How Qatar purchases academic chairs in Europe
How Qatar purchases academic chairs in Europe

Tariq Ramadan confirmed it two years ago in an interview with Libération:

“Certainly Qatar has supported my chair, but its management is under the exclusive authority of Oxford”.

Now comes the investigation of Le Monde, entitled “Tariq Ramadan: le sphinx”, in which we discover how much it cost Qatar to control the chair on which sits today's most famous Muslim intellectual in Europe, a position which earned him, among other things, the appointment as Ramadan explains that the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels are the direct result of our policy in the Middle East.
“religious adviser” of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Le Monde spotlights Ramadan now because he is having difficulty in his adopted country, France (Ramadan is a Swiss citizen). In Béziers, Argenteuil and Orléans, he was not allowed to speak publicly. Several weeks ago Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, declared him “persona non grata”, and there is no French university that now allows him to speak.

The accusation against Ramadan is “ambiguity”. His latest intervention at Politico Europe let you understand the extent of his double-speak. In the essay, Ramadan explains that the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels are the direct result of our policy in the Middle East.

An intellectual who wrote nearly 30 books, married to a woman named Isabelle, a Catholic who converted to Islam and took the name of Iman, Ramadan lives in a very British house close to Wembley Stadium, in London, but spends most of his time in the suburbs of French cities, where he is a hero for young girls wearing the chador, the unemployed, students, small business owners.

Some people compare him to the amiable Mohammed Ben Abbes, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that Michel Houellebecq imagines as French President in “Submission”. Since Ramadan has announced its intention to obtain French nationality, the authorities in Paris have questioned his possible political ambitions.

With his flawless oratory and charisma, Ramadan has undeniably contributed to a new Islamist assertivity in a generation of French and European Muslims. Ramadan has become “the symbol of the visibility of a European Islam”, in the words of the Franco-Turkish sociologist Nilufer Gole. 

The consecration came in 2009. Oxford University offered him the dreamed-of position: university professor. Haoues Seniguer, professor at Sciences Po, said to Le Monde that Ramadan’s appointment can be attributed to preacher Youssef Qaradawi, the guru of the Muslim Brotherhood based in Qatar who praised terror attacks against Israeli Jews and also sits in the board of the Islamic Studies Center in Oxford.

The Qatari monarchy, in 2015 alone, has donated 11 million pounds to renew St. Anthony's Oxford college, where Tariq Ramadan teaches. Sheikha Moza, the wife of the emir Thani, inaugurated the magnificent building designed by Zaha Hadid, the late architect.

A script that even Edward Gibbon would have not imagined, when in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, written in 1776, he explained that if Charles Martel had been defeated at Poitiers, the Koran “would now be taught in the schools of Oxford”.

Tariq Ramadan accomplished that without a battle.