In what was billed as “his first U.S. appearance since the Bush administration barred him from the country in 2004,” the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan spoke last night to a nearly full house at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City. It may well in fact have been his first public appearance in the U.S. ever. For before the Bush administration “barred him” – or, in other words, revoked his visa – in 2004, Ramadan was hardly the internationally renowned public figure that he is today.
At the time, Ramadan was employed as a philosophy teacher at a high school in his native Switzerland and he was a frequent visitor to the small Tawhid Islamic cultural center and bookstore in Lyons, France. The center’s publishing house, Tawhid Editions, published his books, as well as the popular audio cassettes of his lectures that would make him famous in the troubled French banlieues, but not beyond. The fact that Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, undoubtedly contributed to such notoriety – both positive and negative, depending on constituency – he has enjoyed. Today, he is a professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford, and his books are published by Oxford University Press.
