Foreign Muslim Funding of Western Universities

^{Excerpt of a June 26 article originally titled “Western Universities: The Best Indoctrination Money Can Buy.”}

Oxford’s Middle East Centre “has received substantial sums of money from sources in the Middle East ... there is a clear risk that donors will seek to influence the output and activities of the MEC.” – Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence, 2009.

[T]here is a growing threat to Western leadership around the world. The threat is not Islamic terrorism (although that is a real and growing threat, especially in Europe, but increasingly in the United States). The threat is not about growing Muslim demographics (although this is taking its toll in Europe, too). The threat is not even from the rise in influence of Islam across the globe. Those are genuine issues; Western leaders have so far failed adequately to respond to the threats they represent.

The clear and present danger here eclipses all the others: it is to the values of the Enlightenment. If not curtailed, this risk could usher in the abandonment of the very intellectual freedoms on which our wider freedoms rest. It is our complicity in the rapid and so far unstoppable growth of direct Islamic (and indeed Islamist) control over whole departments and centers in a burgeoning number of Western universities in Europe and the USA.

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Do a handful of donations from Muslim governments to a number of European and American universities merit an entire article that starts out with claims that Western civilization is under threat? As a matter of fact, the scale of the donations is far beyond a handful, the universities involved are among the top academies in the world, the money involved is hundreds of billions of dollars, and the targets of Islamic finance are, for the most part, specific and form part of a distinct agenda. Some money may be given to business schools or science departments, but the overwhelming majority goes to support or create large departments and academic centers for Middle East, Islamic, or Arabic Studies.

There is a seeming logic in this – aren’t extremely rich Muslim states entitled to further the study of their own societies, history, and religion?Shouldn’t they have an interest in creating a corps of knowledgeable men and women with the requisite language skills and close familiarity with the subjects they first study then teach, or with which they engage as government advisors, civil servants with governments, the UN or international NGOs, think tank members, public experts, media analysts and perhaps politicians? Well, if they observed complete neutrality and left academics to their own counsel, their input would pass as simple generosity or as a contribution to good relations within the international community. What could be nicer? Isn’t the Islamic world badly misunderstood in the West, and wouldn’t more teaching and research on it and its beliefs be a real boon? And how can someone like myself, who has spent a lifetime studying, teaching and writing about Islamic and Middle Eastern subject think badly of such an endeavour?

One obvious criticism is the sheer scale of the operation, meaning that fundamentalist Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar now effectively exercise a swathe of influence over the way in which Islam and Middle East Studies are taught in key Western universities. The dilemma for the universities is a harbinger of crises to come. Even fairly rich universities such as Harvard and Oxford experience financial difficulties. State funds are often hard or impossible to obtain; academics have to scramble to find funding for their projects, their jobs or their departments.

Universities have responded in a number of ways. One has been to bring in more and more students from abroad, including extremely high numbers from Islamic countries (where the standard of education is almost uniformly poor). ICEF Monitor reports:

There are also large numbers of Saudi students in Canada and the UK.

The number of Saudi students in the US increased 2,000 percent from 2005 to 2015.

A second response for a small number of universities has been to open satellite campuses in foreign countries, several in the Gulf. For example, University College London, Heriot-Watt University, New York University and Ireland’s Royal College of Surgeons run programs, respectively, in Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Bahrain.

Unsurprisingly, these campuses are far from free from external supervision. According to Professor Stephen F. Eisenman of Northwestern University (which has a branch in Qatar), “The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression, and counts among its allies several oppressive regimes or groups.”

Problematic as all this is, it is eclipsed by the impact on the study of the Islamic world in Western universities at home. Starting with the UK alone, Arab News reports:

Here, as well, is a summary of moneys given to U.S. universities, dating back as far as 1976: In a 2009 study of the funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities, Robin Simcox, then a Research Fellow for the Centre for Social Cohesion, provides detailed tables and longer commentaries on the provision of funds to Arabic and Islamic Studies. A Degree of Influence[4] looks at eleven universities, including some with major centers for Islamic and Middle East Studies, such as Oxford (22 entries), Cambridge, London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Edinburgh, Durham and Exeter. Some of his observations are pertinent. Writing of Oxford’s heavily-endowed Middle East Centre, he notes that Of Cambridge, he writes: What does this unprecedented influence from countries and individuals with low expectations for academic freedom bring to our most revered institutions of learning? There are some positives. The money can allow genuine scholars to lecture or carry out valuable research, to teach languages such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish or Urdu (although not, of course, Hebrew), and to hold conferences open to a wide array of colleagues. All that is to the good, provided academics steer clear of controversy and subjects that upset their donors. In truth, academic freedom is at risk.

What so many fail or prefer not to grasp is that the subventions from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular are part of a much wider pattern. The Saudis for decades have disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars in order to propagate their puritan form of Islam, Wahhabism, across the globe, while building hundreds of mosques, schools, libraries, and Islamic centres, and sending out streams of hardline preachers trained in their seminaries and Islamic universities, to spread their message to Muslims everywhere, creating and financing bodies for Islamic missionary work, recruiting young Muslims to commit to an extreme form of their faith – all to the end of making the Saudi state the key player in the world of Islam and a leader in the propagation of Islam in the West. That is the nature of the doctrine. Deep pockets for academic study in Europe and North America are stitched tightly against their pockets that fund the missionary work and the enforcement of the most fundamentalist form of the Islamic faith.

