Egypt's Al-Sisi Wants An Islamic 'Revolution' – The Good Kind
Egypt's Al-Sisi Wants An Islamic 'Revolution' – The Good Kind
A voice of moderation from a major Islamic leader, though, might make a difference. Yet the West almost entirely ignored one of the most remarkable speeches coming out of the Middle East in memory. On New Year's Day, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gave an address at Al-Azhar, the oldest and most prestigious religious school of the Sunni world. He said:
"It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (multinational community of Muslim believers) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! That thinking – I am not saying 'religion' but 'thinking' – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world!
"Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants – that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands."
Sisi realizes that the specter of Islamism will not be diminished by political action or suppression – including by Egypt's own forces. Ideology must be matched by ideology; a different Islam needs to be preached and taught in tens of thousands of mosques and madrassas – including the small ones, not just the large ones that welcome camera crews.
Sisi's speech was a rare inversion of truth-to-power. Sisi used his political power to coerce the imams (whose funding comes from the state) to change their rhetoric. More importantly, he appealed to their sense of truth about their own religious convictions. Have they not made a mockery of their faith? When billions of people around the globe think of Islam, do they think "the religion of peace," or do they think of attacks on chocolate shops in Sydney; beheaded Christian children in Iraq; and schoolgirls sold as sex slaves in Nigeria? Only a global chorus of Muslim voices saying, "Not in our names, and not in the Name of Allah!" will counter the gruesome images non-Muslims see.
Why did the West completely ignore what should have been a welcome call for a religious revolution? No doubt many have reservations – as they should – about someone whose rise to power was hardly an exercise in Jeffersonian democracy.
But they miss the point. More significant than the speaker's identity was what he understood about the receptivity of his audience. Sisi believed that the imams would "get it." He felt that enough citizens in the oldest and most populous state in the Muslim Middle East care about what the rest of the world thinks, and are unhappy that their faith is generally reviled and detested. Islam could change its image, but only after a reconstruction – a revolution, as Sisi called it – that would have to come from the clergy.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/08/egypts-al-sisi-wants-an-islamic-revolution-the-good-kind/
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2015 20:53:42 -0500
Subject: Re: Egypt's President Sisi: A Titan For Freedom in the Islamic World Calls for Reformation of Islam.
From: skmirza.mirza@gmail.com
To: msa40@aol.com
Interpretation of what Sisi has said:What the Quran says is not applicable today and as such, it should be dumped forever!Mohammad Asghar-----Original Message-----
From: Syed Mirza <skmirza.mirza@gmail.com>farukhchowdhury <farukhchowdhury@gmail.com>; naushad49 <naushad49@gmail.com>
Sent: Tue, Jan 6, 2015 5:25 pm
Subject: Egypt's President Sisi: A Titan For Freedom in the Islamic World Calls for Reformation of Islam.Egypt's President Sisi: Islamic "Thinking' Is 'Antagonizing the Entire World"At last, at least one brave and honest Muslim leader spoken the real truth about Islam which we have never heard before from any Muslim leader from the entire world. So far, we only heard some Islamic Taqqiyya and utter lies about Islamic deceptions.President Sisi said: "Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gave an extraordinary, groundbreaking speech on Islam on New Year's day. Sisi said that the "corpus of [Islamic] texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years" are "antagonizing the entire world"; that it is not "possible that 1.6 billion people [reference to the world's Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants…."Please read the rest of Sisi's speech here: http://pamelageller.com/2015/01/egypts-president-sisi-a-titan-for-freedom-in-the-islamic-world-calls-for-reformation-of-islam.html/Thanks.Syed K. Mirza
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