I had a small warning that UCL was not the centre of enlightenment thinking it seemed when I went there to interview the urbane geneticist Steve Jones a couple of years ago. At the end of a discussion of the dangers of holding an unquestioning faith in the power of genetics to deliver miracle cures, he started to worry about creationism. I thought he would criticise the American religious Right, as all liberals were doing at the time. Instead, his urbanity cracked slightly and he began to talk about Islamist anti-Darwinism. When the publishers of a Turkish edition of Almost like a Whale — his updating of The Origin of the Species — flew him out to Istanbul, he was astonished when they told him that the Islamists saw evolutionary theory as a threat and then introduced him to his bodyguards. Back at the university in London, he heard more and more Muslim science students insisting that evolution could not be true.

"What do you say to them?"

"At the end of the course, I ask, ‘Was I lying to you about chromosome structure?' and they say no. Then I say, ‘Was I lying to you about cell structure?' and they say no. So I ask why on earth they think I'm lying to them about evolution, and of course they can't answer, because they're not allowed to'."

John Sutherland, a UCL English professor, remembers that at about the same time I was interviewing Jones, the Islamic Society was putting on a show of Islamic art. "A friend of mine strolled in to take a look. Was he a believer, asked an obviously Muslim student. No, replied my friend, he didn't believe in any God, as it happened. ‘Then,' the young man confidently informed him, ‘we shall have to execute you.' He wasn't joking; he was predicting. He wasn't going to draw a scimitar that minute and lop off the Godless one's head, but he implied that at some future point such things would happen. My friend laughed it off after lodging a mild complaint."

I do not believe I am reading too much into Sutherland's description when I guess that his friend's laughter was of the high and nervous variety. Nor is it unfair to say that a few academics knew that radical Islam was on campus long before Abdulmutallab attempted to kill himself and everyone flying with him. Once he had, any academic reading the story of how he went from Nigeria to Britain to Yemen to America should have noted and worried about the following details:

Abdulmutallab was not a tribune of the oppressed but yet another of radical Islam's poor little rich boys. The son of a Nigerian banker, he did not live in squalid student digs when he was at UCL, but in a West End apartment between the Wigmore Hall and Regent's Park. He was religious when he was in Nigeria, but his radicalisation began in supposedly secular London. His cousin recalled that after reaching Britain, "He changed. He was saying: ‘Islam, Islam, Islam'; he was saying we should all try to change and be more Islamic." He attended mosques that our tolerant intelligence services watch but do not close down. One intelligence source told the New York Times that he was "reaching out" to known extremists, but no one thought to bring him in for questioning.

As president of UCL Islamic Society, he organised an "anti-terror week", which featured a promotional video of clips of violence, accompanied by a soundtrack of hypnotic music. He inserted footage of George Galloway saying that the West believed that Palestinian blood was cheaper than Israeli blood and Amnesty International's poster boy Moazzam Begg alleging that the Americans tortured him at Guantanamo Bay. "When we sat down, they played a video that opened with shots of the twin towers after they'd been hit, then moved on to images of mujahedeen fighting, firing rockets in Afghanistan," one member of the audience said. "It was quite tense in the theatre, because I think lots of people were shocked by how extreme it was. It seemed to me like it was brainwashing, like they were trying to indoctrinate people."