Another way of looking at it is that earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Shaykh Abd al-'Aziz bin-Abdullah al-Shaykh, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to play chess. He is far from the first to do so. He justifies the ban by saying, “The game of chess is a waste of time and an opportunity to squander money. It causes enmity and hatred between people”. On February 3, 2016, a young Saudi cleric, Shaykh Sa’ad al-'Atiq, appeared on a fatwa advice programme onal-Ahwaz TV, and stated that if people publish pictures on social media sites, someone else may copy them and apply sorcery to them, which will result in the original poster becoming ill with cancer and other diseases. He even says he knows many cases of this. Over the past several years, several people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia on charges of witchcraft and sorcery.

Saudi Grand Mufti Shaykh Abd al-'Aziz bin Abdullah al-Shaykh recently issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to play chess.

In May 2016, I read that another Saudi shaykh, Salih bin Fawzan Al Fawzan, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, said that, “taking pictures is prohibited if not for a necessity — not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything”. This, of course, is in direct line with the ancient ban on images of living creatures that has had such a marked effect on Islamic art. It is not hard to see that, if this is the height of scholarship in Saudi Arabia, their motives in financing academic study in Western universities may not be as noble as some would like to believe.

The Saudi antipathy to critical, rational, and secular scholarship is surely a warning. More than one Saudi shaykh, including the notorious Grand Mufti Bin Baz, have declared that the earth is stationary and that the sun revolves around it. Some are still doing so. Of course, better educated Saudis and others will find this laughable; but the fatwa declaring it has become the basis for intense debate among the highly religious.

The moment Western scholarship infringes the sensitivities of the Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis, Bahrainis and others, the barriers go up. Academics are denied visas to attend conferences, criticism of Gulf states is toned down, debate is shifted away from the Gulf monarchies themselves, and, compared to study of other Arab regions, rigorous critiques on subjects in the Gulf, such as political reform, human rights and suppression of dissent are largely excluded. According to Kristian Coates Ulrichsen of Rice University’s Baker Institute, “Almost every centre of Middle East studies in the UK is linked somehow to a Gulf backer. It’s created dilemmas, especially over the last few years as the threshold for self-tolerance of any dissenting view has got lower.”

One of those “dilemmas” is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. The students join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties. America’s Campus Watch monitoring organization keeps a close eye on this sort of abuse by identifying teachers and researchers who go far outside the boundaries of balanced academic discourse to mislead, indoctrinate, and validate student extremists. It exposes professors who make exaggerated claims about Islamophobia or who offer support to terrorist entities such as Hamas. Its steady record of news associated with Middle East Studies provides ample evidence of the distortions now hawked as balanced scholarship.

But for the clearest evidence that Gulf backers cannot be entrusted with the support of Western university studies of Islam and the Middle East, we need not look further than one of the earliest cases of Saudi investment in the field. In 1981, the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education paid for a lectureship at Britain’s Newcastle University, to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies.[7] The appointee, a non-Muslim British teacher with a solid research record, embarked on an ambitious range of topics designed to give students a wide background in Islamic history and doctrine. Five years later, funding for his post was abruptly ended. The reason was that he included among his courses lectures on Sufism and Shi’ism – vital subject for any study of Islam, yet, to the Wahhabis, both anathema.

This was bad enough – academics at neighbouring Durham University’s Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies were vociferous in condemning the action and the reason given for it but the Saudis went further. They appointed (unilaterally, without any involvement with an interview by a university board) a Saudi teacher with no qualifications whatsoever in Islamic Studies (his PhD was in English Literature). The department and the university, eager to receive more money, allowed this amateur to teach and examine their students for several years more, after which the post fell by the wayside.

This is one of the most remarkable academic stories of recent history. A dismissal and an appointment based solely upon religious doctrine. But it had its effect. Other academics in the field, receiving or hoping to receive Saudi funding, now had their eyes open: There are topics, however important within the subject, that anyone who wants to keep his job must steer clear of. There are teachers who have research and publication interests in those topics who should not be appointed to Saudi-financed posts. In 1981, the Saudis were dipping their toes in the water. Now they are offshore, swimming in the strong currents.

Fundamentalist Islam, backed by vast monetary power, is corrupting our dearest Enlightenment values. This May, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Muslim body likened to the United Nations, prohibited eleven gay and transgender organizations from attending a conference at the UN on research to end the AIDS epidemic.

It has to be assumed that the real reason for this was the deep-seated homophobia within the Muslim world. Potentially life-saving medical advances were blocked because Islam proscribes homosexuality (Qur’an: 77: 80-84).

We cannot continue to live like this. We cannot let hardline Muslims and Muslim states elbow aside their reform-minded brethren and trample on our most essential freedoms. Without the example and standards set up by Western nations, the Muslim world itself will fall into even greater decline, and that will lead to greater violence everywhere. If we owe it to ourselves to resist this onslaught on our values, we also owe it to the Muslim world to protect it from its own resistance to and fear of change.

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[4] Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence: The funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities, Centre for Social Cohesion, London, 2009.

[5] A Degree of Influence, p. 35.

[6] Ibid, p. 64

[7] See Daniel Easterman. New Jerusalems, London, 1992, pp.92-93.