British universities are still letting Islamist hate preachers speak on campus facilities despite widespread condemnation.
The Peter Tatchell Foundation reports that last month, students at the University of Westminster initially invited hard line speaker Murtaza Khan to speak before replacing him with Uthman Lateef, another speaker with extremist views. Brunel University in northeast London also invited Lateef and Dr Khalid Fikry to speak at their annual dinner.
More recently, the University of East London’s Islamic Society received permission to hold its annual dinner, at which Murtaza Khan and Uthman Lateef were due to speak, in the main lecture theatre at its Docklands campus. The event was advertised on Facebook as “segregated”, and there were separate contact numbers for “brothers” and “sisters”.
After much pressure from the counter-extremism Student Rights group and the Peter Tatchell Foundation, the university finally agreed that the Islamic society should not be allowed to meet on campus premises if their events featured hate preachers and were segregated. The event was cancelled.
Student Rights said that holding a segregated event on Campus could violate the university’s equality policy, and that it could be against the law for a taxpayer-funded body to allow gender segregation.
They also pointed out that seeing as the far right British National Party is prohibited on campuses for expressing extreme views, it is only fair that Muslims who espouse extremist views are also blocked.
In 2007, Murtaza Khan was shown in a documentary asking “for how long do we have to see our mothers, sisters and daughters having to uncover themselves before these filthy non-Muslim doctors?”
He has also called non-Muslims “enemies towards us”, and has said that homosexuality is an “abominable action that goes against humanity.”
In 2009, Uthman Lateef told an audience at the East London Mosque: “If we are teaching the way of life of the disbelievers, of the kuffar, Allah will bring humiliation on us” and that Muslims should not be misled by those advocating Islamic modernisation, such as “democratic Islam”.
Peter Tatchell said the cancellation of the event was “a victory for equality and humanitarian values. Sincere thanks to the University of London for rejecting hate preachers and discrimination.”
“The swift, positive response of UEL stands in contrast to some other universities which, in the name of tolerance, collude with Islamist intolerance by allowing extremist preaching on university premises.”
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