Cairo - In a prolonged interview with Mohammed Al-Gharieb from Al-Bawaba News Portal, Grand Mufti of Egypt talks about renewal of religious discourse and what Al-Azhar and other moderate Islamic schools can present to counter extremist thoughts and terror acts under the name of Islam. Hereunder some highlights from the interview: - How do Dar al-Ifta's officials, under your auspices, view the issue of "renewal of religious discourse"? In Dar al-Ifta, we are fully aware of the enormity of the task to take up this major challenge that had been taken up before by earlier scholars. As we are on the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, our role is to find ways to deal with this real challenge of the new millennium. - What does the concept of "renewal" mean from the standpoint of the fatwa apparatus? By and large, "Renewal" basically means providing a new reading of the rich legacy and treasure troves of knowledge left behind by our fore-scholars. "Renewal" is a timeless rule that has always been there. In the past, our scholars have shouldered this task, and performed it well through publishing counterarguments to destructive scholarships of their times, embarking on novel scholarships relevant to the time and space, redacting and refining older books, and critiquing previous books in order to separate the wheat from the chaff therein. We are fully aware that our intellectual ‘heritage' is nothing but human contributions to the overall human experience. While their works sometimes verged on brilliance, other times they were only ordinary. Renewal is not a change per se, but it is based on new approaches to the classical literature. Our legacy is not sacred simply because it was the by-product of by human beings who were not far from error or misguidance. -