Camelia Pasandaran – To fight terrorism fight poverty, Islamic scholars said on Thursday.

Speaking at a panel discussion called "Terrorism in Modern Society" at the Sultan Hotel in Central Jakarta, leading Islamic scholars called on the government to increase welfare programs to uproot extremism.

Syekh Ahmad Babikir, an Islamic scholar who preaches at London Central Mosque, said people living in poverty were more susceptible to being recruited by militants.

"When our countries have societies with people living on less than one dollar per day, it will become a center of radical schools," he said.

Bachtiar Effendy, another Islamic Scholar, said Indonesia should expand government social welfare programs to curb extremist beliefs. "Terrorism is not just a theological problem," he said. "We cannot solve it just by issuing statements denouncing terrorism."

Bachtiar blamed the government for the poverty gap in Indonesia. "If [the government] cannot provide people's basic needs then terrorism will grow easily," he said. "It becomes the terrorist's reach out program."

While it may seem obvious that poverty leads to terrorism, academics disagree on whether it is true.

Some argue that rapid economic development draws people away from terrorism by offering them other paths to fulfillment. But others have found there is little statistical correlation between poverty and terror, and that factors such as geography and the level of political freedom in a country are more significant.