When the various scandals that circled around the other people involved in the Academy meant that the newspapers were looking around for what they could dig up, and they called me (having been put in touch with me by disgruntled students hoping that I would voice their complaints, and perhaps even point people in the direction of the skeletons in the Academy closets), I told them that I wasn't interested in talking to them and they would have to go to other sources. Unfortunately, although I don't expect this website to pick up visitors by the million (with what is on here really only targeting a very niche market), it is of its nature exposing me to a much wider public than I have been used to of late, and leaves me open to attack by those who might find it convenient to attempt to destroy my character or credibility.

Now this may sound paranoid, but I've been around long enough to know that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you, and at the same time that if you have dealings with someone else who is paranoid about you, it's not what you think about them or what you are thinking of doing to them that counts - it's what they think you think about them, and what they think you are thinking of doing to them. So as I think that when they hear I am surfacing in public again they might think that I am thinking of causing them problems, I think I'd better get my say in first. What the Israelis invented a phrase for - 'the defensive pre-emptive strike' - a phrase which also describes the policy we followed in Iraq. Let's hope that this doesn't have a similar rebound effect upon me. I'm a lover not a fighter.

But let me start at the beginning or, as usually happens, just before. For many years I had tried to do things for or with the muslim community in Glasgow and around the UK, and more or less all of those attempts had failed miserably to achieve what I/we had set out to do. Sometimes the effort involved and then the crushing disappointment that followed could be very enervating or depressing, and the more the effort and the more hope for the outcome, the more the depressing the failure. Now the effort that I put in on the SRC project to implement religious education for muslim children in their schools was immense, with long hours of work into the night, and travelling around Glasgow from mosque to mosque in an attempt to co-ordinate an agreed approach in the teeth of mosque politics, incompetences and obstructions, and when the project was finally, brutally, abruptly and arbitrarily terminated by the Central Mosque (a story you might come across in another part of the website) my reaction was a dark night of the soul which kept me away from the muslim community for several years.

So when I was introduced to Abd al-Fattah El-Awaisi at Stirling University, and he suggested that I join the board of the Islamic Research Academy that he was in the process of forming, I viewed the offer with some scepticism. But he explained how he was a member of Labour's Middle East committee, which made one feel he had some competence and integrity (remember, this was 1996, before the Blair government), he seemed genuinely disturbed by the way that the muslim community had treated me previously, and the fact that despite my muslim faith and practice I had virtually no contact with the muslim ummah, plus the organisation he was asking me to join seemed very different, in that it was intended to be essentially academic. And of course, there was the added hook that it was being specifically organised to explore and explain the Islamic nature of Al-Quds, the Holy City, Jerusalem, and it was probably that which finally drew me in, albeit with a certain hesitancy.  

Now in case you get the impression that I was joining an organisation that was already fully formed, the first thing that I had to contribute to this organisation was to write a Constitution (I should perhaps have been forewarned of future events by the Chairman's insistence on naming his post 'Secretary General' - a title I felt was more suited to the leader of the United Nations than an organisation of four people sitting around a dining room table). The organisation was indeed our Secretary General's idea originally, and he had printed a poster and published an Arabic language newsletter in its name, and he had registered it as a charity, and (crucially) opened a bank account in its name with himself as signatory. Apart from that, the organisation was little more than puff, telephone calls selling the idea and trying to raise money (nominally for scholarships and an academic prize). But as far as it being an organisation (as opposed to one man and his telephone), I was actually a founder member in August 1996, sitting on the board as Secretary to the organisation, alongside the treasurer (Mohamed Branine), the photographer Jak Kilby, and the Secretary General's wife (Aisha Al Ahlas, who rarely attended meetings except in the thoroughly liberated role of serving tea). 

