A prominent Islamic scholar has been charged with rape after two women accused him of assaulting them in hotel rooms in France.

Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, was arrested by French police on Wednesday.

He has denied the allegations and filed a complaint for slander against author Henda Ayari, one of his accusers.

Ms Ayari, 41, claims Ramadan raped her at a Paris hotel during a Muslim convention in 2012.

Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Oxford, has been taken into custody in Paris as part of an investigation into rape allegations

She first made the allegation in October last year as part of the #MeToo movement in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

She later made a formal complaint to prosecutors in Rouen, Normandy on October 20, insisting she had been too scared to speak up until now.

The divorced mother-of-three also accused the contemporary Islamic studies professor of threatening her children to stop her from going to the police.

'He choked me so hard that I thought I was going to die,' she told Le Parisien newspaper.

The other accuser is a an unnamed disabled woman also claims the academic raped her in a hotel room in Lyon in 2009.

Ramadan was remanded in custody pending a bail hearing, to be held within four days.

Accuser: Henda Ayari, 41, a feminist activist, says Ramadan raped her in a Paris hotel room during a Muslim convention in 2012

'If there are other victims in France or elsewhere, they now know that the justice system will respond to what has happened to them,' said Jonas Haddad, lawyer for feminist activist Henda Ayari, the first woman to accuse Ramadan.

Women who have testified anonymously during three months of preliminary investigations might now also file rape complaints, one of the sources said.

The married father of four has denied the accusations from the two women.

In November, Oxford University said Ramadan was taking a leave of absence from his post as professor of contemporary Islamic studies, 'by mutual agreement'.

He has also denied allegations in Swiss media of sexual misconduct against teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s, denouncing them as 'a campaign of lies'.

Lawyers for Ramadan have accused Ayari of slander and suggested the women colluded to try to disgrace him.

As part of his defence, he has presented investigators with Facebook conversations in which a woman identified as Ayari allegedly made explicit advances towards him in 2014, two years after the alleged rape.