His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, yesterday at his Majlis, attended a lecture by Usama al-Sayed al-Azhari, advisor to the Egyptian president, on "Erroneous Conceptions of Extremist Groups".

Al-Azhari stressed that the ideology and bloody practices of extremist groups are not based on true spirit of Islamic sharia and that they prosper in the absence of the authentic knowledge promoted in Muslim countries by large Islamic institutes and schools like Al Azhar University in Egypt, Ezzitouna University in Tunisia, the Ottoman School in Libya, the Two Holy Mosques in Saudi Arabia, Ahmadiya School in the UAE and many others.

These schools, he said, prepared men to promote a civilisation on the foundations of compassion, good ethics and keenness on protecting homeland.

He added that the groups that emerged some eighty years ago did not follow these scholarly institutes, lacked approaches to generate knowledge, had enthusiasm that not governed by fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence and knowledge) and ended up shedding blood.

Dr. Al-Azhari said that these groups share a common ideology that is centred around the concept of hakimiyya (the vision of God's dominion) leading them to practice takfir whereby they accuse Muslims in general of apostasy violating the consensus of renowned and highly-esteemed Islamic scholars and authorities like Al-Ghazali, Ibn Masoud, Ibn Abbas, Al-Tabari and many others.

Boko Haram, ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaeda, he said, are among the groups that "lost the keys to true knowledge over the past eight decades."