Dar Al-Iftaa applauds Egypt’s counter terrorism diplomacy

CAIRO – 14 July 2017: Dar Al-Iftaa’s monitoring observatory praised the efforts of Egyptian diplomacy in combating terrorism through the global coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) “terrorist” group.

In a Thursday statement, the observatory warned against allowing countries supporting terrorism and embracing Islamic extremism to join the global coalition fighting IS and disuniting it as a result.

Egypt’s efforts during its leadership of the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Committee resulted in the adoption of resolution 2354 by the Security Council.

The council welcomed the “Comprehensive International Framework to Counter Terrorist Narratives” proposed by Egypt and urged member countries to follow the guidelines presented in the text.

The framework aims to recommend effective ways to struggle against the way terrorist groups use their narratives to encourage and recruit others to acquire similar practices, according to the UNSC.

Earlier this week, Dar al-Ifta, Egypt’s religious body responsible for issuing fatwas (Islamic decisions), announced its strategy to confront extremism, violence and Takfiri ideas during the next stage, which will be based on the launching of a project titled "Anatomy of the terrorist building cycle,” state-owned news agency MENA reported.

This comes within Dar al-ifta’s efforts to fight extremism and terrorism. A website will be launched for this project for easy access to its information.

When IS emerged in 2014 under the pretext of “fighting in the name of Islam,” Dar al-Ifta created an encyclopedia on the “true” Islamic identity in English that was distributed among Muslim communities in the West. The encyclopedia was a scholarly project recently drafted in five volumes that aims to guide modern Muslims in all walks of life, fight “extremist ideology” and refute “misconceptions” about Islam.

Since then, Al-Azhar has announced a number of projects that aim to instruct Islamic teachings to new Muslims, non-Arabic speaking Muslims and non-Muslims interested in learning about Islam.