Why is Cambridge platforming Islamic creationism?

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms 
creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. 
It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to 
“actively resist” the science of evolution.

At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, 
Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an 
example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.”

It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education 
faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator 
Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research 
professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since 
banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ahmed’s extraordinary CV, and her 
long record of grossly bigoted, extremist and separatist views, were 
revealed by a 2002 pamphlet exposed by The Spectator on Tuesday.

IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the 
Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of 
Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing 
fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.

IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on 
“Islamic scientific critical consciousness” which asks: “Does the common 
modern biological assumption that humans have common ancestry with other 
life forms conflict with [Islamic] religious beliefs about God creating 
Adam and Eve?”

The author of this paper, Usama Javed Mirza, was at the time a 
researcher at Cambridge University’s faculty of education and at Ahmed’s 
IELC. He still is, according to his LinkedIn entry.

The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education 
for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make 
the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.”

It adds that “fitna” (trial or temptation) “may occur, for example, when 
a Muslim student in the science classroom begins to believe that humans 
emerged on Earth without any role played by the Creator.”

It says that fitna “boil[s] down to two beliefs being inculcated in 
students that are problematic from an Islamic standpoint,” namely that 
“the meaning of existence is socially constructed as an evolutionary 
response. There is no afterlife or soul; and the universe exists by 
chance, and runs according to mindless laws of physics…. To counter 
these hegemonic ideas, it is not enough just to intellectually dispel 
them. Rather… it is necessary to also instil within students a capacity 
to actively resist the influence of this monoculture.”

On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator 
revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant 
professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, 
she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned 
democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching 
that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has 
also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of 
evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict 
Islam.” She said in 2010 that she was no longer a member of Hizb 
ut-Tahrir and did not agree with “all” its views.

After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive 
action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, 
presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools 
checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they 
have.)

Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to 
ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic 
freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly 
agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should 
have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging 
subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write 
that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and 
numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University 
should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country.

Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as 
debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, 
anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research.

But it does.


Andrew Gilligan