In a widely praised January 1 speech at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi addressed the country's religious leadership, saying the time had come to reform Islam. He's won Western plaudits for this, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, but I have reservations about the speech.
To begin with, no matter how fine Sisi's ideas, no politician – and especially no strongman – has moved modern Islam. Atatürk's reforms in Turkey are systematically being reversed. A decade ago, King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan gave similarly fine speeches on "the true voice of Islam" and "enlightened moderation" that immediately disappeared from view. Yes, Sisi's comments are stronger, but he is not a religious authority and, in all likelihood, they too will disappear without a trace.
As for content: Sisi praised the faith of Islam and focused on what he calls fikr, literally meaning thought but in this context meaning wrong ideas. He complained that wrong ideas, which he did not specify, have become sacralized and that the religious leadership dares not criticize them. But Sisi did criticize, and in a colloquial Arabic highly unusual for discussing such topics: "It is inconceivable that the wrong ideas which we sacralize should make the entire umma [Muslim community] a source of concern, danger, killing, and destruction for the whole world. This is not possible."
Nonetheless, that is precisely what has occurred: "We have reached the point that Muslims have antagonized the entire world. Is it conceivable that 1.6 billion [Muslims] want to kill the rest of the world's population of 7 billion, so that Muslims prosper? This is not possible." Sisi continued, to faint applause from the religious dignitaries assembled before him, to call on them to bring about a "religious revolution." Barring that, the Muslim community "is being torn apart, destroyed, and is going to hell."
 Egypt's President Sisi addressing the religious leadership at Al-Azhar on Jan. 1. |
Kudos to Sisi for tough talk on this problem; his candor stands in sharp contrast to the mumbo-jumbo emanating from his Western counterparts who uphold the pretense that the current wave of violence has nothing to do with Islam. (Of many flamboyantly erroneous remarks, my favorite is from Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who responded to the Charlie Hebdo massacre with, "I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They're about as Muslim as I am.")
But Sisi gave no specifics regarding the revolution he seeks; what might he have in mind? Contrary to what his admirers say, I believe he champions a subtle version of Islamism, defined as the full application of Islamic law (Shari'a) in the public sphere.
Several indications point to Sisi having been an Islamist. He was a practicing Muslim who apparently has memorized the Koran. The Financial Times found that his wife wore the hijab (headscarf) and one of his daughters the niqab (the covering that reveals only eyes and hands). The Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, appointed Sisi his defense minister precisely because he saw the then-general as an ally.
 Shortly after his Azhar speech, Sisi became the first Egyptian president ever to attend a Coptic Christmas service. |
While a student in Pennsylvania in 2005-06, Sisi wrote a paper advocating democracy adapted to Islam, one that "may bear little resemblance" to its Western prototype but "will have its own shape or form coupled with stronger religious ties." His version of democracy did not separate mosque and state but was established "upon Islamic beliefs," meaning that government agencies must "take Islamic beliefs into consideration when carrying out their duties." In other words, Shari'a trumps popular will.
Also in that paper, Sisi partially aligned himself with Salafis, those long-bearded and burqa'ed Islamists aspiring to live as Muhammad did. He described the early caliphate not merely as "the ideal form of government" but also "the goal for any new form of government" and he hoped for the revival of "the earliest form" of the caliphate.
It's certainly possible that Sisi's views of Islam, like many Egyptians', have evolved, especially since his break with Morsi two years ago. Indeed, rumors have him affiliated with the radically anti-Islamist Quranist movement, whose leader, Ahmed Subhy Mansour, he cited in his student paper. But Mansour suspects Sisi is "playing with words" and waits to see if Sisi is serious about reform.
 Ahmed Subhy Mansour of the Quranist movement, with the Ahl al-Qur'an logo. |
Indeed, until we know more about Sisi's personal views and see what he does next, I understand his speech not as a stance against all of Islamism but only against its specifically violent form, the kind that is ravaging Nigeria, Somalia, Syria-Iraq, and Pakistan, the kind that has placed such cities as Boston, Ottawa, Sydney, and Paris under siege. Like other cooler heads, Sisi promotes Shari'a through evolution and popular support, rather than through revolution and brutality. Non violence, to be sure, is an improvement over violence. But it's hardly the reform of Islam that non-Muslims hope to see – especially when one recalls that working through the system is more likely to succeed.
