Bore Them Into Submission

Great Britain is adopting a new strategy for dealing with Muslim extremists - civics lessons.

Muslim "opinion formers", including imams, are to be given lessons in civic leadership under a new plan to tackle Islamic extremism in Britain.

Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, will this week announce details of a £6 million "hearts and minds" drive to deal with growing radicalism among young British Muslims which can fuel terrorist plots.

Also part of the plan are school-twinning projects, in which pupils from mainly Muslim schools will undertake joint projects, such as music and drama, with children from predominantly white establishments.

The schools could go on trips together, while groups of pupils could spend days in each other's classrooms.

Miss Kelly will also announce a major increase in the number of "forums against extremism" - regional groups which meet regularly and which were set up in the wake of the July 7 London bombings to enable Muslims to discuss ways of tackling extremism.

Somehow, I'm not optimistic that sweet talk is the answer. Not when I see this.

A secret intelligence document warns that al-Qaeda agents in the UK are training young Muslim men and women to fight British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dossier, seen by this newspaper, also says that al-Qaeda sympathisers are sending terrorist groups in Pakistan hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash to fund jihad against Western democracies.

Young British Muslims are still being "radicalised" by extremists despite a crackdown on al-Qaeda supporters in mosques and community centres, the document states.

And finally, this whole silent Muslim majority is a bit of wishful thinking too.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.