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.