Shielding their country against the threat of terrorism and helping their coreligionists be immune against radical ideologies, a group of Singapore Muslim scholars is running an ambitious programme to fight extremism. “We are not scared of [terrorists],” scholar Ustaz Ibrahim Kassim, a member of government-backed anti-extremism Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG), said on May 16. “We know that history repeats itself, but these problems do not need to be passed on.” The 40-member group, which was formed by the government after 9/11 terror attacks, is trying to rehabilitate or “deprogram” terror suspects. Once the detainee is rehabilitated, the scholars ask for his release and the government offers him a job.
After studying extremist ideologies, the Muslim scholars were distributed to the heavy-guarded jails that house the suspects. In more than a thousand weekly hour-long sessions, the scholars worked to build personal relationships with the detainees before discussing and correcting their religious convictions.