Following the 9/11 attacks on Oxford and the collapse of the DIM powers in 2004, the university has declared a War on Error, Akme can reveal. "It's going to be a long hall," admitted a sauce.
Feeling beseiged on many fronts, and facing the prospect of the city being subjected to an ever-increasing tourist threat, university security chief Michael B'el Off has drafted a defensive contract against undergraduate militants and has ordered the governing body's retreat to the heavily-fortified 'grey zone' in the heart of occupied central Oxford. The imposition of contract law will require civilians to be off the streets by nightfall, will ban public drinking, restrict the watching of television, and require students' attendance at all faculty lectures and seminars. Essays will have to be delivered on time and be free from error. If the new rules and statutes are not strictly observed, subjects will have their fees confiscated and in addition may be 'rusticated' (obliged to work on the land), 'sent up' (obliged to work in the north), or 'sent up in smoke' (obliged to work in London). Imprisonment has not been ruled out.
Sceptics, however, are claiming that the imposition of contract law is an irrelevant distraction from Oxford's underlying, overwhelming malaise: its ancient feudal structure, its mismanagement, corruption, waste, and steady financial collapse. They argue that attention should instead be focussed on resisting the city's apparently inevitable descent into sectarian civil war.
"These contracts are unrealistically strict and absurdly one-sided" said student union leader Gerry Mander. "We will be in breach and risk prison if we miss a lecture or make a mistake in an essay, yet there is no obligation on the authorities to provide us with electricity, water, sanitation or even a roof, never mind decent security and education. The famous personal tutorial is now largely a myth, and I know of people who are getting little or no teaching worth the name. Demoralised supervisors are having breakdowns in front of their students, or even sleeping through entire seminars. There are stories of 150 students turning up for the new compulsory lectures and finding themselves being crammed into rooms that can fit only fifty. Sometimes the proctors will physically jam the doors shut on a bursting hall even when the advertised lecturer hasn't bothered to turn up. After ten minutes, never mind forty, the conditions in these places become appalling. Students begin gasping for knowledge, are ready to die for their beliefs. Some prepare to cross the borders, to seek martyrdom. With all this compulsion and pressure, the university is turning itself into a breeding-ground for suicide crammers."
Olivia bin Laden-Smythe, spokeperson for Oxford University Islamists, concurred: "The authorities who have control of higher education can drop exams on us from thirty thousand feet, but how does that help? On the ground, up go the rents (the highest in the country, and rising), up go the fees (£10,000 a year predicted soon), up goes our loan interest (student bankruptcies a record). They can try to wall us in (or is it out?), and blockade us economically, but in the end we will pass our examinations and they will fail, in the end our intifada will confound their militarism. You outsiders speak much about democracy and freedom and scholarship, but we cannot even feed ourselves now, and westerners no longer dare to venture outside the grey zone. We are ordered to attend all your lectures, to parrot but not plagiarise your texts, never to make mistakes or to break rules, but your Tony Blair, who I believe once studied at this place, he is allowed to make big mistakes, to tell big lies, and still he gets away with it. What is the point of all this occupation? Allah Akme!"
The splits in Oxford's Governing Council are ever more evident too, with the governing body's 'modernist' vice-chancellor and his Hoodawi followers battling votes of no confidence, leadership challenges and alternative manifestos. A crucial meeting over his proposals for a new unitary constitution has been postponed to 14th November. With growing rumours of federalism, privatisation, the closure of facilities, the rise of new wardenlords, and the increasing influence of the shi'its, the prevailing talk around the grey zone is now all about 'exit strategies'.
The sectarian/ethnic divides spreading across Dimistan are also going beyond the traditional three-way demarcation. Within the broad religious groupings, local peoples are reverting to the obscure edicts and practices of the individual saints who are regarded as the founders of the regional tribes - B'Allahol, Hil-dah, Al Daits and so forth. Some tribes like the Wadi have rejected the proposed contract as being "entirely devoid of the true teaching."
