by Andrew Gilligan, Spectator
After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.
We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.
Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.
These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education. In a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, ‘Education and Identity’, originally written in 2002, republished in 2017, and obtained by The Spectator, Ahmed writes that ‘the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.’
She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’
Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’