[American Center for Democracy] In recent days an Al-Jazeera news anchor wondered live on camera why the Arab armies can’t be as humanitarian as the Israeli army–trying its best to avoid civilian casualties. As far as we know he was not fired.
Youssef Zeidan, a prominent Egyptian scholar and author, declared in a televised interview that Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israel attitudes were attributable to indoctrination, ignorance “…and stupidity”.
Twenty-five Egyptian Islamic scholars—some from Al-Azhar University, the closest thing Sunni Islam has to an authoritative theological think tank—recently issued a statement that Islam needed to restore ijtihad, the investigation of Islamic dogma, in the light of changes in the objective situation within which it functions.
All this could be downplayed as unrepresentative and unlikely to have any substantial effect on Muslim thought or practice. But public pronouncements by al-Sisi of Egypt, one of the two most powerful current Sunni Arab figures (the other being King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), cannot be ignored. His statement that Islam must exit its 800-year stagnation and join the modern world is nothing short of revolutionary.
| The writer asks, is this the beginning of a true Sunni Reformation? |
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