Why are Arabs shunning British universities? Because they are hotbeds of Islamism By
Bepi Pezzulli
January 12, 2026
SO, THE United Arab Emirates has decided to protect its Muslim youth from radicalisation by discouraging them from studying at British universities. Fabian surrealism, groomed at home by woke cosplaying as governance, is finally colliding with the real world abroad.
Like any decent farce, the joke lies in the reversal: when a Gulf state concludes that the safest way to preserve religious moderation is to keep its students away from Britain, you know that the nation that once exported administrative sobriety has achieved a rare feat of cultural inversion.
Alas, the instinctive British response does not get the point. Officials speak of academic freedom, universities issue pious statements about inclusion, and nobody pauses to enjoy the comic precision of the charge. The UAE is not accusing Britain of Islamophobia. Quite the opposite. Britain, in Emirati eyes, has become excessively enthusiastic, dangerously indulgent, and recklessly naïve in its handling of Islamist currents. To protect Muslims, they must now be protected from Britain.
That is the core of the embarrassment. British campuses have spent years presenting themselves as the safest possible environment for Muslim students, padded with trigger warnings, sensitivity training, and an allergy to judgement. The result has been a culture in which radical ideas are not challenged but curated, provided they are draped in the correct moral vocabulary. Extremism, once defined by intent and consequence, is now judged almost entirely by tone.
The Muslim Brotherhood sits at the centre of the misunderstanding. Across much of the Arab world it is treated as a revolutionary movement with a long record and an obvious ambition. In Britain it is approached with the sort of cautious fondness usually reserved for a difficult but expressive nephew. One does not interrogate; one listens. One does not prohibit; one convenes. Context is everything, and context has a habit of doing most of the work.
An Emirati student arrives in Britain hoping to study economics or engineering. Within weeks he discovers that his chosen discipline has been reinterpreted as a moral hazard. Markets oppress. Infrastructure discriminates. Maths is racist and serves white supremacists. The law is a fiction to perpetuate colonialism. The most confident voices belong not to scholars but to activists, many of whom speak with the certainty of revelation and the impatience of youth, fortified by institutional indulgence.
Back home in the UAE, this is not read as intellectual vibrancy. It is read as loss of control. Gulf states have spent decades battling religious movements that fuse political ambition with theological certainty. They know the signs. Britain insists on missing them, partly out of guilt, partly out of vanity, and partly because it has convinced itself that good intentions are a substitute for outcomes.
British universities protest that this is what freedom looks like. In a narrow sense they are right. Yet freedom untethered from responsibility has a habit of becoming theatrical. Campuses increasingly resemble moral stages in which the loudest claim to injury wins, and the quietest dissent is treated as violence. Ideas are free to circulate, provided they move in one direction.
The Emirati response has been almost cruel in its restraint. No denunciations. No diplomatic rows. No accusations of hypocrisy. Simply a bureaucratic adjustment. Scholarships withdrawn. Alternative destinations encouraged. The US, that great carnival of excess, suddenly appears reassuringly straightforward by comparison. At least there, one knows what one is getting.
What stings is not the loss of students, but the implication. Britain has long imagined itself as a civilising influence, a tutor in moderation, a referee of moral disputes. To be quietly assessed and found ideologically excitable by a Middle Eastern state is not a criticism so much as a diagnosis. The raised eyebrow from Abu Dhabi carries more force than any sermon.
This episode exposes a peculiarly British confusion. In its desire to be welcoming, Britain has become incurious. In its fear of offence, it has abandoned judgement. In its anxiety to protect minorities, it has outsourced authority to the most strident voices within them. The result is not harmony but distortion, a version of Islam shaped less by theology than by campus politics and managerial timidity.
The tragedy, if one insists on the word, is that none of this was inevitable. Universities could have insisted on intellectual seriousness without hostility, on pluralism without indulgence, on freedom without fear. Instead, they chose performance, and now find themselves performing for an audience that has stopped buying tickets.
The UAE’s decision is not an act of hostility. It is a parental judgement delivered at state level. Fabian Whitehall is outraged, but it would do well to listen. When even authoritarian regimes worry that British universities have become radicalising environments, the problem is not foreign misunderstanding. It is domestic complacency, played for laughs elsewhere, and for keeps at home.
The message, in its quiet absurdity, is unmistakable: the Empire may be gone, but the ability to bewilder remains. British universities no longer merely educate. They astonish.
This article appeared in the Times of Israel on January 10, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.