Civil liberties group challenges US visa ban for Muslim intellectual

0 Comments | AFP, October, 2007

NEW YORK (AFP) — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged in federal court Thursday the US government's refusal to grant a travel visa to Swiss-based Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan.

Ramadan, one of the world's leading scholars on Islam, was forced to turn down a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame when the US government revoked his visa in late 2004 on the basis of the so-called "ideological exclusion" provision of the Patriot Act.

Washington later dropped its claim, unable to prove that Ramadan had endorsed terrorism.

But it banned the academic in September 2006 on grounds he made donations between 1998 and 2002 to a Swiss-based charity that provides aid to Palestinians. The charity was included in a US list of terrorist...