What is going on in some of London's Universities?

Harry's Place has two very interesting pieces up this week. This piece relates how:

"University College London Union has defied calls to cancel a provocative talk organised by the Ahlul Bayt Islamic Society, stoking up anger from students and the Iranian ex-patriot community who accuse the University of fermenting Islamic extremism and implicitly condoning the brutal actions of the regime in Iran.

Entitled, 1979 – The Revolution that Shook the World, the event takes place on the 11th of February, coinciding with expected protests and possible fatalities in Iran on the penultimate day of the 11 Days of Dawn, which mark the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the 1979 revolution.

Attending, the guest speakers include Islamic convert Yvonne Ridley from the controversial Iranian state-owned 24-hour broadcaster Press TV, which is currently under an Ofcom investigation for breaching the code of conduct.

More controversially still, the event has earmarked a seat for Dr Mohammad Marandi from Tehran University. Marandi has stated his support for the execution of protesters, and recently condoned the execution of Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour who was aged as young as 19, saying on Al Jazeera “there isn’t much sympathy for these two people.”

...

Revelations of this latest controversy come hot on the heels of damaging allegations that UCL is rife with Islamic extremism, following the failed terrorist bombing on Christmas Day by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who studied at UCL and was the president of the Islamic Society in 2006-2007, the second Islamic society at UCL alongside Ahlul Bayt.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph in January disclosed the number of radical Islamic preachers who’ve attended talks held in the Darwin Lecture theatre, which ironically include “Muslim radicals who have challenged the theory of evolution”.

Of the keynote speakers invited, one had “suggested that homosexuals and opponents of Islam should be killed”, reports The Telegraph. Abu Usamah, a preacher at Birmingham’s Green Lane mosque had been filmed in a 2007 Channel Four documentary, where he praised Osama bin Laden and said: “If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs who should be murdered, that’s my freedom of speech, isn’t it?”"

And this piece relates how:

"earlier this week ... two SOAS academics were pictured receiving awards from President Ahmadinejad. SOAS is one of those universities that have also previously accepted cash from the Iranian government...

One of those academics who met Ahmadinejad recently was Mohammad Abdel Haleem, King Fahd Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East, and Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies at SOAS. This Centre was set up following a £1m donation from the Saudi government, specifically from King Fahd himself.

Haleem’s appointment at SOAS in June 1995 was a controversial one, coming in the context of thirty SOAS employees protesting the £1m donation that the university had received from King Fahd. One academic said at the time that ‘Saudi Arabia is known to have a certain agenda on Islam and there could be implications about accepting money from such a source’. However, according to Arabic newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, the academics were also angry that Haleem – who had been a lecturer at SOAS for several years – had been appointed to a professorship at the Centre without the post being advertised inside or outside the university. The reaction to the donations within SOAS led to the establishment of a working party in order to ‘codify the principles on working with sponsors’.

Haleem’s links to King Fahd go even further – he is also one of seven trustees at the Saudi-run King Fahd Academy, which offers primary and secondary school education and operates ‘under the support and supervision of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in London’. This academy got itself into a spot of bother in 2007 after admitting that it used textbooks that called Jews ‘apes’ and Christians ‘pigs’. Perhaps he was unaware of the content of the textbooks – yet his willingness to accept patronage from Ahmadinejad is undoubtedly a black mark on his record.

Equally culpable are those universities who accept donations from such regimes in the first place, of which SOAS is a clear example. In correspondence with them last year, SOAS told me that their donation from Iran came with ‘no strings attached’ and that ‘The donations from Iran and Saudi Arabia have had no detrimental impact on the University’. Yet this week, Durham University – who have recently accepted cash from Iran themselves – admitted that they have ‘taken steps…to sever all financial ties with…any representatives of the Iranian regime’, as ‘Iranian money comes with strings attached’.

SOAS has obviously managed to retain a better working relationship with the Islamic Republic than Durham. It will be interesting to see how the other British universities that Iran tells us it has been in negotiations with – specifically to fund Islamic studies programmes – gets on."

All is obviously well at SOAS and UCL and there is absolutely no way that Saudi Arabia or Iran could possibly be influencing policy at these two institutes of learning.