The prominent Swiss academic Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody by French police following accusations of rape.

A judicial source confirmed to Reuters that Ramadan was taken into custody on Wednesday. A preliminary investigation was opened after two women filed police complaints against him late last year, accusing him of rape.

Ramadan, a senior research fellow of St Antony’s College, took a leave of absence from the university last November after the two women filed complaints. He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against the author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.

In October, Ayari, 40, who heads the women’s organisation Les Libératrices, filed a complaint with prosecutors in Rouen, France, alleging rape, sexual violence, harassment and intimidation by Ramadan. She said she was assaulted by him in a Paris hotel room in 2012.



Ayari said she had described the rape in a chapter of her book, I Chose to be Free, published in France in November 2016, giving her attacker a made-up name. In the book, Ayari describes a sex attack by an intellectual in a Paris hotel room after a conference, saying she fought back but was insulted, slapped and treated violently.



In the wake of the sexual assault and harassment scandal involving the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Ayari said she decided to name Ramadan and made a formal complaint to police.



Later, a second woman reported Ramadan to police, alleging that he had raped and violently assaulted her in a hotel room in the French city of Lyon in 2009.

The 55-year-old Swiss-born academic made his name as an author and commentator on modern Islam, as well as advising successive British governments on Islam and society. A well-known figure in the Middle East, he is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna.



Ramadan said in a statement in November, after he took a leave of absence from the University of Oxford: “Contrary to reports in the French-language press, I have taken leave of absence upon mutual agreement with Oxford University, which will permit me to devote my energies to my defence while respecting students’ need for a calm academic environment.”

