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Rabat – More than EUR 106,000 has been collectively raised online to help free Tariq Ramadan. Launched on CotizUp platform, this prize pool aims to help the Islamist scholar, who “is confronted with several cases whose battle will be long and costly.”
Organized by the “For the Liberation of Tariq Ramadan,” Facebook page, the initiative has already raised more than EUR 106,000, far exceeding the EUR 90,000 target. Between “Legal proceedings, attorneys’ fees, appraisals and counter-appraisals (…) the battle will be costly,” said the group, adding that the money will go to Ramadan’s trial.
French police arrested Tariq Ramadan on January 31, after two women filed complaints accusing him of rape in 2017. The police continue to hold him as “part of a preliminary inquiry” into the rape and assault allegations.
The Oxford professor denies the allegations, claiming that they are part of a “campaign of lies launched by [his] adversaries.”
His wife, Iman Ramadan, believes her husband was targeted by the media. “It is enough to just read the press or turn on the TV and think that he’s guilty,” she stated, adding that she thinks, “he is, unfortunately, a victim of this media lynching and political pressure exerted against him.”
Though he was recently hospitalized, the Appeals Court in Paris denied his release after a medical report indicated that Islamic theologian’s health was “compatible with his detention.”
Ramadan was initially accused of rape by author and former Salafi Henda Ayari, who reports that the rape occurred in 2012 when both were attending a congress of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France. Another woman stepped forward shortly thereafter and claimed she was also raped by the Swiss scholar in a French hotel in 2009.