In those early days, there were endless meetings, mostly between the Secretary General and myself, informally discussing possibilities and formulating plans, and in those early days, as in the years that followed, I did my best to bring what I thought was the Secretary General's original vision of an academic organisation dedicated to researching and communicating an understanding of Islamic Jerusalem to fruition. To that end, we divided up the work involved to suit our personal competences. For myself, I wrote all the minutes of formal meetings, dealt with membership registrations and mailshots as well as all the other official correspondence, wrote the English language newsletter, helped plan, organize and co-chair our annual International Conference on Islamic Jerusalem (which was an annual event during my time with the Academy). I designed our Journal of Islamic Jerusalem Studies, and edited its English language section (it was published bi-annually while I was associated with it), and wrote the Preface to a new printing of the original 1930 report on the legal status of the Al-Buraq Wall (after having scanned, OCR'd and edited the contents). I designed the Academy's website, wrote a film outline for a production company that had contacted us (a project that vanished into the mist) and developed a massive discussion series proposal for Dubai TV (which went the same way). As a general rule, the Secretary General restricted himself to his particular area of expertise, persistent and wide-ranging flimflam on the telephone.

His efforts eventually paid off, however, and in 1999, at the Secretary General's insistence, I visited Dubai with himself and Mike Watson ('the Lord' as our Secretary General liked to call him) who had been made an Honorary President of the Academy in December 1997. In fact, the  Secretary General wanted me along, not just to write speeches for the Lord and sell the project to the English speaking educationists we would meet, but perhaps more importantly to add to the 'Britishness' of our representation, as that would make them less likely to be suspicious of our motives than they would if it was just another Arab asking for money (oh how understandable in retrospect). During our visit, we toured universities and colleges, met government ministers and the like, and met with the ruler of Dubai, Shaikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, who agreed to fund several post-graduate scholarships for research into Islamic Jerusalem. Plus there were thousands of pounds provided to ensure future issues of our Journal. All this money was paid up front, to sit in the Academy's bank account until such time as we felt the need to use it. Looking back at that visit, there is one particular occasion that was to have an unmistakeable relevance later. When talking about previous cases that had been funded by the Al-Maktoum Foundation, Mirza Al-Sayegh, the director of Shaikh Hamdan's private office, pointed out how frequently the acquisition of money caused the breakup of the organisations that had received it. Aaaaaaah.

But in the event, it took somewhat more than the hundred grand or so that the Secretary General now had at his disposal to do it, as he had bigger ideas and began to talk of getting funding for our own department within a Scottish University. It was at this time that I suggested that with the sort of money to which we now apparently had access, we might as well establish an independent college of our own, and with those words were sown the seeds of my departure from the Academy. For I had touched on the Secretary General's dream, one which he had not really until then considered possible, but which I now suggested was realisable. Which of course it was. But to make it happen, I had to not only design a range of publicity material to sell the idea, but also find suitable premises, draw up plans for how they might be used, plus details of the many and various expenses involved in the set-up and running of such a venture, and finally make presentations to Shaikh Hamdan's representative, demonstrating the viability of the project and the professional nature of our approach. All of this, as might be imagined, took an enormous amount of time and effort, which no doubt distracted me from the rest of what was going on. As ever, it is only in retrospect, when one looks back at the process by which one was suckered by a con-man, that one sees all the signs of what was happening along the way that one dismissed as insignificant at the time, but that stand out like beacons of self-serving dissembling in retrospect.

From the moment that the multi-million pound financing for the Al-Maktoum Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (which I had worked so hard to achieve) was formally agreed in front of Dubai TV cameras at the Academy's annual conference in London, it was clear that I was no longer considered an asset to the Academy, but rather a hindrance to the Secretary General's intentions. Within weeks of my giving the closing address to that conference, the Secretary General had managed to transfer all power, including all management and financial decision making to an executive committee composed of himself, his wife, and his twenty-one year old son. Had I not delayed an intended journey in order to attend an executive committee meeting which the Secretary General had deliberately arranged for a date when he thought I would be absent, I would not have even known what was happening. Having been involved so intimately with the proposals for the new Institute, I felt it necessary to inform the Al-Maktoum Foundation of the new situation, that the Academy (and to that extent, the Institute) were now no longer academic organisations, but simply the new Al-Awaisi family business. From that point I heard no more from the Secretary General, soon to take up his new and more prestigious (and hugely profitable) title of 'Principal & Vice Chancellor'. 

