AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The world has watched as ISIS and other Muslim extremist groups have persecuted Christians, Jews and other minorities in countries like Iraq and Syria. Now a group of government, religious and academic leaders from majority Muslim countries say they'll unite to protect those minorities. They say Islam forbids religious persecution. NPR's Tom Gjelten reports.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: More than a hundred countries were represented at a gathering in Morocco this week. One of the organizers, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf from the United States, says it had one focus, the plight of religious minorities in Muslim lands.
HAMZA YUSUF: We have people being enslaved into sexual slavery. We have Christian churches that have been there for long before Islam was in these lands that are being destroyed. And we have Jews in Yemen, one of the oldest Jewish communities, now the very existence of which is threatened.
GJELTEN: While some prominent Muslims belittle the plight of non-Muslims in their countries, those who came to this meeting in Marrakesh heard testimony from other faith leaders about the conditions in their countries.
SATTAR HILU: (Foreign language spoken).
GJELTEN: Sheikh Sattar Hilu, speaking on behalf of the Sabian sect in Iraq, said they and other minorities face killing and deportation.
HILU: (Foreign language spoken).
GJELTEN: The message from this meeting - such persecution is un-Islamic, according to the Charter of Medina, the Prophet Muhammed's 1,400-year-old outline for an Islamic state. It mandated peaceful coexistence and religious freedom in the Arabian city of Medina inhabited at the time by various tribes and religious groups.
RECEP SENTURK: Today, we need to re-publicize these documents.
GJELTEN: Recep Senturk in an Islamic scholar from Fatih University in Istanbul.
SENTURK: Especially when we see that the minority rights are violated, those people who are involved in terror activities, they are misusing the name of Islam to justify their evil actions.
GJELTEN: A declaration coming out of this week's meeting in Morocco calls for a more inclusive political culture in Muslim majority countries. School authorities should be on the lookout for teaching materials that promote extremism. Religious leaders in those countries should remind their followers that people of other faiths lived peacefully among them for centuries. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, who founded a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, says the purpose of this week's meeting was to counter the extremist ideology that fuels groups like ISIS.
YUSUF: We don't have any power other than our intellects and our hearts, and that's what we're fighting with. Ideas must counter ideas. You can drop all the bombs you want, but if you don't pull up weeds by their roots, they just grow back.
GJELTEN: But this is not the first time mainstream Islamic scholars and Muslim government officials have tried to challenge extremism in the name of Islam. Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution studies extremist movements, and he worries efforts by these traditional Muslim scholars may not reach young, angry Arabs and Muslims.
SHADI HAMID: If you want to convince people who are predisposed to radicalism, you have to provide voices that they're going to see as legitimate. You don't come with these government-sponsored clerics who are very much part of the ruling establishment in the Middle East which itself has been a big part of the problem.
GJELTEN: There is, however, another audience - all those who say Islam is itself to blame for terrorism. That notion drives anti-Muslim sentiment, which in turn may lead some Muslims to conclude a religious war is underway, and that conviction may, in time, lead them to radicalism. Tom Gjelten, NPR News.