TOI correspondent from London: Cambridge University hired an academic who once supported proscribed Islamist terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir, described Western education as a “threat” to Muslims and condemned democracy.Farah Ahmed is assistant research professor at the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, the same faculty as Jason Arday, the controversial black professor who was recently forced to quit following allegations of plagiarism.Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Sunni terror group which aims to establish a caliphate ruled under Islamic law. The group is proscribed in Britain.Ahmed, who was appointed last year to the post where she is responsible for postgraduate research and teaching undergraduates, wrote a chapter in a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, “Education and Identity”, in 2002, republished in 2017, obtained by the Spectator, that said “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 … 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.”Democracy, she wrote, is a “corrupt tradition”.She criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage and polygamy are wrong and for putting the value of Islam “on the same level as Hinduism, Sikhism and the like”.Science, fairytales and Romeo and Juliet are problems as “Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam”, she wrote.She criticised the UK national curriculum as a form of “systematic indoctrination” to “build model British citizens”. “Naturally, such a system will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the aqeedah (belief system) of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this,” she said.In 2010 she said she was no longer a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir.A spokesperson for Cambridge’s Faculty of Education said: “The faculty is committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law. All members of our community are encouraged to exercise their rights to freedom of speech, including to challenge ideas or theories they disagree with through scholarship and robust debate.”
