Stopping ideas at the border.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Tariq Ramadan denied of visa

The University of Notre Dame invited the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan in January 2004 to leave his home in Switzerland and become a tenured professor in South Bend. In Europe, Ramadan enjoys a reputation as a leading Muslim scholar, with such works as Western Muslims and the Future of Islam and Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity.

He was no stranger to the United States. He'd given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. And he'd spoken at the Clinton Presidential Foundation.

He was excited about the opportunity Notre Dame offered, and so he got a visa on May 5, 2004. He and his family rented an apartment in South Bend. He shipped his belongings there, and he enrolled his children in school.

But they never attended school in Indiana, and the family never lived in the South Bend apartment.

"On July 28, 2004, a little over a week before my family and I were to move to Indiana so that I could begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame, the United States embassy in Bern informed me by telephone that my visa had been revoked," Ramadan declared in a lawsuit filed against Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "I was astonished by the government's decision to revoke my visa. While I have sometimes criticized specific United States policies, I am not anti-American, and I have certainly never endorsed or espoused terrorism."

The ACLU, the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors, and the PEN American Center filed the lawsuit on the grounds that the denial of Ramadan's visa was preventing their members from meeting with him and hearing his views, "in violation of their First Amendment rights."

Ramadan is an unlikely threat.

Just two days after 9/11, he wrote an open letter to Muslims. "You know as I know that some Muslims can use Islam to justify the killing of an American, a Jew, or a Christian only because he/she is an American, Jew, or a Christian; you have to condemn them and condemn these attacks." One month later, at a meeting sponsored by a Muslim magazine in Paris, he said, "You're unjustified if you use the Koran to justify murder." And on the first anniversary of 9/11, he was one of 199 Muslim signatories to the "Statement Rejecting Terrorism."

In September 2005, Ramadan reapplied for a visa at the urging, he says, of academic groups that wanted to meet with him. The government sat on his application. The U.S. embassy in Switzerland...