A courageous voice from inside Islam
By Ken Allard
How long will this sort of thing keep going on? While the Islamic State busily beheads Iraqi children who refuse to renounce their Christian faith, their Islamist brethren in Paris pursue their own jihadi offensive. Twelve people were massacred Wednesday in an attack targeting a weekly humor magazine famous for publishing satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad. Their battle cry: “The prophet has been avenged!”
Meanwhile, Americans obsess about our racial, ethnic and political divisions, preferring that the Islamic State be confronted by Persian rather than American boots on the ground, content to leave the larger questions about the future of civilization to be asked elsewhere.
Because our media faithfully reflects those reigning obsessions, you may have missed the startling New Year’s Day speech delivered in a most unlikely place. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi stood before a clerical audience at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, long regarded as the world’s leading center of Islamic thought. His purpose: to directly challenge those reigning orthodoxies. According to the translation published by Middle East Forum, Mr. el-Sissi told his audience that current Islamic thinking was antagonizing the entire world:
“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah . I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move because this [Islamic world] is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”
The videotapes show his clerical audience appearing shocked and uncomfortable, but Mr. el-Sissi fearlessly plunged forward:
“I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have [enshrined] 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! I am saying these words here atAl-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars … . Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.”
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Read more: www.washingtontimes.com
“I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah . I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move because this [Islamic world] is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands.”
The videotapes show his clerical audience appearing shocked and uncomfortable, but Mr. el-Sissi fearlessly plunged forward:
“I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’ — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have [enshrined] 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! I am saying these words here atAl-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars … . Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.”
.......
Read more: www.washingtontimes.com
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