How to save Islam from the Islamists

[Valin]

The Spectator:

It's time for Muslims to take a stand. Egypt may be showing the way

Qanta Ahmed

17 January 2015

 

 

The terror attack in Paris last week represents Islamism’s most explicit declaration of war on free society. Non-Muslims were slaughtered in a non-Muslim country to avenge a so-called crime against a blasphemy law that is not even Islamic — but merely Islamist. If there’s any blasphemy here, it’s that of Islamism itself against my religion, Islam.

 

At last, on New Year’s Day, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, did what no other leader of the Muslim world has done to date: he named Islam’s real enemy. In a gathering of religious clerics at Cairo’s ancient Al Azhar University, he called for the rescue of Islam from ‘ideology’. His speech was given little coverage in the western press, but it is worth repeating at some length.

 

‘We are in need of a religious revolution,’ he said. ‘You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands.’ It is inconceivable, he said, that ‘this thinking — and I am not saying religion — should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.’ The remedy, said al-Sisi, was for Islam to recognise and talk about its mutant strain. ‘Religious discourse is the greatest battle and challenge facing the Egyptian people,’ he said. ‘We need a modern, comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam,’ rather than ‘relying on a discourse that has not changed for 800 years’.

 

Sisi’s speech is significant because the Islamic world has precious little record of leaders discussing Muslims’ collective responsibility for the toxic ideologies within our midst. President Sisi’s candour has shone light upon the most critical issue of our time: the urgent need for the Muslim world to denounce Islamism as the imposter and explain the real meaning of the Quran.

 

I’m a British Muslim who has lived in Saudi Arabia and worked as a doctor in Pakistan — and I have seen how any discussion about Islam is increasingly dangerous in these places. In nations gripped by Islamist ideology, it’s deemed ‘Islamophobic’ to be critical of Islam in any way. Even in the West, critical discussion is becoming difficult. The United Nations has passed several resolutions giving Islamophobia the status of a crime under international law.

 

(Snip)