Religion
Related: About this forumEgyptian President Al-Sisi is a Dictator, Not a Reformer of Islam
http://religiondispatches.org/egyptian-president-al-sisi-is-a-dictator-not-a-reformer-of-islam/BY MOHAMAD ELMASRY JANUARY 19, 2015
Its ironic that a number of (mostly right wing) commentators have been invoking the ideals of freedom of speech and expression while praising an authoritarian leader who has cracked down on these freedoms more than any of his nations authoritarian predecessors. American and European analysts on the right have called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi an Islamic reformer and an ally in the quest to deliver the message of Western freedom to Muslims.
The praise for Al-Sisi comes in the aftermath of his January 1, 2015 speech at Al-Azhar University, during which he called for an Islamic religious revolution to combat extremist thought in the Muslim-majority world. Analyses (which accelerated after the Charlie Hebdo attacks) have suggested that American leaders need to let Al-Sisi lead the charge against Islamist extremism and the Christian Posts Richard Land even compared his talk to Dr. Martin Luther King Jrs I Have a Dream speech.
Its troubling that Westerners claiming to be lovers of human rights would overlook, or downplay, Al-Sisis policy recordwhich features a military coup against a democratically elected president, large-scale massacres of civilian protesters, the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people (including many journalists), the shutting down of all oppositional medial outlets, and the banning and effective elimination of key political competition, among other gross human rights violations.
Many Western writers have demonstrated a near-complete lack of contextual awareness. Read through the lens of Egypts political context, Al-Sisis talk of a religious revolution is about political domination, not religious reform. The 2013 military coup was not a confrontation against extremism: it was an attempt by Egypts deep state to reverse the nations democratic gains and to once again assume complete control over its political economic system.
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Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)even now French kissing Wahibi religious extremists in control of a prison camp nation.
Igel
(35,374 posts)That subject line doesn't quite work. It was about political and social domination in Russia. Still, he did reform Orthodoxy. Not sure that was a good thing or not.
Al-Sisi is unlikely to reform anything. But since Islam is a deeply political beast for many, many Muslims, it'll be like the Reformation in Europe--it will be partly voluntary, partly forced; partly secular in thinking, partly religious; it will affect the structure of the state and also have far-reaching consequences for the structure of the religious organization. It will also happen slowly, in stages, and often be visible only after the fact.
There will certainly be losers and winners. Large chunks of Western society have a problem with winning or losing: We love frozen conflicts, conflict resolution, mediation, equally distributed outcomes. The most successful outcomes of conflict, however, come when there is a clear winner and the loser admits not just his loss but commits to his loss as irreversible and therefore something that he won't even try to undo. At that point the loser finds some other area in which to succeed. Unfortunately, at the individual level the losers often suffer. (Sometimes the victors do, too. Poland in some sense won WWII, but lost a huge chunk of land, had to relocate millions of people due to de facto ethnic cleansing, and itself ethnically cleansed its new western periphery. Poland suffered that Stalin might punish the Germans. More Russian hegemonistic sphere-of-influence 'we control you' thinking.)
cbayer
(146,218 posts)He appeared to be taking a stand against extremism, but it looks like it could have been hot air and pure politics.
You seem to believe that it will happen, although it will be difficult.
I hope you are correct.
Promethean
(468 posts)but I doubt he'll do it in an ethical way. He won't eliminate theocratic laws and promote freedom of speech. He'll just declare the new rules and kill the dissenters.
kwassa
(23,340 posts)Egypt is a single-party defacto military dictatorship that destroys all who oppose it. Since those that oppose it are religious, the religious will be destroyed. There is a massive ongoing purge going on there.
and even Mubarek is being rehabilitated, after being charged with corruption. The entire society runs on corruption, though.
Same as it ever was.