Tariq Ramadan, currently a professor of contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and head of the Qatar-based Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics (CILE), is one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals active today, and perhaps the foremost Muslim thinker in Europe. This prominence is due to some degree to his patrimony. He is the maternal grandson of Hassan al-Banna (1906–49), the Egyptian Islamist and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and son of Said Ramadan (1926–95), an activist prominent in mid-twentieth-century Islamist circles. This lineage has undoubtedly brought scrutiny and mistrust as well; Ramadan's public life has featured constant controversy, notably in European politics and media, and he was refused entry into the United States from 2004 to 2010. He is also barred from a handful of Middle Eastern countries.

Ramadan was born in 1962 and raised in Geneva, where his family had settled following his father's expulsion by the Egyptian government a few years earlier. Educated in Switzerland, he studied French literature and philosophy at the University of Geneva before pursuing a doctorate in Islamic Studies there, which he completed in 1996. He also studied Islamic subjects with ‘ulamā’ of al-Azhar in Cairo, including the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Ali Gomaa. Following the completion of his Ph.D. he took on a teaching position at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has worked in academia for his entire career, holding positions at various institutions throughout Europe.

It was also in the mid-1990s that Ramadan began writing, with his first book Les musulmans dans la laïcité: responsabilités et droits des musulmans dans les sociétés occidentales published by the Tawhid publishing house in Lyon, France in 1994. Ramadan's partnership with Tawhid, an influential organization among French Muslims, proved beneficial, and he published a number of works with them over nearly the next fifteen years. He is an uncommonly prolific writer, which helped him grow in stature over this time, becoming a widely known public figure in France in particular. In the late 1990s his connections with British Muslim institutions began, and he spent a year associated with the Islamic Foundation of Leicester, who published his first English-language book in 1999.