Next time someone asks me what I mean by ‘suicide of the West’, I’m going to tell them that Cambridge University has a professor who once said Muslims should build ‘advanced weaponry’ for the coming ‘jihad’ to elevate Islam ‘over all other [religions]’. I’m going to let them know that at one of the highest seats of learning in Christendom, on the same dappled lawns walked by William Tyndale, Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, there now skulks an academic who once said ‘Allah’s reward’ will be ‘immeasurable’ for those who make ‘machinery for jihad’. For there it is, in all its snivelling idiocy and decadence: the West’s death wish.
Her name is Farah Ahmed. She’s an assistant research professor in Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department that employed the late fabulist, Jason Arday. Only where his wacky life story had been highly embellished, Ahmed’s is all too real. She was once an activist in the virulently bigoted Islamist outfit, Hizb ut-Tahrir. It was during her mingling with those homophobic, Jew-hating religious supremacists that Ms Ahmed wrote lovingly about ‘jihad’ while lamenting the ‘corrupt tradition[s]’ of the West. Never mind Allah’s reward – Cambridge’s reward for the woman who once spouted such medieval drivel has been an assistant professorship.
It was the sterling reportage of Andrew Gilligan at the Spectator that brought to light Ahmed’s mad old writings. In his latest piece, Gilligan reveals that she once co-authored a crazy paean to jihad with another senior Hizb activist, Nazreen Nawaz. It was published in a Hizb pamphlet in 2002 and republished in 2017 (Ahmed was not involved in the republication). The authors lay out their chillingly intolerant dream: an education system built solely around Islamic pieties, in which nothing will be taught that ‘contradicts with Islam’. ‘Freedom, nationalism, democracy, evolution’ – no such haram idea will get a look-in in the Islamo-dictatorship.
Ahmed and her co-author fantasise about abolishing all schools except Islamic ones. No schools may be ‘established on any other religion’, they say. As for higher education – its sole purpose, as Gilligan summarises, would be to ‘equip Muslims for conquest’. So the only reason to ‘study engineering’ would be to ‘aid the development of machinery for jihad’. The only purpose of a ‘computer technology’ degree would be to make you a whizz at ‘elevat[ing] the Islamic society over all other societies’. The good student would be the student who makes ‘advanced weaponry’ for the coming struggle to raise Islam ‘over all other [religions], as commanded by the Creator’.
Ahmed’s intellectual wet dreams about jihad were accompanied by a staggering disdain for Western values, especially Western education. As Gilligan previously revealed, she wrote about the ‘corrupt tradition’ of democracy. And the depraved idea of ‘religious tolerance’, where Islam is blasphemously put on ‘the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism’. And the horrors of English literature, ‘one of the most damaging subjects’ in education, with all its scandalous stories that ‘contradict Islam’. And the sinfulness of teaching evolution, given it, too, ‘contradict[s] Islam’. And now she’s a prof at Cambridge, alma mater of Darwin. What can you even say?
Ahmed’s apologists will say she’s changed. It’s true that, back in 2010, she said she no longer supports ‘all’ of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s teachings. Yet just last year, she co-authored a toolkit titled ‘How Islamic is my school?’ for ‘educators seeking to centre the Islamic worldview in their schools and classrooms’. A Cambridge project she runs promotes an ‘Islamic curriculum’ that tells kids as young as 12 that Israel uses the threat of Hamas as ‘an excuse’ to ‘justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip’. It also refers to the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas as ‘prisoners of war’ and uses a map in which Israel is erased. I suppose I’ll be called ‘Islamophobic’ if I say I don’t like that such ideas have been allowed to fester at Cambridge.
What the hell is happening there? As with the Arday scandal, the Ahmed controversy speaks to the moral rot of this once towering citadel of thought whose discoveries have done so much to expand the knowledge, health and wonder of humanity. These are the quads where the atom was first split. And where the structure of DNA was discovered. And where Turing honed his genius that helped us slay the Nazis. And where Tyndale and others sowed the intellectual seeds of the Protestant Reformation and the glorious birth of freedom of conscience. ‘Little Germany’ their Cambridge pub was nicknamed, for it was there that they pored over Luther’s revolutionary pamphlets that had been smuggled upon pain of death into England.
And now? Now Cambridge fawns over fabulists like Jason Arday who churned out critical-race dross about how Britpop was racist. Now Cambridge has professors who tweet: ‘White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives.’ Now Cambridge adds trigger warnings to Shakespeare, informing students his plays contain references to ‘sexual violence’ and ‘sexual assault’. Now Cambridge has students who’ve targeted people like me with rowdy protests because we say a lesbian can’t have a cock. From discovering the structure of DNA to swallowing the intellectual voodoo of ‘women with penises’ – ladies and gents, I give you the fall of the West.
