The following extract from a conversation between two British terrorists was recorded using surveillance probes and played at the Old Bailey in 2006.

“How many brothers are there active in this country?” asks one. “How many are actually planning things, and doing them here?” The answer comes from Omar Khyam, now in jail for planning a bomb atack on a London nightclub. “There’s a lot of people who agree with it now,” he says. “Especially at, you know, Brunel University at Friday prayer. There, yeah, just blatant bro’.

“In the sermon in front of hundreds of students bro’. And you could see that people were like, they were agreeing with everything you know.”

No piece of evidence better sums up the danger posed by extremists on campus.

Supporters of terrorism had infiltrated a student Islamic society and were using Friday prayers, on campus, to indoctrinate vulnerable young people.

Two big terrorist plots, subsequently foiled, involved Brunel students. Even after the plots had been uncovered and the plotters jailed, however, the university continued to insist that there was no evidence of extremism on its West London campus.

The most significant thing about the revised government guidance on campus radicalisation is that university authorities have signed up to it. There have been no howls of protest about the curtailment of academic freedom and no complaints that lecturers are being asked to spy on their students.

The vice-chancellors have realised that, in the words of the guidelines, “it becomes unacceptable and indeed is a criminal activity when individuals develop extremist views that lead them to espouse, advocate, or even undertake or facilitate violent acts.”

And it’s about time. More than 20 years have passed since Omar Bakri Mohammed began touring colleges and universities pumping out the message that Muslim people around the world were being oppressed by a Zionist-Christian conspiracy and the only way to resist was through a violent struggle to establish a global Islamic state.

Today that message is referred to as “the single narrative” and recognised as the cornerstone of al-Qaeda’s ideology: a one-size-fits-all religious solution to the world’s ills.

It was this kind of rhetoric, repeated over and over again by flamboyant preachers, that turned Omar Saeed Sheikh from a chess-playing student at the London School of Economics into a terrorist. He is in prison in Pakistan, convicted of the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

On the other side of The Strand, at King’s College London, the Islamist message transformed Omar Khan Sharif from a shy mathematics student from Derby into the kind of man who would try to blow himself up in a bar in Tel Aviv.

Only a handful of students ever followed what they believed to be the righteous path all the way to jihad, but many more have been sucked into the extremist groups that operated on campus under a variety of names and taught that they were different from and superior to nonMuslims. Undergraduates with such mindsets find it hard to be part of a tolerant society.

The emphasis placed in the new guidelines on integration and responsible freedom could, if properly implemented, finally curtail the activities of the campus extremists.

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