Where the true remedy could be found

His Majesty King Abdullah’s speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last week had a resounding impact on world leaders and peoples as he affirmed that Jordan will not allow Daesh to hijack our religion, distort its image and defame our noble values. 

Arabs and Muslims should be the ones defeating and uprooting this Satanic group committing hideous murders using the name of God and religion.

Two days following the King’s speech, a Daesh spokesman, Abu Mohammed Al Adnani, issued a statement, carried by Al Furqan network, saying that the next target for Daesh will not be confined to Syria and Iraq, but will include Riyadh, Kuwait and Amman.

Strategic patience will certainly lead to the military defeat of Daesh in Mosul and Raqqa, in months or years to come. 

But a military victory of the US-led coalition will not permanently uproot the group.

Daesh recruits its fighters through ideology. History provides strong evidences that it requires another ideology to defeat a deviant one.

Islamic scholars in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia issued press statements condemning Daesh’s atrocities, but not one single religious fatwa that says in unambiguous terms that the members of this group are non-Muslims and apostates. 

Such fatwa would constitute a strong deterrent for the 3,000 Tunisians and nearly 1,000 Jordanians fighting alongside Daesh, assuming they are following the way of jihad for God.

What is needed are new curricula for preparatory and secondary schools that specifically repudiate the interpretation of tawheed as we know it in Jordan and the Sunni world by those who deviated from Islam.

It is unfortunate that professors of Islamic Sharia in many Arab universities are graduates of the same educational institutions that advocate a narrow-minded doctrine of jihad, while ignoring the holy pillars of tolerance for other religions, and the universality of mercy for all human kind.

They are the same professors who were tasked by the Ministry of Education to come up with school curricula for the subject of religion to elementary, preparatory and secondary classes.

Since 1973, when the Gulf oil prices quadrupled, many educational institutions managed successfully to give scholarships and incentives to the younger generations, recruiting them to that deviant concept of Jihadist Salafism. 

Many ministers of awqaf and religious affairs obtained their PhDs from those institutions.

The publishing industry there, with its new multi-million dollar budget, drowned the book markets in the Arab world with cheap compendiums of their literature. 

True remedy should start at the early level of education.