Yemeni Qazi, Hamoud al-Hitar in making many journalists scribble in their notebooks.

In 2002, the Qazi approached Al-Qaeda prisoners in Yemen, then being seen as the new centre of the jihad because of its ancestral links with Osama bin Laden, a large number of Yemeni recruits in the al-Qaeda network and incidents such as the bombing of the USS Cole.

Al-Hitar offered the prisoners a challenge: "If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle. But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."

Western anti-terrorist experts thought it was crazy and had no hope of working.

Two years on, the prisoners have been released, and Yemen is relatively peaceful. It is on the road away from the 'failed state' that it was near being labelled as, and moving rapidly. Yemen has moved from being a potential enemy to an indispensable ally in the war against terror. And Hitar's unconventional approach has a big part to play in this.

"Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror's capital," says Hitar.

"Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else."

Simple but compelling system

Hitar's system is simple, but compelling. He invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defence.

What he is doing is getting the prisoners to engage in ijtihad, a process of personal reflection on the meaning of the Quran, allowing individual interpretation of the words and actions of the Prophet, and the elders of early Islam, the salaf.

In a way, there is a direct link between Hitar's project and the ideas of the early Salaffiyah of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh.

Afghani and Abduh, at the height of Western Imperialism and Colonialism in the Islamic world, were trying to reconcile Islam and Modernity. This was a dynamic intellectual process, and the central tenet of it was ijtihad, individual reasoning, allowing each individual to be a direct interpreter of the Quran. Ijtihad then, the central tenet of being a Salaffiyah, was a highly subversive doctrine to orthodoxy and what we now call 'fundamentalism'.

This was radical Islamism without the connotations it has today. But paradoxically, Osama bin Laden and his twenty first century jihadis also identify themselves as salafiyyah, and for them, as for the Saudi funded Wahhabi orthodoxy that supports them, ijtihad is un-Islamic.

But Ijtihad, the process of an individual asking himself what it means to be a Muslim, is as old as Islam itself.

Hitar says that most militants are ordinary people who have been led astray. Just as they were taught Al Qaeda's doctrines, he says, so too can they be taught more- moderate ideas.

Defeat intellect by intellect

Says Hitar: "If you study terrorism in the world, you will see that it has an intellectual theory behind it. And any kind of intellectual idea can be defeated by intellect."

Hitar has been invited to speak to antiterrorism specialists at London's New Scotland Yard, as well as to French and German police, hoping to defuse growing militancy among Muslim immigrants.

US diplomats, sceptical not so long ago, have also approached the cleric to see if his methods can be applied in Iraq.

Says Hitar: "Before the dialogues began, there was only one way to fight terrorism, and that was through force. Now there is another way: dialogue."

If Yemen is showing the way can Egypt be far behind? In Egypt an Economics Professor, Ayman Kandeel has started a series of super-hero comic strips for Egyptian teenagers, AK comics.

The comics are intended as role models, to inform children of the dangers of terrorist cells, and to counter the propaganda of those who would recruit impressionable youngsters into the global jihad.

The superheroes are Zein, Rakan, Aya and Jalila. Aya and Jalila, the women, are a law student and a scientist, respectively. Jalila's brothers are, respectively, a terrorist and a drug addict, reflecting the problems that Egyptian civil society is striving to overcome.

The moderate approach has even been taken up by Muslims in Spain. A Spanish cleric came in the news recently for issuing a fatwa against Osama Bin Laden. On March 11, 2005, exactly a year after the horrific train blasts in Madrid, Spain, Mansur Escudero, issued a fatwa that declares Osama bin Laden outside of Islam, based on his killing of innocent civilians on 11 March 2004.

The fatwa maybe ineffectual, but it is not insignificant.

Renewal of interest in Spain's Islamic past

For Spain, in the year since the bombings, has proven to be quite a remarkable place. There has been virtually no violence directed against Spain's largely immigrant Muslim community.

Instead there has been a renewal of interest in the country's own Islamic past and the Spanish Government has promoted the teaching of Arabic and Islam. The Spanish King, Juan Carlos, has addressed the Moroccan Parliament most of Spain's Muslims are immigrants from Morocco, across the straits of Gibraltar. This is particularly poignant, for the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492, and the horrors of the Inquisition that followed, are among the darkest chapters of European history. Many of those expelled from Spain after 1492 found refuge in Morroco…

That Spain has refused to be divided by the terror attacks, that Muslims and Christians have overcome the most fractious of histories to come together in solidarity, that it is Osama bin Laden who has been declared outside of Islam… all of this gives hope for the simple fact, that the simplest, and yet perhaps the most difficult innovation in combating terror, is to forego revenge, and come together in reconciliation.

Effort to organise greenies

Though the above examples emanate from the Muslim communities themselves, there are many ingenious ideas coming from elsewhere, even the sanitized atmosphere of think tanks and institutes. For instance, there's the Institute for Analysis of Global Security (IAGS). The institute is working on a plan that would make all the greenies of the world join them.

IAGS, for instance, wants the US to invest heavily in clean cars, plant-based fuels, and fuel-cell technology. The policy director of IAGS, Anne Korin and others are proposing a $ 12 billion plan, called Set America Free. The money would be spent mostly on incentives to consumers, automakers and fuel providers encouraging the use of hybrids and alternative fuels, and the cutting down on the use of fuel guzzling SUVs.

Among others pushing this plan are Robert McFarlane, National Security Advisor during Reagan's regime and James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA.

The reasoning is somewhat along these lines: America consumes a quarter of the world's oil supply but has just 3% of global oil reserves. We are thus forced to import over 60% of the oil we need, and this dependency is growing. Since much of the world's oil is controlled by countries that are sponsors of or allied with radical Islamists who foment hatred against the United States this dependency is a matter of national security.

The argument works two ways

1. If America doesn't consume oil from countries that are 'sponsors of or allied with radical Islamists' (read Saudi Arabia, and with a large stretch of the imagination, just about any other oil producing Arab country in the Middle East) then America will no longer be vulnerable to embargo, or such tactics as the 1974 OPEC price hike.

2. Without American payments for the oil, the aforementioned countries will no longer be able to sponsor radical Islamists, at least not with American money.

Plan B isn't that hot. For with the world economy booming, and with the powerhouses of India and China revving up, and constantly on the look out for sources of oil, and hence energy security of their own, oil producers aren't about to run out of markets anytime soon.

But Plan A is seemingly radically innovative. It would put a nation on the search for alternative fuels and alternative supply sources at a faster pace than is happening now.

If one of the side effects of the fight against terror can be a less polluted planet it would be a welcome outcome.