Former Salafist accuses Hassan El Banna’s grandson of rape

CAIRO – 22 October 2017: After his assassination in 1949, Egyptians heard little of Hassan El Banna’s family, the founder of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, until The Telegraph reported on Saturday that his grandson, who is relatively identified as a radical Islamist, was accused of rape by a former Salafist.

The 55-year-old Islamic Studies professor at Oxford University, Tariq Ramadan, was accused by the French feminist author of Tunisian origins, Henda Ayari, of “rape, sexual assault, violence, harassment, and intimidation.”

The 44-year-old author who was a Salafist before renouncing that ideology later told The Telegraph that Ramadan committed these crimes after inviting her to his hotel room following a conference on Islam in Paris in 2012. Ayari added that she filed these accusations against the Islamic Studies professor with the prosecutor’s office in Rouen, the capital of the northern French region of Normandy.

Ayari published a book last year titled “I Chose to Be Free.” The book narrates the story of how she abandoned Salafism after holding onto the belief for 20 years. She dedicated a whole chapter of the book to the assault, and she gave her rapist the pseudonym Zoubeyr before she revealed his name on her Facebook page on Friday night.

The French author stated to the Telegraph that she decided to speak up in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal calling Ramadan a “pervert guru.” In her book, she said that they met at a congress of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France. She also said that she was a great admirer of him.

Ayari was surprised when he told her to meet him in his room instead of the lobby. He proceeded to put his arms around her and began kissing her. “When I fought back and shouted at him to stop, he insulted me and humiliated me,” she wrote.

The author refused to give many details on the incident saying he took advantage of her “weakness;” adding that throughout the following months he kept texting, asking to meet her again, but she refused.

Ramadan is a Swiss national who grew up in Geneva. He was temporarily stopped from entering France over suspected links to Algerian terrorists. In 2003, he refused to condemn the stoning penalty; insisting instead on a “moratorium on the death penalty,” according to the Telegraph. That incurred a clash with former French Minister of Interior who later became president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 2004, he was barred entry to the United States by local authorities for “providing material support to a terrorist organization,” which had denied him a post as professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

In 2010, Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, revoked the ban. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also chose him “to work on a task force to help tackle extremism in the UK following the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005,” The Telegraph reported.

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 and has been involved in a series of terror attacks and assassinations. The most prominent of which are the shooting of late Prime Minister Mahmoud El Nokrashi Pasha in 1948 for dissolving the Brotherhood, and late President Anwar El Saddat in 1981 in objection to the peace treaty signed with Israel in 1979.

The Brotherhood also assumed responsibility to an assassination attempt on President Gamal Abdel Nasser while delivering a speech in Manshiyah square in Alexandria in 1954.