The New Year 2015 speech of the Egyptian president El-Sisi is a sign of hope. It was pronounced before the events of Paris from 7-9 January.
See on this an article of the Basler Zeitung of January 9th, 2015: http://bit.ly/1I1Oqte ,
as well as this post on the Internet: http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/egypts-sisi-islamic-thinking-is-antagonizing-the-entire-world/

This speech was pronounced in front of the flower of the flower of the Muslim religion at the university Al-Ahzar of Cairo, the Sunna capital. It is thus no menial thing for these people.

In summary, El-Sisi finds inconceivable the thought that what is held as the most sacred can cause the whole Muslim community to be the source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the World.

He speaks about the “inconceivable thinking”, and not about religion, as a set of texts and of ideas which were sacralised over the centuries, any departing from them having become impossible, and which antagonize the rest of the world.

He questions that 1.6 billion Muslims should want to kill the rest of the 7 billion inhabitants of the World. An impossibility!

And he says it in front of an assembly of scholars’ and ulemas, at Al-Ahzar.
He tells them that they cannot remain trapped with this mind-set, that it is necessary for them to step outside of themselves to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

He says and repeats that a religious revolution is needed and that they, the imams, are responsible before Allah. And that the entire world waits for their next move because the Muslim community (the umma) is being torn, is being destroyed, and is being lost, by their own hands.

It is in itself an internal revolution, a welcome ecclesiastical putsch.

The leader of the largest Arab-Muslim country asks the doctors of the faith to reinterpret the texts and to go out of the box in which the community has put itself over the centuries. It seems that the recipients of this speech were shocked, it is a good start.

The victim posture which many Muslims in the world adopt, not only the extremists, consists in attributing all the troubles to the faithless, thus justifying the hatred toward them. It is the usual trick to look for evil in the others while one does not feel well at home. The mote and the beam.

What is refreshing with what says El-Sisi, is that the Muslim community has to take on itself to undertake the cleaning of its home and to stop propagating speeches that are ambiguous, resentful, impossible, and destructive of their own religion.

Many thinkers and politicians in the Western World urge us not to make any amalgam between the motives of the terrorists and Islam, although the public opinions made it already, despite of the published one. It is, at last, a leader of that community who makes it, an amalgam which we were awaiting for a long time, connecting the foundations of the dogmatic interpretations of the texts (he does not criticizes the text, he is not an apostate) with the impossibility to live in peace with other human beings in the World.

If he is right, and I hope he is, a moderate Islam could appear, finally argued by the highest doctors of the faith. We just have to wish that he will not be assassinated too early.

Link to an earlier post on that subject.

Addition on January 12: an article from the Basler Zeitung on further activities going into the same, necessary, direction: http://bit.ly/1I1Oqte