A Geneva teacher fired for controversial comments he made in an article for a French newspaper will receive SFr255,000 in damages from the canton of Geneva. The canton announced yesterday it is paying the amount to Hani Ramadan, a French teacher from a junior high school (cycle d’orientation) in Meyrin. The sum is the equivalent of two years’ salary for the teacher who was sacked in November 2004 after defending the stoning of men and women guilty of adultery. --from this news article

Meanwhile, his more famous, and far more dangerous brother, Tariq, appears in the "Islam" issue of The New York Times Book Review, where he identifies himself as at present a "professor at Oxford." He is no such thing. He has been a temporary lecturer, at St. Antony's College, in the Middle Eastern wing (the other wing is Russian and East European Studies), which ever since its inception was the fiefdom of the late Albert Hourani, described by J. B. Kelly as "a plump abbot dispensing his favors," who allowed the place to be a diploma mill for all kinds of doubtful people. The D. Phil. does not require courses, but only a thesis, and every Rashid, Hamid, and Yusuf could get a D. Phil. at St. Antony's, as long as Hourani was ruling the roost. Now he's gone, and possibly things are changing there. But not completely, for Tariq Ramadan was given his temporary post.

Now the Arabs have got together, and the most "respectable" of them -- the government of Oman -- has simply given a large sum of money, not only for a chair, but with a specific non-negotiable candidate, the Arab Muslim candidate, to fill it, at the otherwise respectable University of Leiden. That's right, the same University of Leiden that has a distinguished history in Islamic studies, where Joseph Schacht, having left Germany in disgust in 1933 (Schacht was not Jewish), ended up for a while, and where C. Snouck Hurgronje has a center named after him, to give Tariq Ramadan a grand title ("professor" I presume, or possibly "director" of some "institute" created just for him by fellow Arab Muslims). And that will be convenient, that will allow him to lecture, and to write articles, billed as "Tariq Ramadan, professor at the University of Leiden."

But don't believe a word of it. His chair is entirely bought and paid for. It's to make his propaganda, his presentation, more impressive, more effective, more convincing.

Now, if I hadn't set all this out, you might have been fooled. You might have thought "ummmh, so Tariq Ramadan is a full professor at the University of Leiden. And the University of Leiden has been such a center of Islamic studies. Well, well, well."

Now you won't. But others, who will not have read about Tariq Ramadan and How He Got His Chair At Leiden, may still be. And that may include people who give valuable space, at book reviews, for articles on Islam, to people just exactly like...Tariq Ramadan.