Academia

New Report: SOAS links to Saudi Royal Family

This is a press release from Student Rights

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Download the report here

Our latest report uncovers the links with the Saudi Arabian Regime which has resulted in SOAS directly receiving £755,000 from the Saudi Arabian Royal family. Further scandals are also uncovered by this report.

The briefing unveils the fact that SOAS provided Mutassim Gaddafi, the National Security Advisor to the Murderous Gaddafi regime, with private English tutoring and that an agreement between SOAS and Al-Fateh University in Tripoli was signed just months before the uprisings began in Libya.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation is that Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a cleric who is banned from the UK and US for endorsing suicide bombings and the killing of pregnant women, is on the editorial board of the SOAS journal of Quranic Studies. Al-Qaradawi has in addition been condemned by over 2,500 Muslim scholars worldwide.

An article on our report has been written by The Jewish Chronicle and the brief is also the subject of a new Early Day Motion proposed by Robert Halfon MP.

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This is a response from SOAS:

On the issue of Sheikh Al-Qaradawi’s membership of the editorial board of a journal hosted by SOAS, it said: “Professor Yusuf al-Qaradawi and some other editorial advisers from the Middle East only advise on the Arabic section of the Journal, and not on the English section. His academic peers and Muslim scholars in the UK and across the globe consider him to be one of the most outstanding scholars of the Quran in the Arabic and Islamic world. No political or other consideration was involved in asking him to be on the board.”