House Master Defends Scholar

A prominent Harvard religion professor and Lowell House master, Diana L. Eck, is leading the American Academy of Religion (AAR) as it challenges the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department over the visa revocation of high-profile Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan.

The academy is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging that Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Egyptian opposition group Muslim Brotherhood, has been unfairly banned from visiting the country on the basis of a Patriot Act statute meant to deny entry to those who endorse terrorism.

“The government is using this law to censor and manipulate political debate,” said Eck, the Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society.

Eck said that she was shocked when she learned that Ramadan, a Swiss citizen and currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, had been denied entry to the United States.

“He is one of the foremost thinkers and interpreters of Islam and the West,” Eck said, acknowledging his reputation as an advocate of Muslim integration into Western society.

“These are exactly the sorts of Muslim voices that we want to nurture,” she added.

Under the guidance of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the AAR, an association of approximately 10,000 religious scholars, joined with the Association of American University Professors and the PEN American Center, an organization that promotes human rights and literary exchange, to file a lawsuit two weeks ago in response to frustrated efforts to bring Ramadan to the United States.

Ramadan had been invited to the November 2004 AAR conference and was planning to serve as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University when the Department of Homeland Security informed him in August 2004 that his visa had been revoked, Eck said. Ramadan could not travel to the U.S. for the conference, though he did participate via live video stream from Canada.

The Homeland Security Department “doesn’t discuss the basis for its recommendations to the State Department—whether for or against granting an individual an immigration benefit,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Jamie E. Zuieback wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday.

She declined to comment on the lawsuit, but added, “Criteria for revocation include public safety risk [and] national security risk, among others.”

A State Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

Eck and Jameel Jaffer, a 1999 graduate of Harvard Law School, an ACLU attorney working on the lawsuit, said that Ramadan could not possibly be considered a supporter of terrorism or a national security risk because Ramadan has condemned acts of violence by Islamic extremists and has been an advocate of interfaith dialogue.

Eck suggested that Ramadan’s criticisms of American foreign policy, and his suggestion that certain prominent French Jewish intellectuals were inappropriately biased toward Israel, might explain the revocation of his visa.

“If we’re going to start suppressing the kinds of speech Tariq Ramadan has engaged in, we’re going to have to suppress a great deal of the speech that’s very important to the political debate inside the US,” Jaffer said.

Jaffer accused the government of “using immigration laws as instruments of censorship” and said the lawsuit will also challenge the constitutionality of the Patriot Act statute in question.

-Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.