Racism And The Lie: The Media Campaign Against Prof Jason Arday

The UK public was recently bombarded with hundreds of articles, churned out one after the other, by leading mainstream media outlets: The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Spectator and many others, about the country’s youngest ever black Professor – Jason Arday – who tragically died on 14 August 2026.

The genesis of what led to this man being hounded by the UK media was an egregious lie. In the Islamic tradition, we can trace the origins of that lie right back to the archetype of evil – Iblis (Satan). The Qur’an presents Iblis as the first being to elevate himself through a false conception of superiority. When Allah commanded him to prostrate before Adam (peace be upon him (“pbuh”)), Iblis refused. Iblis’ justification was not that Adam had committed some crime; it was that he considered himself inherently superior to Adam: “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.” [Qur’an 7:12].

The first articulated claim of racialised superiority was therefore born from a comparison of origins. When his haughtiness led him away from obedience to Allah, he declared his hostility towards Adam (peace be upon him (pbuh)) and his descendants and vowed to mislead them. He approached Adam and Hawwa’ (Eve (pbuh)) with deception, presenting the forbidden tree not as a source of destruction but as a pathway to immortality and an everlasting kingdom. He swore to them that he was giving sincere advice.It was a lie.

It appears that Prof. Arday’s credentials were scrutinised almost from the moment he arrived at Cambridge. The intensity of that scrutiny raises an uncomfortable question: was this simply about academic standards, or did some struggle to accept or submit to the idea that a Black man had attained such a prestigious position?

Although concerns about Prof. Arday’s work had reportedly been raised privately since 2023, the allegations became public in July 2026 through a Substack post by Nathan Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who describes himself as a “race realist”. Cofnas, who was dismissed by Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2024 following controversial comments about racial disparities in intellectual ability, claimed that numerous passages in Arday’s PhD thesis were plagiarised – this was a lie as Prof. Arday had already been cleared of this allegation. Scorned by his dismissal from the University and driven by jealousy that Prof. Arday, a Black scholar, had attained such a prestigious position, Cofnas, like Iblis before him with Adam (pbuh), was determined to bring Prof. Arday down.

Being a Zionist, as is apparent from his social media postings, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cofnas’ Substack found a willing audience in one of Britain’s most staunchly pro-Israel newspapers, The Daily Telegraph. From there, the allegations gained traction and the relentless witch hunt begun: wall-to-wall coverage, with some 249 articles published across 15 outlets in just 22 days.

The overtones of racism become even more difficult to ignore considering that Cofnas, in the wake of Prof. Arday’s death, is heard  speaking provocatively about the prospect of becoming “the head of the department of eugenics & race science at Harvard” after “the revolution”.

But why? What had Prof. Arday actually done to warrant this extraordinary level of media hounding? Why did an allegation become a national media spectacle of such unprecedented proportions? Where in times gone by, a Black person would be lynched by a racist mob, the modern-day lynch mobs appear to have moved from the mean streets onto newspaper pages, television screens, and the Internet, where humiliation, ridicule and abuse can be delivered incessantly to the victim’s phone, home and family thousands of times a day until you kill them.

In recent years, intense media campaigns have been directed at other Black public figures, including Bob Vylan, Misan Harriman, Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and Paul Pogba. We have also seen similar treatment of British Asian and Muslim figures, including Mayor Lutfur Rahman and Tahir Alam. Doctors, teachers and ordinary people have also found themselves subjected to media scrutiny and vilification simply for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. And this is where the question of race becomes salient. On Palestine, the hostility does not appear to discriminate solely on the basis of race or background, for those who challenge the endemic racism at the heart of Zionism will find themselves targeted regardless of race as we have seen with Gary Lineker, Dr David Miller, Jeremy Corbyn, Zack Polanski and many others.

Only weeks ago, our media class had been eulogising Rod Liddle following his death, despite him being an Islamophobe and a pervert. The same media class then devoted extraordinary attention to hounding a disabled Black man to death, while giving comparatively far less attention and scrutiny to the real-time genocide and ethnic cleansing unfolding before our eyes in Gaza, or the murders of their fellow journalists in Gaza. The contrast couldn’t be more glaring: ravenous media wolves voracious for a Black professor at the pinnacle of his profession, yet apathetic towards far greater crimes and abuses of power. Such campaigns of misinformation and distortion are routinely used against the Muslim community and we recognise them as the same system of oppression.

There now needs to be a full and independent inquiry into the conduct of the media, alongside stronger regulation and accountability, before another life is just as surely destroyed by an unchecked culture of media harassment.

In his Final Sermon, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) dismantled the very foundation upon which Iblis’ arrogance and racism was built. He declared that “there is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; no superiority of a white person over a Black person, nor a Black person over a white person, except through righteousness”.

Islam replaces racism and superiority with humility, justice and the recognition that every human being stands before the same Creator. No race is superior to another, nor are any people superior to another. The only true measure of a person before Allah is in their righteousness.

May Allah grant patience and strength to the family of Dr Arday, and bring truth to light wherever it has been buried.