Al-Sisi calls for intellectuals' role in reforming religious discourse

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has called upon his country’s intellectuals to join Islamic scholars from Al-Azhar University in the process of reforming religious discourse, it was reported on Tuesday. According to Anadolu, the president made his comments during his regular monthly speech on state television, which he uses to cover domestic and foreign issues.

It was the first time that Al-Sisi had called on intellectuals in this respect. “Al-Azhar Al-Sharif scholars carry out this mission,” he said, “but Egyptian thinkers also have to take part in order to be able to drain the terror springs and produce a true religious culture and environment.”

At the beginning of this year Al-Sisi called on the religious scholars during a religious event to reform the stereotypical images about Islam that were reinforced in the mentality of Muslims. “We are in need of a religious revolution,” he told the scholars present at the function. “You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting for your word… because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost… by our own hands.”

When he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, Al-Sisi pointed out that Islam is a tolerant religion, although this has not always been clear to the rest of the world during the past 20 or 30 years. “The terrible terrorist attacks and this terrible image of Muslims 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,” he added.