An academic project

Andrew Gilligan at The Spectator:

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.”

Well it’s a “monoculture” kind of thing, in a yes or no sort of way. Is everything that exists the product of one supernatural guy who gave an order? (If so, doesn’t that require another supernatural someone, and another for that one, and infinite regress?) If we think that can’t be right, and we point to all the reasons for thinking so, is that monoculture or is it just…well, thinking? Why is One Magic Dude more polycultural than a more detailed body of knowledge about the origins of matter, of stars and planets, of biological creatures?

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

[To belabor the obvious, this was written before Arday’s suicide.]

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.

That takes my breath away a bit. What is Cambridge doing making a religious fanatic an assistant research professor of education?

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?”

Note the word “assumption”. It’s not actually an assumption. It’s the “Islamic religious beliefs” that are based on assumptions, aka one book written by one ignorant fanatic hundreds of years ago. Putting the word “religious” in front of the word “beliefs” does not make the beliefs true or well-founded.

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.”

Note the words “colonial hegemony”. Some forms of “hegemony” are good to have. The hegemony of science in science education is one of those forms.

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.”

Ah yes, resist the influence of the scientific monoculture and replace it with the Islamic monoculture. Such an upgrade.