Prince Naif Bin Abdul Aziz, Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, will open an international conference on terrorism and extremist thought here on Sunday. Organized by Madina's Islamic University, the four-day conference will hold 12 sessions on four main areas, cited as the “Founding and Feeding of Extremism”, “Sources of Extremist Thought”, “Dangers and Effects of Terrorism”, and the “Intellectual Treatment of Extremism and Terrorism”, during which over 80 research papers will be discussed by scholars, thinkers and specialists in combating terrorism around the world. “The conference seeks to show Islamic moderation, its tolerance of others, and clear up the error in attributing terrorism to it, due to the deviation of some of those who belong to it,” said Muhammad Bin Ali Al-Aqlaa' of the Islamic University. “We will show how it is one of the crimes of the age and has no religion or nation, and show how Islam is innocent of it in thought and behavior, and we will look at how to confront it intellectually to uproot it and dry up its sources and strengthen intellectual security in Islamic societies,” he said. Al-Aqalaa' added that focus would also be on the “spirit of tolerance, ingraining values of understanding, promoting ways of dealing with differences and the culture of dialogue”. He added that the conference's importance stems from the fact that it is being organized in the Kingdom, a country founded mainly on the basis and goals of establishing the sound aqeeda (faith) and implementing moderate methods taken from the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him).
