Khushaiban, a professor of sociology at King Saud University, has said that the “intellectual defeat” of terrorism will prove more difficult than the “security victory”. Al-Khushaiban told Al-Riyadh Arabic daily in a recent interview that despite the “great and brave efforts” on the part of the security forces, “intellectual victory” was a “complicated and completely different issue”. “It requires a precise program to completely change the culture of society, and the security services cannot do it alone,” Al-Khushaiban said. “It's the joint responsibility of many, but particularly the family, the school, the media and the mosque, but the most important for achieving intellectual security are society's religious authorities, given that the logic of the ‘deviant group' is basically founded on incorrect religious assumptions. The correction of those assumptions requires the efforts of specialists in that field.” Al-Khushaiban said that the intellectual war on terrorism entailed a “complete re-reading of the religious discourse” and “development of its concepts” with focus on “important and fundamental issues such as Al-Walaa' wa Al-Baraa' (allegiance and disavowal), and ways of understanding them, as well as the acceptance of others who have a different way of thinking, culture and belief”. According to Al-Khushaiban, the religious discourse needs to be associated with “modern life and development in the world”. “This can lead to a development program for the culture of society that can be promoted through official and non-official bodies and be conducted over a minimum of ten years to bring about the required change,” he said. Al-Khushaiban also addressed the use of the term “deviants”, and said that “calling a spade a spade” was a necessary part of the process. “When we call terrorists ‘deviants' it leaves the question of how far they have deviated and in which direction and how,” he said. “The deviation is not a result of terrorism, on the contrary. Why do we call them deviants after they've committed acts of terrorism? The truth is that they are deviants from the correct understanding of the religious reality, and become terrorists later.” Al-Khushaiban says that security efforts have frustrated terrorists' recruitment methods, and that the process is mostly conducted through the Internet, targeting younger generations than before. “Al-Qaeda is having trouble reaching the people it reached before and we have been seeing in recent years the appearance of age groups all in the middle of their teen years,” he said. The lack of codification and control of Islamic work and preaching through legal organizations, Al-Khushaiban says, made it in the past prone to penetration by extremist strains. “A lot of organizations and religious activities come under no legal organization with a discernible authority. They used to get permission from the police for activities such as sermons, trips and camps, but after that what they got up to was not monitored,” he said. “Preaching work and particularly the Islamic awakening did what it wanted and permeated the whole of society under a religious cover, and there was no organizational or legal supervision. They set up camps and no one could object and ask what their purposes were or ask any authority to keep an eye on them. The result was that extremism disappeared under the cloak of religion and produced terrorism.” For Al-Khushaiban, part of dealing with a problem is acknowledging the existence of a problem. “Unfortunately, we still haven't admitted to many of the negative things in our societies, and we try to cover them up, and an example of that is extremism. Society is in a crisis of understanding social reality and religious reality, and its relation with the world around it,” Al-Khushaiban told Al-Riyadh. “I hope we and society are able to create a suitable environment to develop the wealth of minds in the next generations,” he said, adding that a society needs to be forged “suited to the future, not the past”. __
