Interesting times in Egypt where President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi recently called for a “religious revolution” at Al-Azhar University in Cairo which, established in 970, is the most prestigious Sunni institution in the Islamic world.
It’s inconceivable that the thinking we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing, and destruction for the rest of the world.
[…]
That thinking […] that corpus of texts and ideas that we have made sacred to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible is antagonising the entire world.
[…]
You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it from the outside, to root it out and replace it with a more enlightened vision of the world.
I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. 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.
Ordinarily, with words like that you probably wouldn’t anticipate someone in the Islamic world these days to be breathing for very long (tolerant religion of peace and all that) but el-Sisi’s military background
might give him a better chance than most.
Dar al-Iftaa, Egypt’s government-sponsored religious institution responsible for issuing fatwas and religious opinions responded to el-Sisi’s call by announcing the launching of a national project aiming to correct the image of Islam through social media, foreign visits, publications, and issuing fatwas that “suit the modern age.”
It’s a start.
January 5, 2015
There is also some promising sign in Pakistan against Taliban extremism right now too
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/12/31/from-reclaimyourmosques-to-reclaimpakistan-pakistanis-call-for-an-end-to-extremism