Can Islam's leaders reach its radicals?

"When the Arab Afghans got started, they were people from established groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, from radical factions of course, but they were still from the Brotherhood and maintained the rules on what was permissible that the Brotherhood had established,'' says Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism expert and author of "Al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe."

"Guys like Zarqawi are from a later generation of mid-level commanders [who] are extreme beyond all extremes ... and they've gradually taken over, both in North Africa, the Middle East and in Europe."

To be sure, wars of ideas are fought over decades, if not generations, and most Muslim leaders are increasingly laying the groundwork to further isolate and delegitimize Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers.

Last Wednesday - a day before the attack in London - a little noticed Islamic conference in Jordan brought together nearly 200 representatives of Islamic senior leaders like Iraq's Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Jumaa, and Qaradawi.

The scholars condemned the practice of branding other Muslims as "infidels" - the intellectual tactic that men like Mr. Zarqawi use to justify the killing of civilians - and also the frequent use of fatwa, or religious rulings, by friends of the jihadis who are seen as religiously unqualified. "No one may issue a fatwa without the requisite personal qualifications," they said in a statement after the meeting.

The prominence of lay preachers like Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian medical doctor and Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, has long been a source of frustration to Islam's mainstream scholars, or Ulama, who consider their interpretations of the Koran to be ignorant and misleading, particularly their willingness to kill noncombatants.

While the jihadis shoot back that the Ulama are coopted by "corrupt" regimes - Zarqawi has called Qaradawi a "sultan of the television" who has "abandoned the mujahideen" - the force with which men like Qaradawi are speaking out does yield benefits, say some analysts.

Even when Abu Muhamad al-Maqdsi, the cleric who served as Zarqawi's religious teacher when the two men were in prison together in Jordan in the 1990s, attacked Zarqawi's methods in Iraq - calling the number of civilian deaths in suicide bombs there a "tragedy" - Zarqawi turned on his old mentor. "Do not follow the path of Satan that leads to your destruction,'' he said.

"The hard core really are in a sense beyond reason - moderate scholars are not going to influence their views or behavior,'' says Marc Lynch, a professor of political science and a Middle East expert at Williams College in Massachusetts. "But if you're the kind of person who might become a jihadi, there's a chance you might take the moderates' criticisms seriously."

Mr. Lynch says the real importance of consistent attacks on the takfiri line is that it's probably convincing at least some fence-sitting young men to not go over to the other side. "What they can do is prevent the hard-core types from attracting a lot more recruits and supporters. If you didn't have the counterbalance of these denunciations, the momentum would be all on one side. It's not a silver bullet, but it might keep their growth at a standstill," he says.

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