Battle of ideas at heart of fight against Islamic State

There is nothing new in that message of course, but there is something new in the way it is going to be transmitted – those West African imams are being trained intensively on how to use social media, and they all assured me they could not wait to go home and get started.

There is a widespread recognition that the extremists of IS are good at dominating the global conversation within Islam on subjects like Syria – partly because they were allowed to dominate that virtual space unopposed, just as they came to occupy large swathes of Iraq in the real world without facing any real opposition.

Belatedly, the forces of the mainstream Muslim world are attempting to start a kind of online counter-revolution.

The numbers are certainly on their side.

The Moroccan Islamic scholar Ahmed Abbadi obligingly did the sums for us.

“We have no less that 5 million religious officials on the payrolls of the various states within the region,” he explained.

“If each of those officials displays just one Tweet a day then that’s 5 million Tweets. Daesh are not very numerous and they’ve based themselves on the silence of the majority of Muslims.”

Mr Abbadi’s arithmetic certainly adds up, but you cannot help feeling that something in his perception of the internet itself does not.

The online world still has a counter-culture feel – it is a place the dark pornography of violence practised by the extremists flourishes and where you sense a more wholesome and well-meaning message from the middle-aged religious authorities may not do so well.

In this area too, though, there are signs that things may eventually change.