by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
The uni that liberated the world now employs a woman who called on Muslims to make weapons for jihad. God help us.
Next time someone asks me what I mean by ‘suicide of the West’, I’m going to tell them that Cambridge University has a professor who once said Muslims should build ‘advanced weaponry’ for the coming ‘jihad’ to elevate Islam ‘over all other [religions]’. I’m going to let them know that at one of the highest seats of learning in Christendom, on the same dappled lawns walked by William Tyndale, Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, there now skulks an academic who once said ‘Allah’s reward’ will be ‘immeasurable’ for those who make ‘machinery for jihad’. For there it is, in all its snivelling idiocy and decadence: the West’s death wish.
Her name is Farah Ahmed. She’s an assistant research professor in Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department that employed the late fabulist, Jason Arday. Only where his wacky life story had been highly embellished, Ahmed’s is all too real. She was once an activist in the virulently bigoted Islamist outfit, Hizb ut-Tahrir. It was during her mingling with those homophobic, Jew-hating religious supremacists that Ms Ahmed wrote lovingly about ‘jihad’ while lamenting the ‘corrupt tradition[s]’ of the West. Never mind Allah’s reward – Cambridge’s reward for the woman who once spouted such medieval drivel has been an assistant professorship.
It was the sterling reportage of Andrew Gilligan at the Spectator that brought to light Ahmed’s mad old writings. In his latest piece, Gilligan reveals that she once co-authored a crazy paean to jihad with another senior Hizb activist, Nazreen Nawaz. It was published in a Hizb pamphlet in 2002 and republished in 2017 (Ahmed was not involved in the republication). The authors lay out their chillingly intolerant dream: an education system built solely around Islamic pieties, in which nothing will be taught that ‘contradicts with Islam’. ‘Freedom, nationalism, democracy, evolution’ – no such haram idea will get a look-in in the Islamo-dictatorship.