This evening at 7 p.m., high-profile Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan will deliver "The Quest for Meaning and Pluralism" lecture at SFU's downtown Segal School of Business.
Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, has written more 20 books, including The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism. He is banned from visiting Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and in the past, he has been denied admission into France and the United States.
He describes himself as "Swiss by nationality, Muslim by religion, Egyptian by memory, European by culture". He has two PhDs—one on Islam and the other on philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
In 1928, his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that opposed British rule in Egypt.
Canadian Muslim writer Tarek Fatah claimed in his 2010 book The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths That Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism that the "Islamist baton is firmly in the hands of al-Banna's grandson, the charming, sweet-talking Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan. The language may have developed a level of sophistication, but the message remains the same: the Jews and the state of Israel are the reason why Muslims are stuck in a quagmire of despair."
In recent years, Ramadan has applied his formidable intellect to the question of how to integrate Muslims into European society.