Here’s Andrew Gilligan again, in the Spectator, still exposing the rot in the Cambridge education faculty. Farah Ahmed and the useful idiots of Cambridge University:
Students of Cambridge University’s gradual self-destruction will recall our disclosure last month that it has appointed as assistant professor a woman called Farah Ahmed, a former senior activist in the racist, separatist and now banned terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
In a 2002 Hizb pamphlet, published before the group was proscribed in 2024, Ahmed co-authored an article which said Muslims should study engineering and computers ‘to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens.’ In another chapter written on her own, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. All this naturally made her perfect for a senior post in Cambridge’s education faculty, whose other stars included Jason Arday.
Now we have the first detailed response to all this from the glittering fortress of academic rigour that is Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. Rupert Wegerif, professor of education in the same faculty, has been tweeting that he’s ‘disappointed by how readily people join in a witch hunt without apparently thinking or checking. [Ahmed’s Hizb pamphlet] was written nearly 25 years ago… should a 24-year-old text simply be presented as proof of what someone believes today?… Why not read Ahmed’s later work?’
Well, Rupert, as part of my research into assistant professor Ahmed I did, of course, read her later work. Have you?
To cut a long stort short: no change, but in more academic-friendly language.
The thrust of all Ahmed’s later work is pretty similar to what she was saying in her 2002 Hizb pamphlet, albeit couched in slightly prissier academic jargon and sometimes putting in citations to add spurious weight or distance to more tendentious claims. She can thus say that she’s only quoting what others have said, though she often forgets to use this technique and states her own personal views quite clearly.
As Rupert Wegerif may also not have noticed, we’ve already published two further articles about what Ahmed has been up to while working at Cambridge in the last few years, including running a project which platforms creationism and promoting an ‘Islamic curriculum’ which tells 12-year-olds that Hamas is an ‘excuse that Israel uses to justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip,’ calls the civilian hostages taken by the terror group on October 7 ‘prisoners of war’ and publishes a map of the region from which Israel has been erased.
In summer 2023, Ahmed co-organised a Cambridge University conference on Islam, science and education to ‘recognise the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project’, and to ‘consider challenges’ to the view that ‘sees science as “objective knowledge”’.
In December 2023, Ahmed and Cambridge University ran another conference to ‘unlearn conventional teacher education and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development’. This attacked the ‘secular, neoliberal system of education’ as ‘anti-metaphysical’, and said that teachers ‘need to re-centre our focus on preparing the Muslim learner for the akhira,’ everlasting life after death.
Wegerif and the other key brains at Cambridge are clearly determined to pretend there’s no problem and to hide under the table until it goes away. (Could be a long wait, folks: there’s plenty of material still to come.)…
Wegerif is cited in a couple of Ahmed’s rants and she recommends him as a co-supervisor for her PhD students. It’s hard to know whether the admiration is genuinely mutual. I suspect that this hardened activist secretly sees him as a useful idiot. There’s no shortage of those in his line of work, of course.
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