4 months ago
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The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which provides its high-achieving students generous grants to survey abroad, has been restricting admissions to British universities implicit fears that campuses are being radicalised by an extremist Islamist group, a UK media study said connected Friday (January 9, 2026).
The Times referenced officials with cognition of the determination to assertion that national backing was being constricted for UAE citizens hoping to survey successful the U.K. owed to the feared power of the Muslim Brotherhood, among different issues.
The radical is proscribed arsenic a violent organisation by the UAE, which has besides campaigned for European nations to prohibition it implicit extremist activities.
“It’s a mode of threatening young students to behave, saying successful essence, immoderate you do, don't articulation the Muslim Brotherhood if you're successful the U.K.,” the paper quoted a Middle East adept arsenic saying.
“They (the UAE) kick to the UK astir the Muslim Brotherhood to origin a diplomatic stink until they get what they want. It’s often an interior thing. I don’t judge our universities are infested with the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s each astir positioning,” the adept stated.
According to The Times, the Emiratis are not imposing a broad ban, and privately funded students volition beryllium capable to enrol astatine U.K. universities. However, authorities backing volition beryllium directed towards assemblage degrees successful different overseas destinations.
The fig of UAE students enrolled astatine U.K. universities doubled to 8,500 betwixt 2017 and 2024, a emergence apt to beryllium impacted by this decision.
Programmes managed done its Ministry of Education and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the UAE’s survey grants are designed to screen tuition, surviving stipends, question and wellness security for top-performing students pursuing degrees successful precedence fields.
The UAE, on with different countries successful the region, has cracked down connected the Muslim Brotherhood, believing that the Islamist radical poses a superior menace to its comparatively secular and socially wide system, the paper reports.
In 2014, the then-Prime Minister David Cameron led Conservative authorities launched an enquiry into the radical which concluded that portion the group’s beliefs were opposed to British values, determination wasn’t capable grounds to prohibition the movement.
In France, President Emannuel Macron ordered officials to gully up proposals to tackle the group’s power successful May past year.
