A professor in Cambridge who views Western education as “hostile to Islam”

The University of Ghent in Belgium, led by its vice-chancellor, the former Green deputy prime minister Petra De Sutter – who in April awarded an honorary degree to the impartial journalist Francesca Albanese – has sacked Nathan Cofnas. He is the researcher who exposed the fabricated career of Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic prodigy who took his own life following the scandal that engulfed him. Formally, Cofnas was sacked for ‘racism’ (he opposes academic quotas for minorities). In reality, the organisers of the “two minutes’ hate” campaign against Cofnas in Trafalgar Square have got what they wanted. In any case, the charges against Cofnas matter little: to date, in Europe or America, there has not been a single case of a university professor losing their job for having praised the pogrom of 7 October.

However, the University of Cambridge is once again under fire for having appointed a Muslim academic with links to an outlawed Islamist movement, who has criticised Western education, describing it as ‘hostile to Islamic principles’. Farah Ahmed had set out her views on Western education not in a private diary, but in the chapter "The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum" of the book "Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West", published by Istinarah Press, an Islamic publishing house.

On 11 August, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed was also a former supporter of Hizb ut Tahrir, the organisation that seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate. The UK authorities banned the organisation in 2024. Ahmed wrote her essay as a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet, warning that British Muslims must “recognise that Western education poses a threat to our beliefs and values”. She also criticised those who portrayed polygamy and marriage before the age of sixteen as archaic. Even Shakespeare came in for criticism, accused of encouraging disobedience towards parents and premarital relationships (it must be said that the ‘woke’ crowd are no less fierce in their criticism of Shakespeare than the Islamists).

The Spectator writer who exposed all this, former government adviser Andrew Gilligan, does not believe his report will have any consequences: “I assume the authorities will do absolutely nothing and ignore all the evidence presented in this article. The case of Professor Farah Ahmed will become the latest example of the slow suicide of Britain and the West.” The problem, however, is not the Ahmeds or the Ardays.

Cam, the Cambridge alumni magazine, regularly publishes a column entitled “This Idea Must Die”. It puts forward a particular idea or concept which, as in George Orwell’s 1984, should be consigned to the “memory hole”.

Hilary Cremin, head of the university’s Faculty of Education, has written an article calling for the abolition of the school system. “Many schools operate rather like a prison, a factory or an army,” says Cremin. “School has become so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is difficult to suggest an alternative.” Instead, says the professor, we must “renaturalise” education, “learning in and through nature” within an “ecosystem of learning opportunities”. The article is based on a longer book, “Rewilding Education”, published last year, in which Cremin rails against the education system, calling it an “accomplice” to the “worst excesses of Enlightenment thought”.

This ends up protecting those who preach the superiority of Sharia law over Western culture, whilst expelling those who expose the lies in a CV that seemed to have come straight out of the Petri dish of wokism; it honours those who challenge the very foundations of an open society, whilst silencing those who defend its empirical premises. Anyone who thinks that Boko Haram (which means ‘Western education is a sin’) was the sole preserve of the barbarians of the Nigerian highlands is very much mistaken.