Well, Cambridge are just determined to cover themselves in glory lately. Getting caught promoting a serial liar, con-man, fraud and plagiarist to a professorship solely because of his skin colour – and threatening anyone who dares notice – wasn’t ignominy enough. To really prove that they’re not just corrupt, but an active threat to British society, Cambridge have now been caught out adding a terror-supporting jihadi to its faculty.
Not just any terror-supporting jihadi, either – after all, Britain has tens of thousands more where this one came from. No, this particularly jihadi openly advocates Muslims producing advanced weaponry for the coming jihad.
Farah Ahmed has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, the same faculty that gave the world Jason Arday. She is now responsible for postgraduate research and for teaching the next generation of teachers “how education shapes individuals and society”. Her own published views on that subject are rather more specific.
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.’
In a direct rebuttal of the ‘coexist’ delusion, she asserts that schools’ efforts to integrate Muslim children seek only to “produce new generations that reject Islam”. If society is built on kufr (unbelief), it is a communal duty to protect the young from its corruption. Democracy is a “corrupt tradition”. Teaching that child marriage or polygamy is archaic is an attack on Islam (which to be fair, it is – though not in the way she obviously thinks). Religious tolerance is a problem because it puts Islam on the same level as every other faith. English literature is “one of the most damaging subjects” because fairy tales reflect secular immorality and Romeo and Juliet advocates disobeying parents. Science is dangerous because evolution contradicts Islam. Even the playground is a threat: “Western culture is playground culture”.
As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that Western society encourages.
Such as, not blowing themselves up or stabbing little girls at dance parties? Encourage that sort of nonsense and who knows where it’ll end: nine-year-old Fatima might even start thinking she’s too young to marry 50-year-old Muhammad from the village back ’ome.
Mind you, some of her views would fit right at home in a New Zealand science faculty. A 2023 conference she organised called 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’”. No word on whether Dawn Freshwater, Shaun Hendy or Siouxsie Wiles were invited to contribute.
Ahmed first surfaced in 2009, running two private primary schools that received more than £100,000 in public money. At least three of the four trustees were Hizb ut-Tahrir members or activists. The curriculum matched the group’s separatist ideology. Ed Balls, the Charity Commission and Ofsted did nothing. The schools still receive hundreds of thousands a year. Ahmed remains a trustee. Hizb ut-Tahrir itself was finally banned as a terror organisation in 2024.
Has she mellowed? At Cambridge she directs the Islamic Educator Learning Community. Conferences she has organised attack the “secular, neoliberal system of education” as “anti-metaphysical” and urge teachers to prepare Muslim pupils for the akhira, the afterlife, rather than this world. A toolkit she co-authored states that the Islamic concept of education is opposed to “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications”. Material promoted through her networks warns against Christmas celebrations and mixed-gender activities as threats to the deen.
The clincher, though, is the second chapter of that same Hizb pamphlet, co-written by Ahmed. It sets out the education system required for the coming Khilafah. Nothing that contradicts Islam – freedom, nationalism, democracy, evolution – may be taught positively. Non-Muslims must be educated under the Islamic curriculum so they can be pushed toward the correct belief. Higher education exists mainly to refute foreign ideas. And the real point of studying technical subjects?
The motivation to study engineering would be to aid the development of machinery for Jihad and Allah’s reward for this is immeasurable. The motivation for studying computer technology would be to elevate the Islamic society over all other societies in the world, to show it as a shining example and to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens as commanded by the Creator.
Ahmed has previously claimed she no longer supports “all” of Hizb’s views. She’s a little more coy on whether she’s given up the whole bombs’n’jihad thing, though: asked whether she still holds the ones she put her name to, she did not reply.
Cambridge’s education faculty is already a byword for intellectual and moral collapse. Appointing a woman who has openly called for Muslims to master engineering and computing in order to build advanced weaponry for jihad takes it into the realm of national security.
Just don’t expect the British establishment to do a damned thing about it.
