That threat was understood to depend on the relative brutality of dictators supported by the West, on the influence of more or less anti-Western clerics working in a different language in another part of the world, on the opportunities open to the children of the Middle Eastern middle class at a particular moment in time.
From his base in northern Yemen, one of the Arab world's most militantly anti-Western Islamic clerics runs study centers for thousands of Muslim men.
In the village's heart, at a sprawling compound guarded by bushy-bearded men flourishing Kalashnikov rifles, one of the Arab world's most militantly anti-Western Islamic clerics has his base.
In this objective it will be joined by anti-western, rejectionist Iranian clerics such as the influential Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, plus hardline Sunni conservatives in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf who, in the wake of last week's Yemen intervention, feel themselves engaged in an increasingly overt regional power struggle with Shia Iran.
These clerics view Western music and birthday celebrations as sinful and un-Islamic.
Over the past decade, the militant group has expanded its activities to include attacks on Indian civilians, Western tourists and Jewish clerics.
The trouble is not that children are being lured into belief in witchcraft, as some tut-tutting clerics complain; Western civilization has survived Merlin's magic in the tales of King Arthur.
Mr. Newton is not P.C. "The only word I had to remove was 'fatwa,' " he said, referring to the term for a decree by an Islamic religious leader, which first came to widespread Western attention when Iranian clerics issued a death fatwa against the author Salman Rushdie in 1989.
Since the uprising that eventually saw an anti-Western regime of Islamic clerics take power, relations between Iran and the UK have been suspicious at best and hostile at worst, not least in 2011 when protesters stormed the British embassy.
The political radicals may have been elbowed out, but the influence of a conservative body of clerics, intolerant of western ways and new interpretations of the faith, is making itself felt in many Arab societies.The governments faced with armed Islamist revolt had little choice but to fight back.
