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Bismillah al-Rahman ar-Raheem wa Asalaam ul alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatu.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

You are all here, according to the blueprint for this conference, first to help identify common values between Muslim and Western societies — which also means to determine to what degree these common values are indeed important or relevant in the contemporary experiences of both societies, and to confront the problem of distortion of these common values in both societies. And from that point to move on to consider practical measures and positive issues — practical measures and positive issues that build common platforms that can challenge extremist discourse in the Muslim world, in Europe, and America while increasing co-operation between Muslim and non-Muslim societies.

Nothing too demanding there!

But you know the situation is really too critical to indulge my sense of irony at the expense of the issues with which you must grapple.

Let me put that in the most personal terms — terms you have to trust because I am drawing them from personal experience, not cut and paste research.

I have, as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East, witnessed a progressive drift to barbarism over a period of the past 40 years. In 1975-76 I covered the civil war in Lebanon between Muslims and Christians. In fact the conflict was thoroughly communal, with little or no religious content or even sloganeering.

At that time I designed a T-shirt for my television news crew to wear during the street fighting — an NBC peacock on the front, and across the back, written in Arabic — the word Sahaf — Arabic for journalist — because I was totally confident that if either a Christian Phalangist sniper on one side or a Lebanese or Palestinian Muslim sniper on the other side, read those words thru his sniper scope he would not 200fire. And no one did. Even though the Lebanese and Palestinian leftwing Muslim snipers considered my government as the arch supporter of Israel. Less than a decade later if you wore that T-shirt on the streets of Beirut, a Shi‘ite Islamist militia would beat you up, kidnap you, and if you were lucky, ransom you off. Now, in Iraq Sunni insurgent militias, generally Islamist, would put a bullet thru your head or cut it off.

Let me take it still further back in time and this example is particularly instructive. From 1968 onwards I covered the rise of the Palestinian fedayeen raiding across the River Jordan from the East Bank and their eventual fall and redeployment in Lebanon.

Their objective back in 1968 was to ambush Israeli patrols and if the mines they dug or the ambushes they staged resulted in Israeli civilian casualties it was, as a rule, by accident not intention.

These men were nominally enrolled in a variety of ideological movements. They were nominally revolutionary Arab or Palestinian nationalists, or socialists or Marxists but they were nearly all men raised in traditional Muslim homes — in which Islam was a religion — a ritual practice, a spiritual perspective, a moral and ethical perception.

Despite their abstract ideological identities, they considered themselves still Muslim and I, who had acquired my understanding of Islam living with traditional Muslims in the old cities of Morocco, sensed I was again in the company of Muslims, by the virtue of their code of good manners – adab– which we are told is half of our religion, the politeness of their speech, their instinctive charity towards each other and a modesty in their purpose.

These men had been born and raised in conventionally pious households more than 60 or 70 years ago, in domestic cultures saturated by traditional Islam, raised by parents who believed that Islam was a religion, not an ideology. That Islam was the five pillars, all of which refer directly or are derived directly from a personal relationship to God through His Revelation. There are no extremist politics lurking in the five pillars.

A decade later I was covering Islamist movements in Egypt, the Sudan and Pakistan that were to greater or lesser degrees extremist. Now I associated with men who insisted that Islam was more than a religion, not just the five pillars – I am quoting directly phrases I heard over and over again — that Islam was an ideology.

And I, an ex-marxist, who had fled the failure of utopian ideology for the realism as well as the spiritual certainties of Faith, felt — in the company of these very conspicuously pious Islamist militants — that I was back in some sort of Leninist Party.

From that I would go on to argue that for the Muslim, the absence of a spiritual core in his understanding of the religion has been disaster.

I refer to the spiritual core and mystical practices that have so often been downgraded or thoroughly dismissed by those revivalist movements operating on the margins of Islam. They are puritanical in their suspicion of the sacred and of that beauty that is informed by the sacred.

In the absence of such a core, there is a void and that void has been invariably filled by revolutionary utopian Islamist ideology in which the political state of governance rather than the spiritual state of the soul takes precedence, and in which expedience in doctrine trumps the very religious law, or sharia, which is invoked as the raison d’etre for attempting to seize state power

And the more extremist the militants, the more utopian is their ideological vision of a world to be purified by violence, so reminiscent of Franz Fanon’s sense of the socially redemptive value of revolutionary violence — of an earthly paradise to be secured by armed struggle.

Indeed if we read what is self described as salafi-jihadi or takfiri-jihad — literature that circulates in European languages as well as Arabic on salif-jihadi websites and is avidly downloaded by radicalized Muslim youth in Europe as much if not more so than in the Arab world — one is struck by the recurrent parallels to Leninism. The salifi-jihadi is part of a vanguard that acts in the name of and on behalf of the global umma, as the Leninist acted in the name and on behalf of the international proletariat.

And the necessary savagery embraced by this literature, as the bridge to a utopian caliphate that has banished evil, is like the necessary dictatorship of the proletariat that would be the bridge in the transformation from socialist state to a classless communist utopia where the state has withered away.

In contrast, let me recall the manner in which I began my remarks, with a few words in Arabic. In the Muslim world and in the company of Muslims one should begin anything, including a dinner speech like this one by either invoking The Name of God, and what must be His two most significant attributes — Mercy and Compassion — for these are the Names that are canonically invoked — when a Muslim begins any action by saying: Bismillah, ur Rahman ur Raheem, and/or by extending peace and blessings to whoever one addresses — Asalaam Alaykum.