True reform requires scholars of Islam, not strongmen, and a repudiation of implementing Shari'a in the public sphere. For both these reasons, Sisi is not likely to be that reformer.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2015 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Jan. 19, 2015 addenda: (1) Sisi has reiterated his argument against violent Islamism: "The rise in terrorism ... requires a thoughtful response from the international community. The fight must not only be restricted to security and military aspects ... but should include a reformed religious discourse from which false ideologies that could lure some into adopting violence to impose their ideas have been removed."
(2) Nick Danforth of Georgetown University argued, coincidentally just a day after Sisi's speech, that it's futile to look for the "Muslim Martin Luther" because Islam won't experience anything analogous to the Christian Reformation. A couple of extracts:
One of the most enduring explanations is that the Islamic world really needs its own Reformation — a Muslim Martin Luther to bring the religion of Mohammed into modernity. It's an argument that Thomas Friedman and various others have been making for over a decade. In the last year alone Fethullah Gülen and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi were added to the short list of potential Martin Luthers. Many analysts and critics of Islam seem committed to the idea that, be it a reclusive Turkish preacher or an authoritarian Egyptian general, there must be someone out there who can straighten out the confusion over church and state in in the Muslim world, and finally help Islam make the jump from totalitarian fundamentalism to enlightened, liberal religion, from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to Pope Francis.
But before western observers start applying lessons of European history to the Muslim world, a little self-reflection is in order. … The different political cultures in Christian and Muslim countries we debate today resulted from a convoluted history, a twisting path that offers few simple or satisfying lessons.
Danforth then runs through a brief history of secularism's evolution in Protestant and Catholic countries and concludes that their contrast "serves as a reminder that politics and circumstance shape religion, and its application to society, far more than abstract theology does."
And these forces can change a faith dramatically even while scripture remains the same. The claim that there is something inherently secular or humanist about Christianity hardly holds up against a history of 250 popes who all read the same Bible as Francis and came to completely different conclusions about the role of the church in society.
But if the separation of church and state is all about politics and not theology, it seems even more pertinent to ask which of the political precedents from western history offers the best model for the Muslim world. Is the solution not a Muslim Henry VIII but an al-Robespierre? Unlikely. The real answer is that there's no single, obvious, historically proven path to modern secularism.
The author concludes:
one lesson from several millennia of church-state conflict in Europe is that even without following any particular model, Muslim countries might just succeed in blazing their own paths, much like the Vatican managed to do, even without a Catholic Martin Luther of its own.
Jan. 22, 2015 update: Sisi told an international audience more along these lines:
The terrible terrorist attacks which we have seen and this terrible image of Muslims is what led us to think that we must stop and think and change the religious discourse, and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism. We need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and will remove some of the misconceptions. No one should believe that they have the truth with a capital T. …
The blood that terrorists spill in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Mali, Canada, France or Lebanon is all of the same color. We must therefore mobilize all our efforts to eliminate the menace wherever it exists.
Mar. 20, 2015 update: Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Sisi and titled his report "Islam's Improbable Reformer." Excerpts:
"There are misconceptions and misperceptions about the real Islam," now-President Sisi tells me during a two-hour interview in his ornate, century-old presidential palace in Heliopolis. "Religion is guarded by its spirit, by its core, not by human beings. Human beings only take the core and deviate it to the right or left."
Does he mean to say, I ask, that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are bad Muslims? "It's the ideology, the ideas," he replies. "The real Islamic religion grants absolute freedom for the whole people to believe or not believe. Never does Islam dictate to kill others because they do not believe in Islam. Never does it dictate that [Muslims] have the right to dictate [their beliefs] to the whole world. Never does Islam say that only Muslims will go to paradise and others go to hell." Jabbing his right finger in the air for emphasis, he adds: "We are not gods on earth, and we do not have this right to act in the name of Allah." …
Mar. 22, 2015 update: Sisi told the state-run Holy Koran radio station, according to a report in Al-Ahram, that
religious values of toleration in Islam must be promoted warning that extremists and terrorists use religion for goals that are unrelated to the faith. … [He] repeated his 2014 call for "a revolution in religious views," saying the Islamic world needs to rethink and revolt "for religion and not against it."