I did, however, hear from some of the scholarship students that a meeting had been called at which they had been informed that I was now to be considered an enemy of the Academy, and that any student found to be communicating with me would face the termination of their grant funding (actually, I believe his instructions also included words to the effect that as the Prophet had said to enter a house through its front door, and he was the door to the Academy, all communications concerning the Academy should go through him, thus justifying his diktats by the authority of the Prophet - I leave it to you to decide quite how mad he was at that point). The fact is, that some of the students were still prepared to take the risk because of the extreme problems they had been having with the Secretary General over their grants, the scholarships they had apparently won yet the acquisition of which seemed fraught with difficulties, and a situation which they had asked me to address over a year previously. I'm now sure that the Secretary General's determination to eliminate me from the management structure of the Academy dates back to at least that time, because he did not take kindly to my challenging the way that he was using his control of the grants to be paid to the scholarship students for his own ends (attempting to improve his supervisory status at Stirling University by insisting on the scholarships being dependent on the students studying under and being supervised by him, even though he did not have the requisite status at the University - this was before he had pretensions towards becoming a Principal & Vice Chancellor). 

Even worse in my eyes, was the petty, dictatorial and vindictive attitude he chose to use when dealing with the scholarship students we were funding, treating them in ways that I considered to be not just unreasonable but questionably legal (the illegality of which only being debatable due to the fact that the students were never given written agreements, just telephone confirmation of their scholarships). He attempted to control students friendships and social life, insisted that students take no more than three weeks vacation per year, demanded written applications for any travel outside the immediate area of the University, and would threaten to withdraw scholarships (paid monthly) on his personal whim (one female student journeying home without permission to visit her parents during her University's Christmas vacation, returned to find her grant had been stopped in her absence and needed to phone her parents to send her money to survive). He insisted on the students living entirely upon their scholarship, forbidding them to take part-time work to supplement their grant, even though few of the students (coming from overseas) realised just how little the grants would pay for in this country, and that after paying their rent they would be living on a maximum of £50-£60 per week for all their living expenses, meaning that without money from home they would be living in abject poverty. And all this while the Academy's bank account swelled year on year with few outgoings other than rent paid to the Secretary General for a room (used as 'office space') in one of his council houses. (Of course, all this may have changed, but if you are considering applying for one of the ISRA / Al-Maktoum scholarships, I can only suggest that before you make a decision you try to make contact with previous recipients, some of whom at least I know were scarred by the experience.)

Of course, the treatment of the students was not the only aspect of Secretary General's behaviour that I had the temerity to challenge during my time with the Academy. The re-alignment of the Academy into a family business was a trend that I had frequently warned against over the years, and in particular during my last year or so, when the issue became steadily more intrusive. In the beginning, it seemed no more than a man trying establish a link between his children and their cultural roots in the land of his birth, Palestine, and to involve his children in what was a central interest of his (like a sort of ongoing 'bring your child to work day'). Nothing wrong with that. Having no apparent inclination (or even perhaps the competence) to either create or learn a filing system for his papers, his young daughter could be relied on to take the feminine role of filing secretary and find whatever he needed whenever he needed it. And as for the boys, with the Secretary General being only barely computer literate, it was an obvious area in which he could make use of his young sons' schoolboy expertise. Not too much of a problem then, as having my own office at home, with my own computer, I relied on my own filing system. What was more disturbing at first, was his being prepared to ask his sons to take responsibility for more important aspects of the Academy's work and image, such as allowing them to re-design the logo (which the original calligrapher found very offensive) and design the cover of the Journal (at least until I stepped in and took over). But in those days I was happy to teach his sons better ways of doing what had been asked of them, showing them the different advantages of graphics and desk-top publishing programs, and how patience of approach can lead to more subtle, complex and satisfying results. It was not until some time later, when I showed them how to build databases and use them to mailmerge, that I realised I had caused myself a problem.

