'By our own hands'

When Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited the Coptic cathedral in Cairo on Jan. 6, it wasn’t the first time the former military official surprised religious leaders.

Many Christians cheered and snapped photos during al-Sisi’s historic visit to the church, but the mood was far more subdued when the president addressed a group of prominent Muslim leaders at Al-Azhar University five days earlier.

Standing in the iconic university where Muslim clerics have trained for more than a thousand years, the country’s Muslim president blasted Islamic extremists: “Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible!”

Al-Sisi urged a “religious revolution” in Islam, and called on imams to confront the strain of Islamic thinking that is “antagonizing the entire world.”

“The entire world is waiting for your next move,” he said, “because this umma [Islamic community] is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.”

Al-Sisi’s quest is an uphill battle.

A month earlier, a professor at Al-Azhar refused to denounce Islamic State extremists, and a top Salafi leader declared any Muslim who offered Christmas greetings to Christians an unbeliever. (Al-Sisi visited the Coptic church soon after.)

Still, al-Sisi’s remarks are “a statement the likes of which no one else in the Arab world has made since September 11th,” said Sebastian Gorka of the Marine Corps University.

Other Muslims have condemned terrorism, but al-Sisi is one of the most high-profile leaders to call so strongly for Islamic reform. During his run for the presidency after the ouster of former President Mohamed Morsi (a member of the Muslim Brotherhood), al-Sisi told an interviewer: “I see that the religious discourse in the entire Islamic world has lost Islam its humanity.”

Egyptian Christians widely supported al-Sisi’s election, viewing him as a leader who saved them from the growing tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood. They also welcomed his efforts to include Christians in the committee drafting the country’s new constitution.

Critics charge the former military leader gained his position through a coup after Morsi’s ouster in 2013, and that he’s cracked down harshly on Muslim Brotherhood supporters and political opponents. His defenders say al-Sisi’s actions protected the nation from an organization with deep terrorist connections.

So far, it’s unclear whether al-Sisi has a broader plan to push for reforms, but some experts say the United States should support the leader’s stance as part of its own policy against terrorism and bolster al-Sisi’s position as a moderate voice.

Middle Eastern expert Walid Phares says the Obama administration has been slow to embrace al-Sisi’s approach or use terms like “jihadists” because it fears creating more extremists, a dynamic Phares calls “obviously false.”

Meanwhile, al-Sisi faces plenty of problems in Egypt. Terrorists in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula have launched repeated attacks and killed dozens of soldiers. Days after the Paris attacks, Islamic State militants posted pictures of 21 Egyptian Christians abducted in Libya.

Egyptian Christians still endure entrenched discrimination, and sometimes face violence, particularly in rural regions. The day al-Sisi visited the Coptic church in Cairo, gunmen killed two police officers guarding a church two hours south in the town of Minya.

Tawfik Hamid, an Egyptian-born Muslim also calling for Islamic reform, applauds al-Sisi’s stand, but admits the broader war against jihadists will be harder to win. “ISIS [the Islamic State] has a lot of money and resources, they are determined, and they can do serious damage to the world,” he says. “That is what is worrying me: Who will win? Will it be us or them?”