There in, is the basis, I would suggest for at least the Muslim portion of a common platform between Muslim and Western Societies to tackle extremist discourse – the most basic imperatives – God the Most Merciful, God the Most Compassionate, and the peace, and mercy and blessings of God upon one and all.

These imperatives resonate from the moment one rises until the moment one sleeps in traditional Islamic culture. And they are rarely if ever to be found in the discourse of extremist Muslims. Certainly these imperatives would resonate in the traditional Christian or Judeo-Christian religious cultures which — the European Union to the contrary — are at the formative core of traditional Western culture.

God, Mercy, Compassion, Blessings, Peace.

But if we are attuned to contemporary realities then the Muslim must recognize that he or she is building a common platform with European societies that to a greater or lesser degree, are post-Christian, with some stirrings here and there of renewed religiosity.

What are the options? To talk about multi-culturalism whether within a particular Western society or within that global society we seem to be stumbling, if not racing, towards?

But the unspoken implication that has been most apparent in practice is a multi-culturalism based on the lack of a common platform or shared values. That has contributed in its own way to the void within those troubled Muslim souls here in the West and increasingly in the East, cut off from the ethnically - colored traditional religion of their immigrant parents, without a serious sense of identification with Western society.

In reaction there are increasing calls, here in England, in Europe, and to a much lesser degree, in America, in the name post-Judeo-Christian liberal thought for what could be called an Enlightenment Consensus or Liberal Consensus as the common platform.

I cannot speak about Europe but in America, where in fact there has been an extraordinary degree of integration of Muslims within the broader society, the most outspoken “Muslim voices” I have heard embracing this sort of common platform are a couple of lady Apostates from Islam, one of whom we Americans recently imported from the Netherlands.

Now, John Gray is one of the first political philosophers in the West to recognize that there is nothing traditionally Islamic about Islamist extremism – that it has more in common with modern European revolutionary perspectives as it does with the religion in whose name it dares to speak. He has also written extensively about the fragmentation and lack of cohesion of the modern world, which is accelerating as part of the process of globalization.

Writing in this week’s Spectator, Gray warns that an attempt to impose a liberal, militantly secularist consensus upon Muslims in the West, as the vehicle of integration, and in the name of a common platform will accelerate the radicalization of the Muslim youth, and undermine co-operation within the Muslim communities in the struggle against terrorism.

Gray suggests that the consensus or common platform must be tolerance and that means focusing on genuine obstacles to peaceful co-existence. Certainly there are many reasons why Muslims have integrated far better in American society than in European societies — but one of them is that the secular perspective in America by and large is based on enshrining tolerance between religious communities rather than eliminating or denying religion or religious differences.

Along with tolerance I would suggest a commitment to law and order. It is significant that one of the great religious leaders from the Muslim world with us tonight has directly addressed the Muslim immigrant communities in the West and reminded them that Islam requires them to obey the law of the land.

Finally I would suggest that any realistic common platform must recognize the importance of reciprocity - as well as tolerance and law and order.

If we, as Muslims, ask non- Muslim liberals to acknowledge that social co-existence may require limits on free speech when that free speech is hate speech, so we must call upon the Muslim community to denounce any institutions which teach our children to hate Christians and Jews and to call upon the authorities to move against any institutions which do so.

Finally there is the unstated issue of policy.

One of the most serious theorists of the salifi-jihadis, Abu Musab al-Suri, acknowledged in his writing that the overthrow of the Taliban and the loss of Afghanistan was a disaster for his movement, but the American occupation of Iraq, he went to observe, inaugurated a “historical new period that almost single handedly rescued the salifi jihadi movement just when many of its critics thought it was finished.”

And nothing that Bin Laden has said or done has resonated so much within the Muslim world, and particularly along the frontiers shared with Israel or Israeli occupied territory, as his remarks shortly after 9/11 when suddenly instead of the usual tirades against Crusaders and Jews, and the Arab regimes, Bin Laden linked his attack on America to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Yet the global implications of a salifi-jihadi insurgency in Iraq, and the failure to establish a viable Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution pale when we consider the implications of a possible American military attack against Iran.

An increasing number of analysts in Washington are convinced or at least fearful, that the administration is attempting to provoke Iran into actions that would justify war.

We know from any number of public opinion polls, that while large numbers of Muslims still appreciate domestic American values of tolerance, freedom, and democracy, even larger numbers are increasingly convinced that the administration in Washington is waging a war against Islam under the guise of a war against terrorism.

The best practical measures, the best programs, the most comprehensive and realistic common platforms could be swept aside by war with Iran and the repercussions of such a war.

Last month a remarkable group of 24 Americans – a group that included a former secretary of state, former members of Congress, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious and cultural leaders, the leading figure in the aborted Palestinian-Israeli peace process, philanthropists, business leaders and experts on foreign policy, public opinion, media and conflict resolution committed themselves to an ongoing effort to alter policy — to improve US relations with the Global Muslim community.

Here is what else was impressive about that three-day gathering: that the group will continue to meet periodically; and that it has the support of an administrative infrastructure provided by two institutions Search for Common Ground and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program. The goal — viable action which means practical measures leading hopefully to altered policy as well as altered attitudes.

Inevitably that is the sort of commitment you are all being called upon to undertake here at Wilton Park. The program sets the direction; the task is profound and nearly global in ambition. I pray that you will succeed.

Thank you.