The University of Wales said yesterday that it would no longer validate courses at the European Institute of Human Sciences, which trains imams and conducts its teaching almost entirely in Arabic.

The validation arrangements, which allowed students from the institute, based in a country house at Llanybydder, Carmarthenshire, to earn credits towards degrees from the university, ceased at the end of last month.

The institute has indirect connections with Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based scholar who has defended suicide bombers in Israel, praised the Iraqi insurgents as martyrs and called for the death penalty for homosexuals.

Dr al-Qaradawi is the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist group in the world, which operates across Europe under a number of guises.

His visit to Britain last year, as a guest of Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, attracted widespread protests, and with the Government tightening the rules on exclusions, he could be banned from entering Britain.

Dr al-Qaradawi, 79, who is banned from entering the United States, heads the council of scholars that devised the curriculum for L’Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines, the parent body of the institute.

The University of Wales said that it had ended its association with the institute, which opened in 1999, for academic reasons. Dr Jane Norris-Hill, a spokeswoman, said: “The University of Wales Lampeter has very high academic standards and had concerns that the performance of some of the students did not always reach the demanding standards that the university requires for study at degree level.”

Concern about the institute was first reported in The Times last year. At the time the Muslim Council of Britain accused the newspaper of pursuing a witch hunt against a “credible and established” institution.

Now, however, concerns about the quality and content of education in independent Muslim colleges and schools are at the centre of the Government’s agenda for clamping down on the spread of extremism. Last weekend the Government floated plans for bringing 150 Muslim schools under state control.

David Bell, the head of Ofsted, aired his worries in a lecture in January, when he called for more state intervention in faith schools. Mr Bell was heavily criticised when — six months before the July 7 bombings — he said that Muslim schools were not doing enough to make pupils “aware of the political institutions in society, of being part of a democracy, of other faiths”.

Kadhem al-Rawi, principal of the institute in Llanybydder, denied that his college had a fundamentalist outlook. He added: “Yusuf al-Qaradawi has never met us, has never been to our college and did not draw up our syllabus.”

But Dr al-Rawi said that he had been a visiting lecturer at the French institute before setting up the college in Wales and added that he regarded Dr al-Qaradawi as a respected scholar.

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