Article published in the Leader Section of The Financial Times
Published 16 July 2005

Ten days on there is justified satisfaction at the response of the government and opposition, emergency, security and police services, and Muslim and indigenous communities in the face of the outrageous attack on Londoners on July 7. It was measured and courageous, calm yet defiant.

Next week, the government meets with Muslim leaders in the next vital stage designed to cement a united front against the propagation of jihadi extremism within our society. The object is to anathematise, once and for all, leaving no possible nuance or ambiguity, this obscene cult of death.

Let it be proclaimed without qualification: the messianic millenarianism of Osama bin Laden is a form of fascism that has no place in any society that believes in or aspires to freedom.

But we need to think more ambitiously still. The objective should be to get an international consensus, including the leadership of the Muslim and Arab world, which places all attacks on civilians and non-combatants in a war situation beyond the pale. We have, fortuitously, a series of opportunities to advance this seemingly simple, but until now impossible agenda.

Britain is currently in the chair of both the Group of Eight advanced economies and the European Union. Tony Blair, prime minister, should use these positions to pursue that vital consensus on how to isolate jihadi extremism.

Any such attempt will soon enough run into a wall of Muslim grievance (about Chechnya and Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq), and will force into the open transatlantic and intra-European disagreements about policy towards the Middle East and Muslim world.

Yet at the United Nations summit in New York in September, and a summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Mecca later this year, every effort should be made to agree on a common definition of terrorism that proscribes attacks on civilians.

This is not just a problem for one "side". The US military doctrine of force protection, for example, results in practice in indiscriminate use of devastating firepower to protect American soldiers, causing widespread civilian casualties - probably tens of thousands in Iraq - against which there is no real redress. If we wish to end recourse to so-called asymmetric warfare, we need to restrain the unbridled use of asymmetric power. There is, nonetheless, a difference to be made here. Only the jihadis are advocating the slaughter of civilians as a legitimate tactic.

This month, Muslim religious leaders including Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of Al Azhar, Sunni Islam's foremost cleric, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leader of Iraq's Shia, denounced the jihadi practice of declaring other Muslims "apostates" and condemned all attacks on civilians.

But this will never be enough while Saudi Arabia's clerical establishment keeps spewing out poisonous bigotry against "infidels", not just at home but through the network of mosques and schools the Wahhabis endow around the world. What, for example, preoccupied the prayer-leader at Mecca's great mosque yesterday? The slaughter of defenceless Shia children in Baghdad this week? The London bombings and their chilling effect on inter-faith relations? Not a bit of it. His theme was how satellite television - the biggest breath of fresh air in the Arab world in a century - is spreading licentiousness. It is not only the jihadis that must be isolated from mainstream Islam, but the sort of totalitarian preaching that feeds and succours them.