Tariq Ramadan
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Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss citizen and academic, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, who is an advocate of Islamic reform. In Time Magazine's article naming him one of the 100 top innovators for the 21st century, his goal was quoted as separating "...Islamic principles from their cultures of origin and anchor them in the cultural reality of Western Europe."[1] He is president of the think tank European Muslim Network. Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of whom he said,
Denial of U.S. visaThe George W. Bush Administration revoked his visa, when he was invited to a tenured position as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Their rationale was that he contributed funds to a Swiss-based charity, the Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP), between 1998 and 2002. The U.S. did not designate ASP a supporting organization of the terrorist group Hamas until 2003. Daniel Pipes wrote in support of the revocation. [3] On the French crisis of 2005Of the Muslims that have difficulty integrating, while he criticized then French Minister of the Interior Nicholas Sarkozy for "...giving the police free rein in a climate characterized by lack of respect. He is fixated on the 2007 presidential election instead of developing a workable political structure for 2020," Ramadan also spoke of the problematic immigrants as
Appeal of the U.S. exclusionIn 2006, the American Association of University Professors, American Academy of Religion, New York PEN and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. government over its blocking visas for academics under "ideological exclusion" provisions of the U.S. PATRIOT Act. [4] U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally authorized his entry to the U.S. "The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation," Ramadan responded. [5] Press TVHe hosts a weekly news program on Iranian state-controlled Press TV.[6] In August 2009, he was dismissed from the faculty of Erasmus University and from a job as advisor for integration for the city of Rotterdam, both in the Netherlands. They issued a joint statement stating that Ramadan's hosting a weekly talk show "Islam and Life" on the Iranian government-funded TV channel, Press TV is "irreconcilable" with the two jobs. [7] Approach to reformHe argues that it is not incompatible to consider the Qur'an the revealed word of God, yet contextualize the reading. " What must be assessed and questioned is often the outlook, psychological set-up and frame of reference of interpreting scholars, and the debate over the status of the text falls far short of resolving the issue of historical and contextualised interpretation." The Sunnah and Hadiths are exactly that: contextualization; he observes it would be impossible to know how to conduct Salāt or obligatory prayer without the hadiths.[8] According to a review, in Foreign Affairs, of his 2007 book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, Ramadan is politician as well as academic. The book does three things:[9]
Education
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