From William Tyndale to Farah Ahmed – what a story. One gave his life – literally – to the searingly democratic idea that the Bible should be translated into English in order that every man, of the cloth or not, would be free to read it. The other once dreamt of bending education to the backward, suffocating cause of ‘jihad’. In my view, Cambridge’s employment of Ahmed is not a glitch – rather, her prickly attitude towards ‘Western education’ echoes that of the academy itself, where the obsession of recent years has been to ‘decolonise’ universities of their Western-centric ways. Oh, Cambridge – you thought you would renew yourself through wokeness, but you destroyed yourself. It’s the story of the West.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
It was the sterling reportage of Andrew Gilligan at the Spectator that brought to light Ahmed’s mad old writings. In his latest piece, Gilligan reveals that she once co-authored a crazy paean to jihad with another senior Hizb activist, Nazreen Nawaz. It was published in a Hizb pamphlet in 2002 and republished in 2017 (Ahmed was not involved in the republication). The authors lay out their chillingly intolerant dream: an education system built solely around Islamic pieties, in which nothing will be taught that ‘contradicts with Islam’. ‘Freedom, nationalism, democracy, evolution’ – no such haram idea will get a look-in in the Islamo-dictatorship.
Ahmed and her co-author fantasise about abolishing all schools except Islamic ones. No schools may be ‘established on any other religion’, they say. As for higher education – its sole purpose, as Gilligan summarises, would be to ‘equip Muslims for conquest’. So the only reason to ‘study engineering’ would be to ‘aid the development of machinery for jihad’. The only purpose of a ‘computer technology’ degree would be to make you a whizz at ‘elevat[ing] the Islamic society over all other societies’. The good student would be the student who makes ‘advanced weaponry’ for the coming struggle to raise Islam ‘over all other [religions], as commanded by the Creator’.
Ahmed’s intellectual wet dreams about jihad were accompanied by a staggering disdain for Western values, especially Western education. As Gilligan previously revealed, she wrote about the ‘corrupt tradition’ of democracy. And the depraved idea of ‘religious tolerance’, where Islam is blasphemously put on ‘the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism’. And the horrors of English literature, ‘one of the most damaging subjects’ in education, with all its scandalous stories that ‘contradict Islam’. And the sinfulness of teaching evolution, given it, too, ‘contradict[s] Islam’. And now she’s a prof at Cambridge, alma mater of Darwin. What can you even say?
Ahmed’s apologists will say she’s changed. It’s true that, back in 2010, she said she no longer supports ‘all’ of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s teachings. Yet just last year, she co-authored a toolkit titled ‘How Islamic is my school?’ for ‘educators seeking to centre the Islamic worldview in their schools and classrooms’. A Cambridge project she runs promotes an ‘Islamic curriculum’ that tells kids as young as 12 that Israel uses the threat of Hamas as ‘an excuse’ to ‘justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip’. It also refers to the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas as ‘prisoners of war’ and uses a map in which Israel is erased. I suppose I’ll be called ‘Islamophobic’ if I say I don’t like that such ideas have been allowed to fester at Cambridge.
What the hell is happening there? As with the Arday scandal, the Ahmed controversy speaks to the moral rot of this once towering citadel of thought whose discoveries have done so much to expand the knowledge, health and wonder of humanity. These are the quads where the atom was first split. And where the structure of DNA was discovered. And where Turing honed his genius that helped us slay the Nazis. And where Tyndale and others sowed the intellectual seeds of the Protestant Reformation and the glorious birth of freedom of conscience. ‘Little Germany’ their Cambridge pub was nicknamed, for it was there that they pored over Luther’s revolutionary pamphlets that had been smuggled upon pain of death into England.
And now? Now Cambridge fawns over fabulists like Jason Arday who churned out critical-race dross about how Britpop was racist. Now Cambridge has professors who tweet: ‘White Lives Don’t Matter. As white lives.’ Now Cambridge adds trigger warnings to Shakespeare, informing students his plays contain references to ‘sexual violence’ and ‘sexual assault’. Now Cambridge has students who’ve targeted people like me with rowdy protests because we say a lesbian can’t have a cock. From discovering the structure of DNA to swallowing the intellectual voodoo of ‘women with penises’ – ladies and gents, I give you the fall of the West.
