The Disgrace of Tariq Ramadan
The Islamist grandson of Hasan al-Banna convinced many Western liberals that he was a moderate because he promised to bridge a divide many feared could not be crossed.
RJ Smith
1 Apr 2026 ·
Tariq Ramadan is either a predatory manipulator who belongs behind bars or a calm voice of reason victimised by a prejudiced ruling class. It really depends on whom you ask. Last week, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced Ramadan to eighteen years in prison for raping three women between 2009 and 2016. This ought to have settled the question about one of Europe’s most divisive thinkers. In fact, Ramadan’s punishment will only fortify the views of the two opposing camps.
Ramadan’s background is well known in France and his native Switzerland but less so elsewhere. His maternal grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. In the late 1940s, al-Banna’s daughter Waffa married a Brotherhood activist named Said Ramadan. After al-Banna’s assassination in 1949, Said became one of the organisation’s leading figures. Expelled from Egypt in 1954 during president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the couple moved to Syria and then Pakistan before eventually settling in Switzerland, where Tariq was born in 1962.
According to his defenders, Ramadan rejected the illiberal fanaticism of his father and grandfather and grew up to be an urbane and moderate academic, enculturated by Western norms but with a heritage that provided him with the legitimacy to speak to and on behalf of radical Muslim communities. Western liberal elites were entranced by this paradoxical figure, and they embraced him as a figure who could explain East to West and vice-versa. This was especially true in France, where he enjoyed his highest profile, frequently appearing in debates and on talk shows.
Ramadan’s path to public intellectual and a chair at Oxford University was an unusual one, insofar as it is discernible at all, given all the conflicting information about him that exists in the public domain. He began his career as a French teacher at the Collège de Saussure, a high school near Geneva, in the late 1980s. At just 23 years of age, he rose to the rank of academic dean, the youngest in the Swiss system at the time. During the 1990s, he became more interested in Islam, which led him to undertake intensive religious studies in Egypt and to pursue higher studies upon his return to Switzerland.
https://quillette.com/2026/04/01/the-disgrace-of-tariq-ramadan/