From that point onwards, apart from my taking minutes at meetings, the Secretary General no longer had any need for me to deal with Academy mail of any kind, and fairly abruptly I was out of the information loop, and before long he could do what he liked on the Academy letterhead and no-one was any the wiser. Eventually, however, I realised (as with the student diktats) just how much he was taking the Academy in whatever direction he fancied. In fact, there were occasions when I had to make it clear that I considered the use of his children to do certain Academy tasks not just misconceived but ludicrous, such as delegating the initial processing and short-listing of post-graduate scholarship applications to his fifteen year old daughter, but whereas I thought my strongly voiced objections would surely bring about some change in his attitude, clearly in retrospect I had no effect at all. But such attempts to keep things in his family were well behind the scenes, and there were more obvious forms of nepotism on occasion, which despite my best efforts I was unable to stop, such as awarding one of the first scholarships to his son-in-law (now firmly ensconced on the payroll of the Al-Maktoum Institute) which I was unable to prevent after the Secretary General had cleared the award directly with the Al-Maktoum Foundation in Dubai. This attitude of the Academy somehow being his own personal fiefdom came to a head when I was fully distracted by work on our proposal for the Al-Maktoum Institute, however, when unbeknownst to anyone else on the executive committee, he took it upon himself to publish an edition of the Academy's 'peer reviewed academic journal', The Journal of Islamic Jerusalem Studies, consisting entirely of articles written by himself (that is apart from the article credited jointly to himself and his wife). Even his henchman the treasurer found that disturbing (after all, a published academic journal is not something you can hide as easily as illegal payments in accounts).

So I did send the Secretary General a long e-mail expressing my concern for his mental health, the instability and short-term memory loss that seemed to have accompanied the prospect of large scale funding, the paranoia and aggressiveness that he had taken to displaying, and the signs of overt megalomania and confusion of his identity with the Academy, but he obviously didn't think too much of my assessment considering the outcome with regard to my personal association with the Academy that I described earlier. And you can perhaps understand now why I was concerned about a possible vindictive response to my doing anything that raises my public profile. It wouldn't even be necessary for me to know where the bodies are buried, it would be enough for him to think that I know. For I'm not sure that he shows many signs of having changed that much. Admittedly, once I realised the situation upon terminating my association with the Academy I tried to put it behind me as soon as possible, and despite the fact that the way I was treated in the end was harsh enough to keep me from having anything much to do with the muslim community since, I did find other things to fill the time that I had previously devoted to the Academy, and did manage to more or less forget about it except when some scandal meant that the Secretary General, now Principal & Vice Chancellor had his picture spread over half a page of the Glasgow Herald, or when the Lord was discovered so drunk and incapable that he was barely able to set fire to some hotel curtains. And occasionally someone I meet will ask what happened, or an ex-student will send me the latest gossip, so I make the effort to check out the websites of the Academy and the Al-Maktoum Institute to see what is going on. But I'm not sure that too much has changed.

I may be wrong, but the Institute seems to have had ongoing problems with finding people who would work with the Institute's Principal & Vice Chancellor, apart from his family that is. Of course, you can't really tell as the website no longer gives a full list of the Institute's employees, but his son-in-law is there as well as his son (that's the one who was awarded a scholarship, not the one who had to call the police out to deal with his father), which makes three out of seven on the list of academic staff. And I believe his wife and daughter had (and may still have) jobs of some kind - and with a lot of children yet to get old enough for employment I suppose there is still a chance it could eventually be fully staffed by the Principal & Vice Chancellor's family. Not much of A New Agenda there then. I'm surprised that Aberdeen University were prepared to associate themselves with an Institute of such a dubious management structure and its bizarre new 'academic discipline' of 'Islamicjerusalem Studies', which according to Shaikh Hamdan's Vision Statement has been 'understood and established' by the 'leading scholar' Abd al-Fattah El-Awaisi's 'academic research' (I wonder who wrote that vision statement for the Shaikh to sign then). I don't know how the Institute managed to switch from Abertay to Aberdeen, but I guess it had something to do with the link between Aberdeen and  Zayed Universities, or The British University in Dubai, or the various other academic issues mentioned in Shaikh Hamdan's vision statement, such as the new daily Emirates airline flights direct from Dubai to Scotland (as it says in the vision statement brochure, 'Shaikh Hamdan indicates very clearly that Al-Maktoum Institute is The Gateway to Dubai') . Now that our universities are recognised as being essentially no more than large business enterprises operating in a global market, I suppose it is to be expected that academic integrity must inevitably take second place to international politics and sources of finance, but I find it extraordinary that a university of Aberdeen's stature would put up with what is going on. But certainly the financial credibility bestowed by the Dubai connection has meant that the Institute has been able to come up with an impressive list of 'academic partners' around the world, so one thing is for sure - the Principal & Vice Chancellor's flimflam phone is still working overtime.

