Even Muslim countries are terrified of Britain’s Islamists

In yet another blow to Britain’s reputation on the global stage, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has curbed state funding for its citizens seeking to enrol at UK universities, over concerns they will be radicalised by Islamists.

As reported in the Telegraph last week, the Gulf state has taken this drastic step because of the influence in the UK of the Muslim Brotherhood – a transnational Sunni Islamist organisation, which is a designated terror group in the UAE. It is also banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The UAE has long offered Emirati students generous grants – including rent and living allowances – for studying ‘priority’ subjects at British universities. These scholarships have now ended because, according to a source quoted in the Telegraph, ‘the UAE doesn’t want its kids to be radicalised on campus’.

This is not the first time that the UK has been embarrassed for being a soft touch on Islamism by a Muslim country. In January last year, the UAE placed eight UK-based organisations on its local terror list on the grounds of their alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Most of these entities, which range from property firms to video-production outlets, are registered in London. Then, in April, the head of the Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, warned that the UK should treat poor integration as a national-security issue. He said that young British Muslims had grown disillusioned because of conflicts in the Middle East, advising the UK that ‘a political situation outside should not interfere with integration inside’.

The UAE’s latest decision should hardly come as a surprise. Indeed, for some time, British universities have embraced the very extremism that Muslim-majority countries have long sought to root out.

For me personally, the news is a bitter pill to swallow. Having entered Britain’s university system as a teenager and leaving it as a 28-year-old with a doctorate, I took a great deal of pride in my academic career. In fact, one of the main reasons my family, originally from Bangladesh, decided to permanently settle in the UK was because of Britain’s internationally respected universities.

That a Muslim country in the Middle East sees the UK as an incubator of Islamist extremism is not only a failure of our education system, it is also indicative of British authorities’ relaxed attitude to Islamist extremism – which remains the country’s principal terror threat.

British authorities have long been behind the global curve when it comes to understanding and challenging Islamic extremism. But many Muslim countries, including our allies like UAE, are under no illusions. They have learnt the lessons of the past and are acutely aware of the gravity of this threat. It is a national embarrassment that the UK is unable to do the same.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.