Jason Arday's story was riveting for many reasons, but it blew up because it was perhaps the best example of how an obsession with DEI corrupts cultures in our elite institutions.
But the corruption goes far deeper than hiring fabulists and incompetents as mascots for "Team Academia." Arday may have been the equivalent of the nonbinary turtle that was just trotted out by the Toronto Tempo, but the rot at Cambridge is not limited to pretending that a man whose great academic achievement was, literally, interviewing himself and publishing the results in academic journals.
Q: "So... Tell me about your life as a black scholar. What did you do today, for example?"
— Rona Dinur (@RonaDinur) August 24, 2026
A: "Today I interviewed myself about what it's like to be a black scholar and wrote about it"
I didn't even know that autoethnography was a thing. Geez.
Well, it turns out that Cambridge has a lot more dangerous hiring proclivities than hiring fabulists and trying to turn them into "the best in the world"; it also hires literal jihadist terrorists.
Cambridge University's education faculty – former home of Jason Arday – has appointed as assistant research professor who wrote that Muslims should study engineering and computers 'to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other… pic.twitter.com/i3NdSiie2S
— The Spectator (@spectator) August 25, 2026
Cambridge University's education faculty – former home of Jason Arday – has appointed as assistant research professor who wrote that Muslims should study engineering and computers 'to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens.'.
Two weeks ago we covered one chapter Ahmed wrote in a Hizb pamphlet – published in 2002, and republished in 2017 (Ahmed was not involved in the republication) – where she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong.
However, the same pamphlet includes a second, even more radical chapter, co-written by Ahmed and another senior Hizb activist, Nazreen Nawaz, head of its women’s section.
This describes Hizb’s plan to create a fully Islamic education system as part of the Islamic dictatorship, the Khilafah, which is its core goal. As the chapter puts it: ‘nothing will be contained within the curriculum that contradicts with Islam, such as the teaching of the ideas of freedom, nationalism, democracy or evolution in a positive light’.
‘Nor can there be any schools established on any other religion, sect or race… Even the non-Muslims need to be educated under the educational curriculum of Islam… by pushing them to think about the correct belief in life.’
✍️ Andrew Gilligan
I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose. Hiring terrorists has been a thing in academia for quite a while, and the University of Chicago almost specialized in the practice.
But like Charlie Brown with Lucy's football, I keep assuming that this time will be different. I just assumed that Cambridge hadn't fallen that far, and of course I was wrong.
Arday's case looks mild by comparison; after all, there is little indication that his work was focused on promoting actual political violence and the replacement of Western Society by radical jihadists. In other words, you would have expected him to be a good fit for Bernie Sanders' staff, and not Abdul El-Sayed's.
How naive of me, and for that matter, most of us. Cambridge University, after all, gained fame in the 1950s for having churned out actual communist traitors, so why should we expect that it wouldn't have continued and updated its traditional role as the official academy-washing of the violent Left?
Actually, the answer is simple, if dispiriting. Cambridge is also the home of the second-largest number of Nobel prize winners in the world, after Harvard. If there is any better camouflage, I'm not sure what it could be.
No doubt Cambridge will trot out excuses, such as "academic freedom," to justify hiring an actual jihadist who wants her students to study engineering to better kill people (many Jihadis are in fact engineers for this reason), but her sins are not academic at all; they stem from using her position to train people to become terrorists.
It's striking that the Arday story doesn't seem to have created more curiosity about Cambridge's, and academia's as a whole, fascination with terrorists. Abdul El-Sayed's sister is an academic at the University of Chicago and is also quite open about wanting to kill Westerners and destroy the University of Chicago itself.
You would assume that would be disqualifying, but apparently it is the opposite.
Vdeo shows professor at University of Chicago, Eman Abdelhadi, Abdul El-Sayed's sister at 2025 socialist event
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) August 14, 2026
“F*ck the University of Chicago, it's evil, colonial land ... but it’s my best shot at power.”
Says she's there to "organize" people
pic.twitter.com/NI8taFXpVt
What has happened to the West's cultural immune system? The institutions that at one time represented the apotheosis of our culture are now leading the way to its suicide.
It's time for a reconquista.
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