Muslim academic at Cambridge says Western education is a threat to Muslim values

[HermioneWeasley]

a Muslim academic has said this -

“In the pamphlet, which has been seen by The Spectator, Ahmed writes that “the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values”.

Does this mean that the opposite is true? That sharia law is a threat to western values?

Jason Arday colleague called western education a threat to Islam
www.thetimes.com/article/8fa7a88d-ca07-4e60-9eef-454786bb3fcc?shareToken=30eb0c406a378da42e737d3c00a55468

Well go back to your country then isn’t it

In what way?

Pretty obviously, because Cambridge is a bastion of Western thought and education, so it's baffling that she is enjoying the massive privileges that employment at Cambridge brings while saying that they are antithetical to her religion. Or is she not actually a believing Muslim?

Wow - I had not heard this before. I
went and Googled - interesting so thank you.

Surely education is a threat to all religious beliefs

Good point! Look at the USA for Christian right wing control of teaching.

Not sure she should be sacked for something she wrote in 2002 and has since said she no longer believes though.

I don’t like these views and think it’s rather foolish of her to espouse them because those values can be and are being used in at least one Muslim country to prevent her being an academic, but she is free to express herself. And I agree, I’m rather more concerned at the idea of her as a headteacher shaping those very young minds than her as a very junior academic.

But she wrote this in 2002, and has distanced herself from the group she was associated with since? The article makes it sound like she said this whilst working at Cambridge, that's not the case.

What sort of things are you against teaching children? Why should education not be agnostic to religion? There are loads of religions. To be truly inclusive to the various religions a curriculum would be ridiculously restricted.
I am imagining a scenario where teachers would have to deliver a sexual health lesson then add caveats that in some circumstances it is fine to rape small children.

Ok... so one Musim woman wrote something disagreeable 24 years ago and we are upset that Cambridge hired her into an assistant research position today. I'm not sure how old this lady was in 2002 but I was 16 then and I would have said some ridiculous things I'm sure. That would be going back to the days of MySpace and before facebook.

I feel like the Times is on a bit of a witch hunt and trying to hit lots of buzz words that will get people riled up here. I expect for a lot of people their views in early adulthood change as they mature and experience the world. The fact she hasn't published anything similar more recently or kept up with the group would suggest this. We rehabilitate criminals, so should we really be saying we should never be rehabilitated from our past views?

Agree it’s odd to bring it up after so many years. The modern take on it is more interesting to me. Because we do feel that free speech is under threat and the number of Muslims and the issues caused by them continues to grow at pace.
id feel the same about fundamental Christians if I was in parts of the US. Religion should have NO PLACE in government or education

There is an opinion (which many academics do hold) that western education is antithetical to religion generally.

western education now encourages examination of beliefs and attitudes and critical evaluation of them. Science focuses on visible evidence gathering about the world around us and is based on accepting and rejecting opinions based on that.

many academics believe that the spread of this kind of education in the past has led to declines in strong beliefs in Christianity in western nations (sometimes referred to as science has left no space for god) and it’s certainly encouraged a more critical attitude to religion generally.

if this is the case for Christianity I don’t see why it wouldn’t be the case for Islam and in fact any other religion,

so on that level what she is quoted as saying is simply a widely held opinion about western style education and religion generally.

It has been raised because she is in the same department as another academic that is all other the media at the moment. The main issue is who is giving these people jobs there without checking them out and their previous work or writings.

I don't think many people will be shocked at her beliefs or past beliefs or whatever. Not if they are living in a multi cultural community anyway. Many people do have similar views so this isn't shocking but she should not have been employed because of the more terrorist sympathy issues associated with her past.

Yes, but will they? Won’t they be terrified of being seen as racist/non inclusive?

It’s frightening (to me, anyway) how such formerly highly regarded academic establishments have been enslaved by ‘wokery’.

Education is a threat to most religions to be fair. The more we learn about science, history, culture etc, the more we learn that what's in most religions is nonsense. There could equally be an article about saying that Western education is a threat to Christianity and it wouldn't cause have as much outrage, I'd bet.

I agree with this. I also want to say thanks for this thread because I read the article on the times app this morning and the comments were mostly from older men “go back to where you came from”, I’m grateful for MN for providing a more balanced view.

It would be great if she kept away from western education, then. That would show respect for others.

As it is, she is contributing to the campaign to convert more voters to Reform/Restore.

That's fair enough, and thanks for the better context, though it's still an odd thing for an academic working in the UK to say

I'm not sure the woke position is that Western values (or Western educational values) are a threat to Muslim ones, which seems to be her position.

Then again, wokery to me seems to be the process of problematising all sorts of unproblematic things, while failing to notice quite obvious tensions between different bits of the communities that woke thinks of itself as supporting.

When I was at university one of our professors impressed on us that 'not all good things are the same thing'. I've always remembered that, but there are a shocking number of people to whom it seems never to have occurred.