The University of Cambridge is under fire for recruiting a Muslim scholar with past ties to an outlawed Islamist movement who trashed Western education as hostile to Islamic principles.
Farah Ahmed, who has denounced British schools for teaching that “polygamy or marriage under the age of 16” is “archaic and discriminatory to women,” was appointed Assistant Research Professor in the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education last year.
Now is the time for us to recognize that if society is built on Kufr, it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.
Ahmed presents her views on Western education in her chapter, “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum,” in the book Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West, published by Istinarah Press, an Islamic publisher, in 2017.
On August 11, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed was a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a terrorist organization aspiring to establish a global Islamic Caliphate. U.K. officials banned the organization in 2024. Ahmed first wrote her essay as a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet in 2002, warning that British Muslims need “to recognize that Western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.”
Three Scandals Take Toll on Prestigious University
The revelations about Ahmed are a public-relations catastrophe for Cambridge University’s Department of Education as it struggles to recover from the scandal surrounding Jason Arday, a professor of Sociology of Education who resigned last week amid multiple accusations of plagiarism and diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) favoritism. Arday is being described as a “serial fantasist” for reportedly fabricating his life story and achievements.
Deborah Prentice, the university’s first American vice-chancellor, faces further backlash after an employment tribunal ruled she had “shut down” a whistleblower’s complaints in a bullying row at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.
“Farah Ahmed’s anti-Western views are not incidental and beg the question of how unserious the vetting process of some of the world’s most influential universities has become,” Nuriyah Khan, a Fellow of the Ideological Defense Institute, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“Years of DEI and critical race theory have created a hierarchy of acceptable views where Western institutions may be condemned wholesale, whilst Islamist ideas are endlessly excused or contextualised,” observed Khan, an expert in Islamic law and legal pluralism.
“This comes not long after a debate scrutinizing Islam at the Oxford Union was postponed and nearly prevented from going ahead, while George Abaraonye, its former president-elect, publicly appeared to celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk,” Khan added.
Ahmed Trashes Western Education, Privileges Islamic Learning
Ahmed writes that the Western education system “will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the ‘adeeqah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.”
“Those of us who have been through the Western education system, and have subsequently started practicing Islam, can recognise the effect on our personalities. It takes many years before even the most obvious Kufr [disbelief] concepts and values can be completely removed and our behavior substantially improved,” Ahmed warns.
The academic’s essay portrays “democracy” as a “corrupt tradition” where students are not told that “only a few people make the decisions and determine the laws that rules (sic) everyone else.”
Ahmed singles out English as “one of the most damaging subjects,” as children are taught to identify genres of myths, legends, and fables. Thus, Muslim children will be taught from “Greek and Hindu myths” which contain “idolatrous beliefs,” and when they are told, in the mosque, about Mohammad riding a winged horse, they might assume that “this is also a made-up legend.”
The academic attacks religious studies for putting Islam “on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like” and promoting the idea of “inter-faith” and “religious tolerance.”
“Issues such as the definition of women’s awrah [parts of the body that must be covered in front of others] and the concept of men being allowed to marry up to four wives are put on a forum for discussion. Hence, the words of man are being placed above the words of Allah (swt) and His Messenger Mohammad (saw),” Ahmed warns.
“The Islamic State produced mathematicians who surpassed each other in their brilliance, yet this fact is completely ignored,” she laments. “The impression is given that science is purely a Western discipline and that this is part of what makes Western civilization superior.”
Ahmed slams even the teaching of dance in the classroom as “troublesome for Muslim children, especially when they are in mixed boy-girl classes.” Equally problematic, in her opinion, is teachers asking boys and girls to work as partners on classwork or homework.
In conclusion, she writes: “Now is the time for us to recognize that if society is built on Kufr, it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.”
Academic’s Earlier Controversy Over Hizb ut-Tahrir
Ahmed first sparked controversy in 2009, when Michael Gove, Conservative MP and Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, named her in a parliamentary debate on radicalism in schools.
“The head teacher of one of the schools, Farah Ahmed, who has described her past activism with Hizb ut-Tahrir as irrelevant, has designed a curriculum that defines the ruling system of Islam as a khilafah or caliphate, in precise accord with Hizb ut-Tahrir ideology,” Gove said.
Ahmed was receiving £100,000 of taxpayer money to run two private primary schools. Three of the four schools’ trustees were part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which had not yet been proscribed. In 2010, Ahmed said she was no longer a member as she “does not agree with all Hizb ut-Tahrir’s views as a political organisation.”
Ahmed also developed a resource titled “How Islamic is my school?” This text posits that the Islamic view of learning is fundamentally at odds with prioritizing literacy, numeracy, and subject-specific abilities validated by certifications.
“Any one of these things shows an urgent need for reform at Cambridge University. All three together show that this institution is rotten to the core,” Tim Dieppe, head of public policy at the U.K. think tank Christian Concern, told FWI. “There needs to be a full independent inquiry into all three matters. Heads must roll, and a wholesale culture change must be enforced on all departments.”
FWI contacted Ahmed for comment but received an automated response reporting that the academic was away until August 30. Cambridge University has now blocked public access to the profiles and contact details of all its faculty members on its website.
