Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation

Professor Steven Greer, Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol Law School and Research Director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam.

On 15 February 2021, my world was turned upside down. I had just discovered that the University of Bristol Islamic Society (BRISOC), frustrated by the lack of progress with a formal complaint submitted the previous autumn, had launched a potentially life-threatening social media campaign to have me sacked as Professor of Human Rights at the University of Bristol Law School. Multiple counts of Islamophobia in my teaching and other public output were alleged. An online petition, accompanied by my photo, demanded that I apologise ‘to all Muslim students’. And if I refused, the University was called upon to discipline me including by dismissal. BRISOC also insisted that the Islam, China, and the Far East module on my Human Rights in Law, Politics and Society (HRLPS) course – which I’d been teaching without significant alteration or difficulty, including to many Muslim students, for nearly a decade and a half – should be ‘scrapped’. Just over a week later, my wife and I were so unnerved by a suspicious incident outside our home, coinciding with a report about the BRISOC controversy by Al Jazeera, that I fled Bristol with her to stay somewhere safer for several days.

In July 2021 a University of Bristol (UoB) inquiry exonerated me completely and without equivocation from all BRISOC’s accusations, an outcome supported by a KC’s opinion and unanimously upheld on appeal that October. However, in September, the Law School nevertheless removed the Islam, China and the Far East module from the HRLPS syllabus from 2021-22 onwards, expressly in order to avoid further complaints and to protect Muslim students from being ‘othered’. In October, the University publicly announced my exoneration while at the same time recognising BRISOC’s ‘concerns’. It also acknowledged that the HRLPS course had been altered in order to be ‘respectful’ of student ‘sensitivities’. Exhausted and demoralized by the whole experience I was signed off work by my doctor from September 2021 to the beginning of January 2022 and never taught at the UoB again.

Having retired in September 2022 I have escaped any further repercussions on the part of the UoB itself, although the possible rescinding of my emeritus status has been threatened. However, as things stand, other academics, particularly in early and mid-career, are unlikely to be able to follow suit. It would be a brave scholar who were publicly to raise similar lawful and legitimate questions, about the social, political, and legal implications of mainstream Islam, as I have.

However, in January 2022, my fortunes changed dramatically. As a direct consequence of BRISOC’s campaign, I was appointed the first Visiting Research Fellow, and later Research Director, at the Oxford Institute for British Islam, a newly established progressive Muslim think tank and research academy. Since then, the tide has inexorably turned against the UoB. Amongst other things, in February 2023, I published a book, Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation. According to my PR firm, Palamedes, news about it and my story was carried by outlets, including many in the UK, with a global audience/readership of 231 million. This prompted Labour MP Barry Sheerman to call for the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Evelyn Welch, and the UoB’s entire senior management team to resign. An expanded paperback edition appeared in August that year. Meanwhile, in April 2023 in a 14-page letter, the campaigning organization, Alumni for Free Speech (AFFS), drew the UoB’s attention to numerous violations of statutory obligations it had committed regarding the BRISOC scandal.

On 21 May 2024 I was listed by name as a victim of intolerance in a 292-page report, Protecting our Democracy from Coercion by Lord Walney, the then UK Government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption. The report was commended to the House of Commons by the then Security Minister, Tom Tugendhat MP ( p.160, para.4.91). And, on 6 March 2025, The Economist published an article which included the following: ‘Professor Steven Greer of Bristol University was accused in 2020 by the university’s Islamic Society of being Islamophobic when he included factual statements in his classes such as: “Islam spread rapidly through war, conquest, trade and conversion.” He was exonerated, but the university … failed to openly support him.’

Apart from its effects upon me and my family personally, the most enduring systemic effect of the BRISOC scandal has unquestionably been the ongoing censorship – particularly self-censorship – of critical academic debate about Islam, not only at the UoB itself but at British universities generally and possibly others elsewhere. Seeking to address this, in June 2025 a consortium of a dozen prominent free speech and other organization (see the list of referring organisations below) referred the BRISOC scandal to the Office for Students (OfS), the universities’ regulator, arguing that there were ‘no good reasons’ for the OfS not treat it in the same manner as the Kathleen Stock affair. In 2021, Professor Stock was hounded out of her job at the University of Sussex by an angry mob which accused her of ‘transphobia’. In March 2025 the OfS fined Sussex £585,000 for governance and management problems which led to this result. We await developments with respect to the BRISOC case.

By Steven Greer

Steven Greer is Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol Law School and Research Director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam. His book, ‘Islamophobia and free speech’, will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in the autumn.

The organisations that referred the BRISOC scandal to the Office for Students (OfS), the universities’ regulator, are:

Academics for Academic Freedom, Alumni for Free Speech, Christian Concern, Committee for Academic Freedom, Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Don’t Divide Us, Free Speech Union, Global Hindu Federation, Network of Sikh Organizations, Oxford Islamic Congregation, Oxford Institute for British Islam, and Project Resist.

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