Many of these sects require their womenfolk to be shrouded in public, while in some, like the legendary Grey and Black Friars, even the men go shrouded, refusing to touch women altogether, even in private. Reacting against such extreme asceticism, a new, heretical tribe has lately instituted obligatory public pork-eating, with its leaders assuming the aspect of twin pigs, wallowing in straw, whose snouts alternately snort loudly or are displayed buried deep in troughs of excrement.
Another group of fanatic animists is beseiging the new abattoir being built by the occupying forces to relieve the city's growing shortage of fresh money. Fatwa-busting protestors are chaining themselves to the construction equipment and threatening the workers with sinister slogans like "murder is meet!" and "you animals will die!", while kidnappings, disappearances and mysterious deaths are spreading, even throughout traditionally loyal north Oxford. Mortarboard attacks and drivebuy killings are becoming commonplace; putrefied bodies are collecting in pits and rivers.
In the face of such widening chaos, even the Americans, who led the way in the War on Error, are having second thoughts. Suffering from heavy casualties in the field, a massive slump in popularity at home, and dwindling allies, the US President is rumoured to be considering the withdrawal of financial support from Oxford's overseas propaganda arm OUPINC. This would leave the university's involvement in the occupation high and dry on the wreckage of a foreign policy disaster. Akme has learned that, in order to pre-empt such a move, behind-the-scenes legal preparations are underway to have Oxford declared the 51st American state.
It is not, however, all bad news. Oxford's notorious Abbey Garb gaol has been decommissioned and turned into the Ba'ath Palace hotel complex for visiting dignitaries. The notorious Mahabarratt secret police have been disbanded, the recruitment of foreign fighters and weapons researchers is up, WMD production is returning to normal, and control of some of the outlying regions to the south has successfully been transferred to 'Councils' of local elders.
Another success has been the reflooding of the far south region of Bin-Sey, from which the historic Marsh Arab tenants were being brutally evicted. A 1,000-mile dyke is planned, behind which the villagers will be allowed once again to flood their homes and fields to the depth of an ambulance.
But the university's authority has collapsed in the outer suburbs of the capital, following the failure of its attempts to extend its concreting into the designated 'green belt'. In areas like the slums of Sadder City, the increasingly lawless estates are patrolled by gangs of youths driving around in Somali-style 'technicals' (top-up trucks mounted with machine-guns), ram-raiding local shops for drugs and degrees. The occupation contracts have been drafted to protect the university from aggressive militants who are being driven by this rising tide of poverty, crime and hunger into pursuing the authorities for damages.
There is a fear that the widespread power-vacuum in this hinterland may be filled by the resurgence of the fundamentalist Teleban, who prohibit all imagery, photography, art and music, and who order women into domestic confinement or brothels. The madrassa at Hil-dah recently only narrowly avoided a Teleban takeover and an enforcement of the burquar. Holy texts have been lost from Oril, and at Kebul there has been a serious race riot.
Nor is the oil flowing as it once did. The Sunni elite ('the brightest of the bright') who used to rule the country and control the 'Holy Wells' are no longer guaranteed the top jobs in the regime - the army, the ministries, the financial sector - and their illicit profits from oil, drugs and sanctions-busting can no longer be syphoned to support the ruling clique and their network of extravagant palaces. Already, several palace cellars have been looted, including that of Allahsols, an extreme, privileged, reclusive group who worship the sundial and the 24-hour consumption of alcohol.
After five years of the War on Error, everyone is asking the question: has it made Oxford more secure or less? "The whole purpose of the university we are supposed to be protecting is said to be freedom of thought, yet the new error laws and study contracts are imposing the exact opposite," commented one of the rebel dons, who, once prompted, spoke at length. He has asked to remain anonymous, as he fears he would otherwise be risking his job. Under the Hoodawi the academics too are being subjected to a fierce new discipline.
"I am reminded of what, for me, was the most shocking moment of 9/11. I was watching events unfold live on the television, and at one point, while the dust of the Dim Powers was, literally, still settling over the city, the presenter switched to reactions being filmed live in the Middle East. Predictably, some Palestinian children were beating drums and waving flags in the refugee camps of Gaza and the backstreets of Jericho and Blackburn Leys, there was some muted triumphalism in Jordan Hill and the Covered Market, but what I found truly disturbing was the footage relayed from Jerusalem, where an Israeli girl, no older than 12, was running down the road, shouting ecstatically to the camera: "At last, at last! At last you in the West now know what it is like! We have been living with this tourism for fifty years!"