When looking at the publications on offer, again there seems a certain familiarity. It's not just that the cover design for the two new books by the Principal & Vice Chancellor and Haithem Al-Ratrout use the design that I produced for the original Journal of Islamic Jerusalem Studies (well, at least they have changed the colour, though it still kind of rubs salt into old wounds), but the new version of the Journal (summer 2005 - same cover - same new colour) has articles by a glittering list of academics, namely the Principal & Vice Chancellor, his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and his son (there are indeed two other contributors, but I don't know if they have a family connection). The published report into the teaching of Islam in higher education establishments in the UK (written by 'two of the leading experts in the study of Islam and the Muslims' - guess who and says who?) after painstaking academic research into 55 UK higher learning establishments comes to the extraordinary conclusion that the only place that has been doing it right is a little place in Dundee run by the authors (does Aberdeen give this kind of 'research' credibility? Not only that, they have the temerity to highlight the problem in these establishments of their dependence on funding from overseas!). As well as that, one gets the impression that they can't give away their scholarships - and they're still trying to flog off those old posters of Umar's Assurance of Safety. Well, I must say it's hard to imagine that this whole bit at the end here isn't coming across as sour grapes, but in fact it has been hard to hold back laughter a lot of the time, as it is the first time I have looked at the Institute website for a couple of years, and my jaw has landed on my chest at times, it is all so gobsmackingly appallingly third world academic. What with the sycophantic fawning before their Gulf State owners, and the unconcealed nepotism of the Principal & Vice Chairman, who sees fit to take a crucial real world problem for the muslim ummah and repackage it under a new name in a vainglorious attempt to justify a reevaluation of his limited academic credentials, and the spurious use of 'research' to justify the opinions of the researchers and the agenda of the Institute they control, and the furtive (well, not so furtive ) use of the Principal & Vice Chancellor's political contacts to push that agenda through the UK and Scottish Parliaments, and .... and .... and .... I can assure you that I am unbelievably glad to be well out of it.

Now, admittedly, when I look at the ISRA website and see the work that I put in still on display, I feel more of a sense of sadness at the wasted time, what with the designs for the Journal and publicity folder (of which I was very proud, and which I am sure is still being used), and all the stuff on the website about the International Conferences at SOAS (which is just the way I left it) - I even gave the organisation the name that it uses for God's sake. Having originally registered it as the Islamic Research Academy, the Secretary General in waiting realised that this gave it the acronym of IRA, so he stuck a P on the end for Palestine, and in the early days it was known as IRAP. After a couple of years, however, I pointed out that it would be much more appropriate to add the S that follows the I in Islamic, providing an acronym that associated the Academy with the Prophet's assumption to heaven from the rock that lies beneath the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. I wonder how often people have thought better of the Academy because of no more than the subliminal effect of that ISRA association with the Prophet. And I suppose if I am honest, I remain scarred by the brutal injustice of the treatment I received at the hands of a man who after a pious recitation from Qur'an could look me directly in the eye and lie through his teeth with equanimity, even lying with a smile on his face for no other reason than that he knew that I knew that he was lying, and he knew that I knew that he knew that I knew, and he didn't care because there was nothing I could do about it. And I am so glad that having finished this unpleasant reminiscence I will be able to consign it to forgetfulness once more. Unless the Grand Panjandrum decides to sue me - and he is probably stupid enough to try.

As for me, the Qur'an says "out of hardship comes ease - out of hardship comes ease", and now that this unpleasant task is over, I am going to take it easy for a while.