From Obama to al-Sisi: A tale of two speeches at Al Azhar

No one understood better the power—symbolic, spiritual and temporal —of Cairo’s Al Azhar University, than President Obama. It was that venue which the young American president chose in 2009 for his first signature overseas speech. His ambitious goal was nothing less than a full reboot of America’s relationship with the Muslim world—so dominated during the George W. Bush years with the consequences of 9/11. This was Barak Obama’s moment to signal 1.6 billion Muslims that he was blazing a new trail—in word and deed— stretching out his hand even to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, with the goal of putting the “War on Terrorism,” Iraq and Afghanistan in America’s rear view mirror.

 Unfortunately, America’s enemies never cooperated with the revolutionary narrative. Americans were still being targeted for murder, mayhem, and beheadings. And even the killing of Osama Bin Laden did not bring about the anticipated demise of al Qaeda. In fact, just last week that group took credit for the brutal executions of ten French cartoonists and coldblooded murders of police and French Jewish shoppers in Paris.

{mosads}Obama’s team now admits that he made a huge mistake in not walking the walk with the dozens of world leaders as they locked arms with French President Hollande in declaring war on Islamist extremists. The president’s team however, still refuses to use the “I” word in identifying the ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, and al Qaeda “extremists” or “activists”, who continue their faith-based recruitment of young Muslims around the globe to their Islamist terror cults. Many of the president’s supporters are afraid that any such admission would feed another beast-Islamophobia.

They are dead wrong.

Intelligent people of all faiths know that the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims aren’t terrorists and that trying to root out the evil ones isn’t anti-Islam, it may be the only way to save its reputation and hundreds of millions of the faithful.

Indeed, that was the underlying theme of another historic speech delivered at the very same Al Azhar University on New Year’s, by the leader of the largest and most influential Arab nation—Egypt.

President Abdel Fattaha al-Sisi minced no words as he lectured the most prestigious Muslim clerics at the nation’s venerated seat of Theology, where he told them that without reforms akin to the western world’s Reformation and Enlightenment, Islam has no future:

 “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible!          . . . . I am not saying ‘religion’ but ‘thinking’—that  corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.  It’s antagonizing the entire world.”

And specifically challenging the ulema (clergy) al-Sisi declared: “I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move . . .”

Al-Sissi, a former general who was a student at the U.S. Army War College is no saint.  But he is a decisive man of action—having deposed the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood(MB) from the seat of power after millions of demonstrators—including fearful Coptic Christians– took to the streets to protest MB’s moves. It may be too early to know if Al-Sissi will be a “new Mubarak”, a “new Sadat,” or a political and historic hybrid.

The fact is that al-Sissi, a Muslim, walked the walk to al Azhar and talked the talk to the clerics—bluntly articulating the mumbled and self-censored fears of a fearful world. His words–still echo in the hallowed halls of the Muslim Vatican and reverberate from Morocco to Indonesia.

In his 2009 speech at al Azhar, Obama said; “… I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.”

Obama has yet to find an effective approach to confront and defeat an enemy who invokes god’s name to kill G-d’s children. We can only hope he will have the courage to fully embrace the message– if not the messenger—and finally join the war against Islamist terrorism.

Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.