CAIRO, 21 March 2007 — Egypt’s Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, a prominent authority on Sunni Islam, said dialogue with Islamist hard-liners could help reduce militant attacks but that those who ultimately take up arms should be killed.

Gomaa said he and his fellow scholars of Islam at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University had engaged hard-liners in debate for the past decade — and he said the efforts had borne fruit with diminishing militant attacks in Egypt’s Nile Valley.

“As long as they are not armed and threatening the population, there is hope to have dialogue,” Gomaa told Reuters in an interview. “If terrorists have taken up arms, there is no recourse but to kill them. This is clear.”

Gomaa, who was appointed by the Egyptian government, said former militants had written 20 books, which had been published, explaining why they had changed course.

“We were able to make these youth change their minds,” he said. “Their books had a major impact on reducing terrorism.”

Egypt fought a bloody war with militants in the Nile Valley in the 1990s. Militants armed with guns and swords killed 58 tourists and four Egyptians at a southern Pharaonic temple in 1997 in the worst of a series of attacks.

After that incident, the Gama’a Al-Islamiya, which had tried to overthrow the government by force, decided on a long-term truce. Many leading members have since abandoned violence.

Meanwhile, Egypt’s opposition yesterday described as a “death certificate” for the constitution the amendments hurriedly passed in an overnight session by the ruling party-dominated Parliament.

Members of the National Democratic Party, which controls three-quarters of Parliament, erupted into cheers and sang the national anthem when the amendments to 34 articles of the constitution were passed late on Monday.

Billed by President Hosni Mubarak as the “biggest and widest constitutional amendments since 1980,” the amendments will be submitted to a referendum March 26, 10 days earlier than previously expected.

Saad Al-Katatni, an opposition deputy with the Muslim Brotherhood, bemoaned the unexpectedly swift approval of the amendments in an opposition press conference yesterday in front of Parliament.