“War is deceit”, said Muhammad, profit of Islam
An academic with historic links to the now banned Hizb ut-Tahrir terror group has been recruited by Cambridge University to the same faculty as ex-professor Jason Arday.
Arday decided to kick the bucket after being exposed as a fraud.
The University of Cambridge is facing fresh scrutiny after it emerged that a former member of the now-proscribed extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir was given a role as assistant research professor in the institution’s faculty of education last year.
According to the publication, Dr Ahmed’s chapter for the 2002 Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet ‘Education and Identity’ was republished in 2017.
Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed in the UK in 2024.
The Spectator reported that in the pamphlet, she wrote: ‘The Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.’
She attacked schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam’ and added: ‘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.’
Cambridge defends academic over ‘produce weaponry for Jihad’ article
Cambridge has now told Jewish News that Ahmed says the comments were not written by her and do not represent her views.
A spokesperson for the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “These comments were made in an article to which Dr Ahmed contributed as a historical researcher more than 20 years ago. She has said that they are not her words and do not reflect her views. Dr Ahmed also reiterated that she ended her association with Hizb ut-Tahrir more than 15 years ago, long before the group was proscribed. Her appointment at Cambridge followed a standard recruitment process and complied fully with the University’s legal obligations as an employer.”
Ahmed previously said in 2010 that she no longer supported “all” the views of Hizb ut-Tahrir and had not recently been involved with the organisation.
The revelations follow separate scrutiny of an education project led by Ahmed which promotes an Islamic curriculum. The Spectator reported last week that teaching material promoted by the project described Israelis taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October as “prisoners of war”, called Hamas an “excuse” used by Israel to justify attacks on Gaza and included a map on which Israel did not appear.
Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed by the UK government on 19 January 2024. Announcing the ban, the government described it as an antisemitic organisation which “actively promotes and encourages terrorism” and pointed to its praise for the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023.
