Tariq Ramadan Wins One

June 26, 2006

On June 23, Federal Judge Paul A. Crotty told the government to stop stalling on the latest visa application of Tariq Ramadan. The European Muslim scholar had his visa revoked on July 28, 2004, one week before he was to come to the United States to take a tenured position at Notre Dame.

On September 16, 2005, he applied again for a visa that would have allowed him at least to attend conferences in the United States. The U.S. embassy in Switzerland usually gives an answer “within 30 days of application,” according to the State Department website. But Ramadan was told on December 2 that he might not find out for close to two years.

On March 10 of this year, Ramadan, the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center sued Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The revocation of his visa, and the stalling on the new application, “has prevented United States citizens and residents from meeting with Professor Ramadan and inhibited them from hearing his views, in violation of their First Amendment rights,” the lawsuit, brought by the ACLU, charges.

On April 13, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Jones told Judge Crotty that the government could not give a specific timetable for deciding on Ramadan’s visa application.
While denying that Ramadan was excluded on ideological grounds, Jones said, “Professor Ramadan, tomorrow, could endorse or espouse terrorism.”

Judge Crotty was not impressed with that argument.

“Allowing the government to wait for ‘possible future discovery of statements’ would mean that the government could delay final adjudication indefinitely, evading constitutional review by its own failure to render a decision on Ramadan’s application,” he ruled on June 23.

And he called into question the legality of excluding people on the basis of their speech.

“While the Executive may exclude an alien for almost any reason,” he ruled, “it cannot do so solely because the Executive disagrees with the content of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.”

Here’s the background on the Ramadan case.

When the University of Notre Dame invited the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in January 2004 to leave his home in Switzerland and become a tenured professor in South Bend, he was excited about the opportunity.

He’d been to the United States a lot.

He’d given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. And he’d spoken at the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Foundation at an event hosted by Clinton himself in January 2002.

In Europe, Ramadan enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading academic voices for moderation in the Muslim world. His influential works include Western Muslims and the Future of Islam and Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.

Now perhaps it was time for him to make his reputation in America.

So he accepted Notre Dame’s invitation. He got a visa on May 5, 2004, and he and his family rented an apartment in South Bend.

But they never lived in it.

“On July 28, 2004, a little over a week before my family and I were to move to Indiana so that I could begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame, the United States Embassy in Bern informed me by telephone that my visa had been revoked,” Ramadan declares in a lawsuit he has filed against Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary or State Condoleezza Rice. “They did not provide an explanation for the revocation at that time. On August 25, 2004, however, a spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security stated to the press that my visa was revoked “because of a section in federal law that applies to aliens who have used a ‘position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.’ ”

That federal law is the USA Patriot Act.

“I was astonished by the government’s decision to revoke my visa,” Ramadan states. “While I have sometimes criticized specific United States policies, I am not anti-American, and I have certainly never endorsed or espoused terrorism.”

The charge against Ramadan is an odd one.

Just two days after 9/11, Ramadan wrote an open letter to Muslims. “You know as I know that some Muslims can use Islam to justify the killing of an American, a Jew, or a Christian only because he/she is an American, Jew, or a Christian; you have to condemn them and condemn these attacks.”

One month later, at a meeting sponsored by a Muslim magazine in Paris, he said, “You’re unjustified if you use the Koran to justify murder.”

And on the first anniversary of 9/11, he was one of 199 Muslim signatories to the “Statement Rejecting Terrorism.” That statement said: “Groups like Al Qaeda have misused and abused Islam in order to fit their own radical and indeed anti-Islamic agenda. Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s actions are criminal, misguided, and counter to the true teachings of Islam. . . . We call on all people of conscience to denounce violence and to work peacefully for the creation of a better world.”

Judge Crotty noted that Ramadan “shuns violence as a form of activism and has consistently spoken out against terrorism and radical Islamists.”

Interestingly enough, the government now denies that it was using the Patriot Act when it revoked Ramadan’s visa. “Any statement to the contrary that may have appeared in the media or may have been made by any government spokesperson was erroneous,” the government says in a court filing on March 31, 2006.
Instead, it says it was using an older statute that states: “After the issuance of a visa or other documentation to any alien, the consular officer or the Secretary of State may at any time, in his discretion, revoke such visa.”

The government claims that after Ramadan was issued his visa, “The State Department received information, in the ordinary course of business, that might have led to a determination that Mr. Ramadan was inadmissible.”

But for whatever reason, and under whatever statute, the government revoked Ramadan’s visa, he can’t teach at Notre Dame.

“The government’s actions have caused a great deal of hardship to me and to my family,” Ramadan declared. “We had hoped to make the United States our home, and we were very disappointed when that became impossible. And of course the government’s actions have stigmatized me as a person. . . . Dealing with this stigma has been immensely stressful for me and for my wife and children.”