‘Revolution’ in Islam

Associated Press

CAIRO

Egypt’s president opened the new year with a dramatic call for a “revolution” in Islam to reform interpretations of the faith entrenched for hundreds of years, which he said have made the Muslim world a source of “destruction” and pitted it against the rest of the world.

The speech was Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s boldest effort yet to position himself as a modernizer of Islam. His professed goal is to purge the religion of extremist ideas of intolerance and violence that fuel groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State — and that appear to have motivated Wednesday’s attack in Paris on a French satirical news-paper that killed 12 people.

But those looking for the “Muslim Martin Luther” bringing a radical Reformation of Islam may be overreaching — and making a false comparison to begin with. El-Sissi is clearly seeking to impose change through the state, using government religious institutions such as the 1,000-year-old al-Azhar, one of the most eminent centers of Sunni Muslim thought and teaching.

Al-Azhar’s vision for change, however, is piecemeal, and conservative, focusing on messaging and outreach but wary of addressing deeper and more controversial issues.

Al-Azhar officials tout a YouTube channel just launched to reach out to the young, mimicking radicals’ successful social media outreach to disenfranchised youths. They proudly point out that clerics in the videos wear suits, not al-Azhar’s traditional robes and turbans, to be more accessible.

Young people “have a negative image toward this garb,” said Mohie Eddin Affifi, an al-Azhar official. “As soon as they see it, they don’t listen.”

In a more ambitious effort, religious school textbooks are under review. Affifi said texts outlining rules for slavery, for instance, have been removed.

It’s a problem across the Muslim world: State religious institutions are burdened by stagnation and heavy control by authorities.

For decades, al-Azhar has lost credibility in the eyes of many Muslim youths who see it as a mouthpiece of the state rather than an honest interpreter of religion. More appealing to some young men and women searching for identity in a rapidly changing world are calls for a return to the roots of the faith, including from the extremists of al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

In his Jan. 1 speech at al-Azhar addressing Muslim clerics — held to mark the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday — el-Sissi called on them to promote a reading of Islamic texts in a “truly enlightened” manner to reconsider concepts “that have been made sacred over hundreds of years.”

By such thinking, the Islamic world is “making enemies of the whole world. So 1.6 billion people [in the Muslim world] will kill the entire world of 7 billion? That’s impossible. ... We need a religious revolution.”