Cameron speaks - Egyptian Mufti hints at new directions (The Centre For Social Cohesion)

Speaking on the second day of the major London conference ‘Islam and Muslims in the World Today’ David Cameron has spoken of the need to re-invent British-ness in order to tackle the growing problem of “cultural separatism”.

“The challenge now is to create a positive vision of a British society that really stands for something and makes people want to be a part of it," he said.

However Cameron also said that much of the onus also lay with Muslim religious leaders and that “confronting the false basis of this perversion of Islam is one part of what needs to be done.”

It seems unlikely however that Cameron is likely to attempt to separate ‘the true Islam’ from its numerous “false” perversions.

Instead the presence of Ali Goma, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, at the event – which Tony Blair had addressed the previous day – indicated a possible new direction for government policy.

To many Westerners, Goma is a man who issued a fatwa against statues, who said Muslim men were permitted to beat their wives and who declared his support for Hezbollah.

Others have criticised him for supporting the two-decade dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak and for not speaking out against the torture and jail-sentences regularly metted out to Mubarak’s opponents.

To Egypt’s Islamists, however al-Goma is an apostate who has refused to endorse Osama bin Laden’s global jihad, who has rejected attacks against Israeli tourists in Egypt and who aidedthe government thwart Muslim Brotherhood attempts to turn Egypt into an Islamic dictatorship.

To many ordinary Egyptians meanwhile Goma is the man whose support for the Egyptian government – although cravenly and cowardly on occasion – has also spared the country from the large-scale sectarian unrest that has wracked other Middle Eastern countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen in recent years.

Goma is certainly not perfect but perhaps for all the howls of protests on the blogosphere, his presence at today’s conference indicates that behind the cosy rhetoric of Blair and Cameron dwells a growing – if reluctant - awareness that difficult choices lie ahead.