ROGER L. SIMON - AL - SISI'S EXTRAORDINARY SPEECH ON ISLAM
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi made an extraordinary
speech on New Year’s Day to Cairo’s Al-Azhar and the
Awqaf Ministry calling for a long overdue virtual ecclesiastical revolution in
Islam. This is something no Western leader has had the courage to do,
certainly not Barack Obama, despite his Muslim education.
Accusing the umma (world Islamic
population) of encouraging the hostility of the entire world, al-Sisi’s speech
is so dramatic and essentially revolutionary it brings to mind Khrushchev’s
famous speech exposing Stalin. Many have called for a reformation of Islam, but
for the leader of the largest Arab nation to do so has world-changing
implications.
I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have
to think hard about what we are facing—and I have, in fact, addressing the
topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that
we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic
world] 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 people [Muslims]
should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so
that they themselves may live? Impossible!
I am saying these words here at Al Azhar, before this assembly of
scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day
concerning that which I’m talking about now.
All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain
trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able
to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.
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. [bolds mine]
Al-Sisi is certainly correct. The whole world has been
waiting for a long time for the next move of these imams or for somebody,
anybody that will modernize Islam as other religions have done.. Whether
that will happen, of course, is another question, but what Al-Sisi is saying
here is in many ways more revolutionary than the “Arab Spring.” People
ask, where are the “moderate Muslims”? Well, one of them may be the
president of Egypt. The boys from Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Boko Haram, al Qaeda,
etc., etc., are probably not too happy about what Al-Sisi said. Let’s
hope he doesn’t suffer the fate of Anwar Sadat for that.
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