'Real Fight Back Within Muslim World': UK's Tony Blair Urges Muslims to Counter Fanaticism in Islam

Tony Blair was the prime minister of the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2007, in office when the gruesome 9/11 attacks - carried out by al-Qaeda* hijackers - occurred in the United States.

Speaking on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS" on Sunday, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair pondered over how the Muslim world could bring hope to the battle against terrorists who, Blair said, practice a "perversion" of Islam.

“One of the lessons I've certainly learned in the last 20 years is this will only be defeated by an alliance with those strong voices now within Islam who want to retrieve their religion from extremism, and our job should be to help them, and to support them,“ Blair said.

Looking back at the 9/11 attacks, which took place during his tenure in the United Kingdom, Blair said he believed that fanatical forces that carried out the attacks were a product of a historic trend that blossomed among violent factions and politicized Islam.

Blair described this ideology as based on "religious conviction", saying that it has a "global footprint", that has spread to various parts of the world. He referred to jihadism as its most radical form, which justifies killing people who "live under different systems".

Blair underlined, however, that religion is not to blame.

“The vast majority of those Muslims who have lost their life have been killed by other Muslims, and this is part of the tragedy", he said. "Now as I always say to people there is some good news in all of this, because there is a real fight back within the Muslim world.“

Blair slammed the "fanatics" when he was in office in a statement that saw the former prime minister refer to terrorism as "the new evil in our world."

Amid the 20th anniversary of 9/11, US President Joe Biden ordered the declassification of government documents related to attacks that claimed some 3,000 people and injured over 25,000 after several al-Qaeda hijackers took control of four commercial planes, and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth plane did not reach its destination, said to be Washington DC, instead crashing in an open field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the hijackers.

*Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other countries