, and with a slightly different viewing angle. After keeping silent on the matter, I am stimulated to discuss it after a France TV special and an article exposed several cases of alleged sexual assault and related inappropriate behaviour by world-class Islam Professor-cum- Oxford Theologian-pop-guy-cum-skeptic Tariq Ramadan. And since tariq Ramadan is in prison, I am forced to discuss this.
I met Tariq Ramadan during a conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2014, and was impressed by his wit and oral skills. After that brief encounter, I continued to follow his increasingly popular endeavours, his books, his polemic debates, and generally enjoyed his thorough bashing of secular fanatics and other charlatans. I thought to myself, “we need more public intellectuals like him around – in TV shows we always send professors who cannot cope with the rebuttals and bullshit of the other guy, be that a charlatan or a fanatic or a new Uri Geller”. Tariq Ramadan does a great job and he has been a great communicator. Go Islam!
In the meantime, the #MeToo movement became a global sensation. Now, before I tell you what I think of the Tariq rape allegations, I need to make some distinctions. A man who flirts with a woman in a workplace is not the same as a man who gropes a woman in a subway train station. And a man who gropes a woman in a subway is not precisely the same as a man who is going to rape a woman at knife-point. There are gradations even in the most pathological behaviour. In this day where 25% of American men believe that asking out a girl to a bar is akin to sexual harassment and articles such as “If men could have it their way, they would kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers.” are published in the New York Times. Words such as innocent work flirtation, incessant sexual harassment and “rape-rape” can become entwined. It bothers me that Tariq Ramadan is mentioned in the same breath as the Harvey Weinsteins and the Bill Cosbys of this world.
So, now that I have drawn distinctions (hint: I actually consider myself a die-hard feminist in comparison to 95% of my Muslim colleagues, but that’s a biased sample as I work around Wahabbi Muslims), let me talk about #MeToo and the Tariq affair. Overall, I think it is great that there is an uprising against sexual violence, harassment, humiliation, men’s arrogance, inappropriate behavior, and almost all the related exploitation of power that men operate against women in all settings and at all levels of society. We need to raise awareness on the matter if we want to eradicate the phenomenon. And regardless of how tall an order that goal is, I see progress wherever I turn. But progress on societal changes is notoriously slow, so people who are not patient may feel too little is being done. Be patient! Humanity is evolving!
That said, what do I think about Tariq Ramadan?
I did read the Henda Ayaari article and I watched her interview, and I now also read his reaction, which appeared with quite some delay, as Tariq explains he was advised to not react immediately to the allegations he was subjected to. And I have to say I give him for now the benefit of doubt. Half of the allegations moved against him would be enough for me to condemn somebody in a less visible position, at least until the matter is clarified and verdicts are spelt. But I do see that he is (was) a very visible target, and an easy one, for a smear campaign.
I can vividly see how attractive it can be to sow together a few stories, collected here and there, and build a case against him. For he is a very annoying person to have to reckon with. I can imagine that a similar article could have been written about almost all of Tariq’s male colleagues, given some investigations and a little creativity.
Or perhaps not, as investigations of that kind are made much easier by the visibility of the character they are aimed at: everybody has a Tariq story to tell, me included! My story of inappropriate behavior of Tariq Ramadan comes from the after-dinner talk he gave to a selected few participants to that 2014 conference in Kuala Lumpur, collected in a guest house of Imperial College after a nice dinner together. He gave an entertaining speech, and at some point he made a joke about none less than FGM, where he said “FGM is part of our culture let the dialogue be internal”! Bad guy Tariq, bad! I now don’t recall the boundaries (there was no sex involved and the joke was entirely inoffensive, except maybe for Egyptians), but with some encouragement I could perhaps make up some detail to make it more spicy. Who knows. Perhaps Tariq Ramadan touched his left nipple while he was talking about FGM? (see, what I just did there)
See, I hope you can continue to see things as grey as they are, in a world where simple-minded people would like to paint everything black or white. And for some reason I need to quote Lubos again today, to finish this piece:
“And that’s the memo”.
jafferart 