Demotix/Mahmoud Khaled. All rights reserved.
The day after the November 13 Paris attacks, the Egyptian President Abdul Fattah El Sisi met with education advisors and emphasized that weak education was a key source of extremism and terrorism. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year, he had even called for a revolution in religious discourse.
Extremist religious discourses are of course only one element in complex processes of radicalization. Deeper local and global grievances, evolving opportunity structures and individual factors combine with 'extremist discourse' to drive a minority of Muslim youth towards radicalization and terrorist acts. Undermining extremist discourse is therefore indeed a critical component of an effective counter-terrorism strategy. However, even where there has been high profile interest in ‘rooting out extremism from education’, the approach has been largely misguided. Why are reforms missing the point?
