1. This 41-year-old Swiss citizen could be the much needed antidote against the so-called 'clash of civilizations' between Islam and the West;

2. He could also be a mighty one-man fifth column of radical Islamism in French-speaking Europe and beyond.

Either way, the question recently posed by Le Monde, France's most respected newspaper, is certainly intriguing: "Can we continue to ignore Tariq Ramadan?"

As a matter of fact, Ramadan is not being ignored. For the last three years, United Press International has reported in regular intervals about the relentless efforts of this Geneva-based Islamic studies professor and Nietzsche scholar to turn young Muslims from the ghastly housing estates in the French, Swiss, and Belgian suburbs into responsible citizens of their countries without giving up their faith.

For years now, he has been zigzagging on high speed trains around French-speaking Europe to forge, in a sense, a new politico-religious species: the European view of Islamic faith. And in so doing he received considerable support from the authorities fretting over the real danger of a large, hostile, and insufficiently integrated Muslim minority.

The scary New Year's Eve scenes in Paris, where hundreds of young 'beurs' – disenfranchised Frenchmen of North African descent - rolled in from the suburbs to ransack shops at the fashionable Champs Elysées, only showed up the urgency of such an endeavor.

But there may be another side to Tariq Ramadan, as Christopher Caldwell reported last August in the Washington-based Weekly Standard magazine: "In 2002, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón linked Ramadan and his publishing house Tawhid to Ahmed Brahim, the Algerian financier of Al Qaeda. This does not prove Ramadan is a terrorist... but it does mean he has important contacts in extremist circles.

"Then there is the matter of his brother Hani, a fundamentalist of harsher means, who in September 2002 published a notorious article defending the... stoning to death of an adulterous woman in Nigeria," Caldwell continued.

If you talk to Ramadan about precisely this issue – or read in his well-crafted books about it - you are never quite clear which side of the argument he comes down on. Sure, this sort of thing must not happen in the West, whose secular law Muslims are to respect. But that doesn't answer the question of how the law might change once the Old World has turned Islamic, which is a distinct possibility, given the growing number of Muslims there - about five million in France alone - and the faithlessness of the so-called Christian majority.

Moreover, where places like Nigeria are concerned, Ramadan likes to refer to his favorite Muslim concept of ijtihad, meaning – as he himself describes it - an Islamic jurist's effort "either to extract a law or commandment from scriptural sources that are little explicit, or to formulate a juridical advice where it cannot be found in the reference texts."

What this writer has not heard him say nor read in his writings is the clear statement: "Women, adulteresses included, must not be stoned to death. Period!"

These words did not pass Ramadan's lips either when French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy challenged him in a televised debate with questions about Islamic forms of punishment, such as stoning and amputations. Again, Ramadan referred to the concept of ijtihad, without distancing himself from such practices, which to an orthodox Muslim would be heretical, anyway.

At any rate, as Le Monde suggested, Ramadan has emerged as a man not to be ignored, to wit the hostile reaction by the French media to his observation that French Jewish intellectuals such as André Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, and Bernard Kouchner served Israeli interests by siding with the United States in its war in Iraq.

Was this an anti-Semitic statement, as his French critics charge? Or, in even more general terms, did these words indicate that arguably the most powerful Muslim intellect in the French-speaking world could be guilty of precisely the sin he accuses Glucksmann, Bruckner, and Kouchner, namely, divided loyalties?

It's too early to draw this conclusion just yet. Nonetheless, it's well worth heeding Le Monde's advice: Let's keep an eye on Tariq Ramadan.UPI