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The eastern city of chittagong. now on bbc news, political thinking with nick robinson. hello and welcome to political thinking. the queen has expressed her hope that her platinum jubilee celebrations will focus on what brings us together, on what unites us, not what divides us. my guest on the programme has had to spend much of her career worrying about exactly the opposite, about extremism and how to counter it. she is dame sara khan. herjob now is the government's independent adviser for social cohesion and resilience. before that, she was

Then dominated and said, "well, this is what prevent is about," or people who were concerned about prevent thinking it was a spying operation when it clearly wasn't, there have clearly been mistakes in the past i mean, the example of the spy cameras in birmingham very early on in prevent�*s stages, there were issues like that which caused detrimental failures and people not respect or appreciate the programme, so those types of challenges have continued, and i think having that engagement, continuing to engage with communities, explaining what the program is, addressing concerns i think that...

Now, when there was an independent piece of research done by crest, they show that actually 56% of british muslims had never even heard of prevent, and when there was a neutral explanation of the programme, 80% of muslims would give their support to that programme. it is prevent, this anti—extremism, anti—terrorism programme, that has made you a controversial figure. it took baroness warsi, the former conservative party chair who described you as a creation of and mouthpiece for the home office, as a strong advocate for the government's policy of disengagement. i want to get to the essence...

Policy of disengagement. i want to get to the essence of this. is this really an argument about who speaks up for the muslim community or communities, plural, or is there a fundamental debate about whether there is, in inverted commas, and i do stress in inverted commas, a muslim problem, as was captured in the title of your book, reclaiming muslim identity from extremism? and i think when she made that comment, to be honest ijust found it really bizarre and strange, because she had never actually met me, but she was doing the media tours going round telling me i was this creation of mouthpiec...

Engagement, continuing to engage with communities, explainign what the pressing concerns are and i think that has got to continue in a much better way than we have seen previously. but are you sure a young sara khan, wearing a headscarf, going to talks by people talking about no doubt sharia, the spread of it, talking about a global caliphate, are you sure that a programme like that now would not have looked at you when you were growing up and said look, we ought to get her in? look, i can only talk about my work. people promoting the idea by the way of islamist theocratic caliphate in complet...