From William Tyndale to Farah Ahmed – what a story. One gave his life – literally – to the searingly democratic idea that the Bible should be translated into English in order that every man, of the cloth or not, would be free to read it. The other once dreamt of bending education to the backward, suffocating cause of ‘jihad’. In my view, Cambridge’s employment of Ahmed is not a glitch – rather, her prickly attitude towards ‘Western education’ echoes that of the academy itself, where the obsession of recent years has been to ‘decolonise’ universities of their Western-centric ways. Oh, Cambridge – you thought you would renew yourself through wokeness, but you destroyed yourself. It’s the story of the West.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
3 comments:
Fully agree. The WEST is now in full fall decline. On the ground few can see it, but on my reckoning we are about a hundred years into the Fall. It began pre WWI with the demise of tonality in music.... something so subtle yet profound. Much of the music since is crap - especially the rise of commercial "pop" music for the masses, but here is not the right place to enter into musicological discussion.
I agree with Anonymous 10am , this decline of the West started round about mid last century with the loss of beauty , truth and morality.. Academia started vilifying Christianity , leading to a vacuum for Marxism. In WW 2 , Islam sided with Hitler and then , Russia groomed complicit Muslim countries to apply Marxist ideology against Israel.
Progressivism in Education was always anti - C hristian but fooled everyone by having a facade of promoting democracy .
Our education system , has been thoroughly infiltrated by Marxism and even some churches support Paolo Freire , a Progressive -Marxist educator . It is inevitable Islam finds a home in our Universities. Christiamity has been hollowed out .of these institutions by .Progressive education , founded by an aggressive atheist seeped in Darwinism. Islam can expediently overlook Darwinism , homosexuals and transgenderism , because it has so much wonderful support from all those other groups mentioned.
However Traditional Education,, with Western ethics and methods is the enemy of Progressive education and gaining strength since Progressive Education has suffered a mortal blow, from having its Whole Language ideology trashed by rigorous scientific research .Newton may rise again .Western Science ( Newtonian methods) is quite tame evangelizing for promoting Western Values but Islam has not produced anything close to Western Science in volume and application to technology.. .
There is nothing ‘extreme’ about Farah Ahmed’s world view. It is mainstream Islam.
The primary affiliation of all right-believing Muslims is to the global Ummah, or Islamic Community, meaning the vast majority of Muslims will never truly identify as citizens of non-Islamic nations they might reside in.
Muslims learn Islamic supremacism from an early age.
Allah tells Muslims at Koran 3:110:
“Ye are the best of Peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah.”
The Kuffaar [non-Muslim] on the other hand are, according to Koran 98.6: the worst of created beings.”
“Kuffaar” (usually translated as “Infidel” or “Non-Believer”) is not a neutral term, but a term of absolute opprobrium.
Muslims learn from childhood that Islam must one day dominate the Kuffaar and supplant all other religions, and that the divine revelation of Allah’s sharia law will be implemented in every corner of the globe.
Koran 9:33:
“It is he [Allah] who has sent his Messenger [Muhammad] with guidance and the religion
of truth, in order for it to be dominant over all other religions …”
Sahih Muslim 2889:
“Verily Allah has shown me the eastern and western part of the earth, and I saw the authority of my Ummah dominate all that I saw.”
Here’s Omar Ahmad, founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the main North American Muslim Brotherhood front organisation, speaking in 1998::
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.
Imprisoned British Islamist, Anjem Choudary, has Tweeted:
“Eventually the whole world will be governed by Sharia & Muslims will have authority over China Russia USA etc. This is the promise of Allah."
Koran 3.19:
“Certainly, Allah’s only Way is Islam … Whoever denies Allah’s signs, then surely Allah is swift in reckoning.”
Muslims are to be the Sword of Allah in this matter. Disbelief has severe consequences, as set out at Koran 3:56:
“And as for those who disbelieve, I will punish them with a severe punishment in this world and the Hereafter."
Allah will punish the disbelievers in the afterlife with hellfire, and it is the role of Muslims to punish them in this world.
Muslims fall into one of two broad camps, depending on how closely they follow Muhammad’s example and instructions:
Cultural Muslims are born into Islam, focus on the positive aspects of their faith, and avoid the harsher teachings. These Friday Night Mosque-goers practice what might be called passive Islam and do not see themselves as at war with non-Muslims.
Religious Muslims pray five times a day, closely follow Islamic teachings, and believe they have a theological obligation to make Islam the world’s dominant religious and political system. They are practising what we might call active Islam’ and are most certainly at war with us.
For convenience, let’s call the second group, Islamists. These are people who believe that society’s rules, values, and laws should be based only around Islam, and that no other kind of society is acceptable.
Based on their reading of Islamic scripture and the deeds, words, and example of Muhammad they believe that violence is an appropriate way to achieve their religious and political goals. This is called terrorism.
And this is what the vile Farah Ahmed has advocated for, her entire adult life.
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