NEW YORK — Amid a recent outpouring by French women reporting episodes of sexual harassment and naming their aggressors, two women have accused a renowned Islamic scholar of violent sexual attacks.
French activist and author Henda Ayari filed a police complaint 10 days ago accusing the well-known, Swiss-born Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan of sexually assaulting her in 2012.
Then on Thursday, a second woman filed a complaint in Paris against Ramadan, accusing him of rape and assault in a hotel room in Lyon, France, in 2009.
Ramadan’s lawyer has issued a categorical denial about the first accusation and said that Ramadan would sue his accuser for defamation.
The explosive accounts came in the aftermath of accusations that powerful Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein had engaged in decades of sexual harassment and assaults against women such as actress Rose McGowan.
A New York Times investigation revealed that Weinstein had paid off at least eight women over the years.
In the aftermath, many women, and some men, around the world added their voices to a wave of complaints on social media, including under the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc, or ExposeYourPig, in France.
On Sunday, women protested sexual abuse and harassment in 11 French cities under the #MeToo banner in the wake of allegations against Weinstein.
Carol Galand, an independent journalist who organized the protests, told the Associated Press that it’s important this movement went beyond social media. ‘‘Some women don’t have the strength to handle alone those aggressions that they faced. So they really need to be together, because together we are stronger,’’ she said.
In Paris, several hundred people protested Sunday on the Republic Plaza. Some held banners saying ‘‘I will not remain silent’’
Among the figures accused by French women in recent days are Pierre Joxe, a former top Socialist leader and minister under François Mitterrand. Joxe, accused of groping a woman sitting next to him at an opera in Paris in 2010, told French radio station Europe 1 that the accusation was completely unfounded.
Soon after, a 29-year-old woman told Franceinfo radio that she had filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment by Christophe Arend, a lawmaker in President Emmanuel Macron’s governing party. Arend has denied the allegations.
Ramadan, 55, is a revered Islamic scholar and the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1920s. The group has become one of the most influential transnational Sunni Muslim movements in the world. He teaches contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and is the author of a dozen books in English on modern Islam and the Western world.
Ayari, 40, said she had been corresponding with Ramadan on Facebook and had often asked him for advice on religion, until one day, he proposed a meeting in the hotel where she said she was attacked.
The author had written about the assault in her book “I Chose to Be Free,’’ an account published in 2016 of how she been drawn to Salafism, a radical Islamist ideology, and then fought to break away from it. She did not name the attacker, she said, because he had threatened her and her children.
But she said she had been moved by other women who were speaking out and decided to name her aggressor, even though she expected a storm of criticism.