"What is happening, you see, is that we are importing, buying wholesale, the Zionists' hysteria, their warped perspective, their siege complex. They invade waving their ancient books, steal the Palestinians' land, and then complain when a few kids throw back stones. To them a broken windscreen is an atrocity, a dented tank an outrage. The Israelis demand that the Palestinian authorities deliver a tourist-free Broad, but how can they possibly control the legions of young, hungry hotheads the authorities have themselves provoked? Force them to sign 'I'll behave' contracts? Have them write essays at gunpoint? At the same time, while stoking this hysteria in the schools, we are passing laws that are dismantling the very freedoms we are supposedly trying to teach. Always remember that one man's tourist is another man's free-thinker."
A spokesman for the governing body retorted angrily: "To equate tourism with free-thinking is itself an error. It is moral relativism, a sort of intellectual errorism that must be resisted at all costs, and perhaps even be punished by godown (excommunication). We do not like the new error laws either, but we find ourselves in exceptional circumstances. Recent incidents of litigation have cost us many thousands of pounds, even millions. This global death-cult is going to engulf us all unless we start bombing people now. As we speak, rogue universities around the world are building nuclear and chemical weapons, weapons that foreign tourists may well try to use against us. Just imagine a dirty nuke in Radcliffe Square or a nerve gas attack in the Sheldonian."
But Oxford Islamist scholar Henry Jihadi takes a different view: "Knowledge is international, and cannot and should not be monopolised or restricted. The nuclear genie is out of the lamp - ask the Israelis. Oxford is proud that some of the earliest work took place here and at the nearby secret Al Dermaston complex, and tries to stay at the forefront of such research with its facility at Cull'em. The university positively encourages, indeed recruits international scientists to come and study their physics here, not to mention pay the university's fees, so how can it grumble when its alumni go off and start refining uranium around the world, or bring their results back here for testing? That is having your yellowcake and eating it. Our whole ethos is supposed to be one of freedom of thought and information and expression. And this willy nilly must include the freedom to argue, for example, for the introduction of Sharia law in higher education, and the principle of ground zero interest."
Jihardi's sentiments were echoed even more trenchantly by Oxford publisher Denis Dugdale. "It is the first time in my life that my country's foreign policy has made me feel not just ashamed, but physically nauseous," he declared. "The hypocrisy of dressing up our lust for oil and cringeing subservience to the US bully-boys in the guise of spreading 'freedom and democracy', which we ourselves have abandoned, is deeply sickening. When there's easy cash to be had, Oxford will in fact deal with anyone, from Nazi profiteers to middle eastern gun-runners. I am reminded of the hypocrisy of the former OUPINC boss Sir Roger Otiose, who in the name of education broke the 1989 trade embargo of Tehran in order to make a few quid out of selling nuclear textbooks to the Mullahs, even as he shed crocodile tears over their near-assassination of a fellow publisher. I hope he is pleased with himself now that the Ulama are building a bomb."
Akme's religious correspondent Ben Edict has reported that in Iran students are being taught that 9/11, along with the Holocaust and the Second World War, was just a Mossad propaganda plot, and that suicide crammers will be rewarded in Paradise with 20,000 centrifuges and an ethernet of pornography.
Oxford's celebrated antipostmodernist Malcolm Andrewes takes a more philosophical stance: "I don't see 9/11 as a political event at all, just a technological inevitability. Once large numbers of us started casually flying around in giant tanks of kerosene, and constructing such monstrously tall buildings, it was only a matter of time before someone would put two and two together. It might as well have been a disgruntled cabin-crew, or your average American pyromaniac. As it happens it was a dozen fanatic boxcutters. The fascinating thing is how the US and UK governments have since danced so exactly to their tune. As for Oxford's so-called War on Error, everyone knows that an Oxford contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. Any attempt to enforce one would be laughed out of court."