THE GUARDIAN: Hundreds attend three-day al-Hidayah event at University of Warwick campus to learn how to fight arguments of extremists
After a modest breakfast came the first choice of the day: to take part in sporting activities ranging from five-a-side football to archery, or to join the Sunday morning nature stroll around the campus. Then it was down to the serious business: a series of lectures, workshops and presentations, punctuated by prayers and countless impromptu street-corner debates.
This is al-Hidayah 2010, a three-day event that kicked off on Saturday and attended by 1,300 Muslims – mainly young men and women – that has been billed as the UK's first anti-terror camp.
Devotees of Muslim scholar Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri have gathered at the University of Warwick's campus to be taught practical ways of countering extremist views in their schools, universities and communities. They have been learning how to engage with people expressing extremist views and are being directed to passages in the Qur'an and other Islamic texts to allow them to argue against them.The camp follows the publication by Qadri, founder of the moderate Minhaj-ul-Quran International (MQI) movement, of a headline-grabbing "fatwa on terrorism", a 600-page volume claiming to "remove decisively" any theological justification for Islamist terror.
"People have long asked where are the moderate Muslim organisations? What are they doing to combat extremism," said MQI spokesman Shahid Mursaleen. "We are trying to train young people here to counter the arguments they hear from the radicals, to give them the knowledge so they can question the extremists and contradict their ideology." >>> Stephen Morris | Sunday, August 08, 2010
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