The Cambridge don who once had links to an Islamist terror group

Think Jason Arday’s appointment was a stain on the University of Cambridge? Meet Farah Ahmed, Arday’s colleague in the faculty of education until his resignation last week. Now an assistant research professor, Ahmed once supported the now-proscribed Islamist terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and remains an outspoken critic of ‘Western education’.

Arday’s outlandish claims have provided a hilarious backdrop to this long, hot summer. His seemingly tall tales of athletic and charitable feats achieved despite a series of extraordinarily unfortunate events – such as running umpteen marathons with a broken leg and completing a PhD viva days after an operation to remove a brain tumour – have given us all a good laugh. Ahmed’s past is altogether more troubling. She was promoted to assistant research professor in 2025 after spending the previous six years at Cambridge, employed as a research associate specialising in Islamic education. Before that, she was head of an Islamic primary school and contributed to a book, Education and Identity, published by Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2002 and republished in 2017. The organisation was banned in the UK in 2024.

Arday’s alleged plagiarism exposes his lack of intellectual credibility and points to the low expectations of an appointment committee, seemingly in thrall to diversity, equity and inclusion. Ahmed’s Hizb ut-Tahrir book chapter revealed her view that ‘Western education’ should be condemned as a ‘threat’ to the ‘beliefs and values’ of the Muslim community. Her promotion suggests not just a few oddball dons but also a broader culture sympathetic to her criticisms of British schooling and Western values.

As Andrew Gilligan notes in the Spectator, Ahmed’s 2002 book chapter attacked the national curriculum as a system for indoctrinating Muslim children into accepting the principles of a secular capitalist society. She criticised schools for teaching that ‘polygamy or marriage under the age of 16’ is ‘archaic and discriminatory to women’. And she condemned teachers who espouse the virtue of democracy, which she described as a ‘corrupt tradition’, where if ‘decision makers decide to make bombing Iraq or homosexuality legal, as they currently have, there is nothing anyone can do about it’.

Ahmed also attacked religious education in Britain for the heinous crime of promoting ‘religious tolerance’, because ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like’. She attacked English literature, ‘one of the most damaging subjects’ a school can teach, because too many stories ‘reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam’. And she condemned the teaching of science, especially evolution, because ‘Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’.

It seems that Ahmed’s biggest problem was not with the content of education but with the way that schools are run. Integration was a particular bugbear in this book chapter. Teachers often expect boys and girls to work together, but Ahmed complained that, ‘As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that Western society encourages’. And then there’s the risk of integration with non-Muslim children, in playgrounds ‘full of the competitiveness and individualism that Western culture encourages’, which ‘moulds their personalities away from Islam’. Integration, she argued, is an attempt by schools to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam’.

Over the past few weeks, Jason Arday has been ridiculed for the inanity of his output. In speeches, interviews and academic papers alike, he spouts forth a garbled mixture of song lyrics, bizarre platitudes about the importance of knitting the world together through love, and woke buzzwords like ‘white privilege’ and ‘oppression’. It is word salad with extra dressing, and Cambridge University fully deserves to be criticised for elevating someone so intellectually vacuous to such a lofty position. But there is no lack of clarity when it comes to Ahmed’s past words. Her loathing of Britain’s schools and Western values is clear for all to see.

Ahmed’s views may well have changed in the years since she wrote the book chapter. Indeed, Ahmed has since distanced herself from Hizb ut-Tahrir. In 2010, the then headteacher told a Charity Commission investigation into Hizb ut-Tahrir’s alleged links to the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF), which runs primary schools in Slough, that she was no longer involved with the group. She said that she did not agree with ‘all of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s views as a political organisation’.

Still, it’s worth noting that last year Ahmed co-authored ‘How Islamic is my school?’, a toolkit for school leaders wanting to ‘evaluate and create a development plan’ for ‘educators seeking to centre the Islamic worldview in their schools and classrooms’.

According to the Spectator, Ahmed continues to be director of the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), which, in 2023, co-hosted a conference Ahmed helped to organise on Islam, science and education. The event aimed to ‘recognise the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project’, and to encourage participants to ‘consider challenges’ to the view that ‘sees science as “objective knowledge”’. That same year, Ahmed also helped organise a conference designed to help attendees ‘unlearn conventional teacher education and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development’ in order to prepare Muslim learners for ‘the akhira‘, or everlasting life after death.

Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education knew that Ahmed was organising these events. More than that, it provided institutional sponsorship, both branding and resources, for work that challenged the underlying academic and social principles of British schooling. Ahmed’s promotion shows that her work was celebrated.

Cambridge may try to convince the world that it was taken in by Arday’s improbable claims and seductive life story. But Ahmed’s hiring potentially reveals a far more disturbing truth: that those at the very top of our academic institutions seemingly have contempt for education and a deep-rooted loathing of all that Britain stands for.