Hearts and minds of young Muslims ...

It sounds like, perhaps, that many Muslims in the UK are getting past the denial stage of reaction to the jihadi 'crisis' and beginning to face the questions that some of us have been trying to puzzle over, viz. if Islam is peaceful in essence, where are these folk getting their (Islamic-sounding) justifications from? And, how can their justifications be delegitimised in Muslim terms? And, what steps are being taken to do so? While I can understand the sometimes tetchy responses to this basket of questions, it just won't do to refuse entirely to engage with them. As a Christian I am more than happy to explain the answers to similar questions that could be posed from time to time about people using the label 'Christian' to underpin murderous activities. So the article from which this following quote is taken is a welcome sign of moving further on. The worry has been that there may not be adequate answers to the questions in Islam.

In the past few days, key Muslim community activists have admitted to me that what worries them is how certain theological issues have not been properly clarified, and can be used to justify extremism. The most important is the age-old distinction between dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and dar al-harb (the land of the other, of unbelief - or of war, according to the literal translation from the Arabic). This demonisation of all that is not Muslim is the "paradigmatic, instinctive response that people fall back on in a moment of crisis", I was told. Extremists such as Hizb ut-Tahrir use this dualism, as do jihadis, to justify their contempt for the rights - and lives - of the kufr, the unbeliever.

The article hits all the right buttons and even givens the following encouraging news.

Britain is now the arena for one of the most public, impassioned and wide-ranging debates about Islam anywhere in the world.

It's a shame some of those who comment on the articles fail to engage the issue as cannily as the Metropolitan police:

following a strategy of working with Islamist- and Salafi-dominated mosques such as the one in Brixton, well aware that their best chance of drawing extremists away from violence is through those who know how to argue the case on Islamic grounds and redirect the religious fervour of hot-headed young men.

Some comments are atheists who can't really imagine what it is like to hold a different point of view and how hard it would be to push through their preferred strategy of religious deprogramming. Guys, it ain't going to happen: the Met have the better argument.
Hearts and minds of young Muslims will be won or lost in the mosques