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. She writes: ‘When we are talking about teaching “Islam”, I propose that we are talking about teaching a learner to submit to Allah.’ 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? Here, for instance, is her DPhil dissertation , produced at Cambridge in 2017, in which she pronounces Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, an ‘arm of the State’s security apparatus’ and criticised its promotion of the teaching of ‘fundamental British values and British heritage.’ The Prevent counter-extremism duty in schools has, she claims, been ‘widely criticised as requiring teachers to act as the “secret service of the public sector.”’

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According to Ahmed, however, it was all lies made up by the then-education secretary, now editor of this magazine, Michael Gove. Even if Wegerif does not appear to have read Ahmed’s text, he has at least read its title, seizing on the fact that it includes the word ‘pluralism’ to imply, though not actually to state, that Ahmed believes in pluralism. Let’s examine that proposition, shall we? Here’s a journal article from 2021 , written in her capacity as a researcher at the Cambridge Faculty of Education, in which Ahmed says that ‘the UK government narrative of Fundamental British Values as a means of assimilating non-liberal values and cultures… has been extensively problematized as seriously damaging to Muslim educational experiences in UK state schools.’

She writes: ‘The classical liberal argument is that secular education is essentially neutral, and enables impressionable young children to make autonomous decisions about their beliefs… This perspective has been undermined by the contention that the liberal definition of personal autonomy is actually Eurocentric.’ Implicit in liberalism, she says, ‘is a notion of “intellectual-cultural superiority”, which could be described as little different to the notions of racial superiority that drove colonialism.’

She adds: ‘When we are talking about teaching “Islam”, I propose that we are talking about teaching a learner to submit to Allah.’ Or a book chapter from later the same year, where she cites a claim that ‘Muslims have become entrenched within a secular Western worldview and are looking to understand their problems through this inauthentic lens.’ In 2010, Ahmed apparently told the Charity Commission that while she had been a member of Hizb previously, she had not been involved for a few years and did not agree with ‘all of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s views as a political organisation.’

But when repeatedly asked by us if she still holds her old views, or would like to disown anything she said then, she has refused to do so. (She again refused to respond to such a request for this piece.) 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.) The professor bleats that ‘Christianity has been just as capable of supporting extremist violence as Islam’ and the best way to treat people with views like Ahmed is to give them ‘the space and encouragement to develop their traditions from within, towards greater kindness, openness and dialogue.’

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.