Feminist group FEMEN targets Tariq Ramadan in topless protest

17th May 2016

The so-called feminist group FEMEN have targeted the Islamic academic Tariq Ramadan during a conference near Paris over the weekend.

While Professor Ramadan was speaking a woman dressed in an abayya approached him while he was giving a speech about whether political Islam exists.

When the woman was a few metres away she took off her abayya to reveal her bare breasts. She was then joined in the “protest” by three other topless women who chanted “Allah is not a politician,” before they were ushered away by security personnel.

FEMEN said they were protesting against “fundamentalist preachers” at an event which sought to “politicise Islam” under the supervision of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan himself described the incident as a “non-event.”

Although he is the grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna, Ramadan is not thought to be particularly close to the organisation and instead advocates a so-called moderate Western Islam.

In the UK (where he lives) he is considered on the liberal end of the Islamic spectrum but in France he is regularly demonised by the mainstream media as a fundamentalist.