A US judge has heard arguments regarding the case of prominent Oxford Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan about whether he should be granted permission to enter America.
Ramadan, who is a Swiss citizen and visiting fellow at St Anthony’s College, was banned from the US in 2006 on the grounds that he aided terrorist activity by donating money to a Palestinian charity between 1998 and 2002.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed the lawsuit on behalf of Ramadan in 2006 against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for denying the scholar a foreign visa. The ACLU has championed Ramadan’s case as an example of how the US government is attempting to prevent foreign scholars from coming into the county to express their views.
In 2004, the US government revoked Ramadan’s work visa, preventing him from taking up a professorship at the Kroc Institute of Peace Studies, based at the University of Notre Dame. He then attempted to gain a temporary visa so he could attend conferences and deliver lectures but his application was refused.
Ramadan opposes defining Islam in opposition to the West, and has called for the formation of a new European Islamic identity that embraces western society.
At the hearing last week the ACLU said the decision to deny Ramadan a US visa was politically motivated and represented a serious violation of free speech and academic debate.
ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer, who is representing Ramadan in the case, accused the US government of banning the academic from entering the country due to political motives rather than a concern for national security.
"We have charged that Ramadan, a leading European academic whose work addresses critical issues including Muslim identity and the role of Islam in democratic societies, has been banned due to his political ideas. The government has banned Tariq Ramadan not because of his action but because of his ideas," he said.
Jaffer said the decision represented a serious threat to free speech and set a dangerous precedent. "The ideological exclusion of scholars like Tariq Ramadan impoverishes political and academic debate inside the United States and violates the First Amendment of those who seek to meet with foreign scholars, hear their views, and engage them in debate. Ideological exclusion is a form of censorship and it should not be tolerated in a country committed to democratic values."
ACLU challenged the government’s continued exclusion of Ramadan based on small donations he made to a Palestinian charity, saying that the group was only blacklisted in 2003, a year after Ramadan stopped giving money.
Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said, "Professor Ramadan’s small humanitarian donations were completely permissible at the time he made them, and he had no reason to know that the charity was supporting Hamas, if indeed it was.
"The government seems to be grasping at straws to prevent US audiences from engaging with Professor Ramadan and his ideas" she added.
Ramadan’s Oxford colleagues have denounced the US government’s actions. Dr Walter Armbrust, a fellow at the Centre and Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, said the allegations were unjustified and that Ramadan was a victim of an American neoconservative campaign, and that in his opinion, "The allegations are products of neo-conservative propaganda, mainly from the United States," he said. "The neocons prefer a polarized world that opposes the United States to an essentially ‘Muslim Civilization’. Tariq Ramadan works to overcome this polarization and this makes him dangerous to the neocons."
"Read his books. You may or may not agree with him, but that is beside the point. What is important is that you will find yourself engaged with a thoughtful and utterly non-violent interlocutor," he added.
Dr Avi Shlaim, a fellow at the MEC, praised Ramadan’s academic achievements and contribution to the centre. "I think he is a first rate scholar and America’s loss is our gain. He is a wonderful colleague and we are delighted to have him at the MEC," he said.
Emma Tracey, Development Director at St Antony’s, added, "St Antony’s governing body considers his research to be a great asset to the College’s intellectual activity and hence appointed him as a Senior Research Fellow.
