Is that a flight of pigs on the horizon?

Is a crack of light breaking at last into the darkness of Islam?

President Sisi of Egypt, speaking at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, said (translation by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page):

I am referring here to the religious clerics.   We have to think hard about what we are facing — and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before.  It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible!

That thinking — I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.  It’s antagonizing the entire world!

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!

I am saying these words here at Al-Azhar, before this assembly of scholars and ulema — Allah Almighty be witness to your truth on Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about now.

All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.

Daniel Greenfield comments (in part):

The implication is that he’s calling for a departure from texts that promote international holy wars. Obviously he isn’t taking issue with the Koran. But it appears he is calling for a religious framework that invalidates freelance Islamic expansionism of the ISIS kind. That would be a somewhat conservative step. …

And Sisi is “telling Al Azhar’s clergy to take an enlightened perspective and look outside themselves. That is dangerously close to secularism.”

Will Egypt, with the consent of Al-Azhar, become a secular state? There is a precedent in the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk and his immediate successors. (Turkey is reverting now to an Islamic theocracy under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.)

Is it possible that Egypt will persuade Islam to give up its jihad?

And even perhaps – to hazard an even wilder hope – revise sharia law, set women free, tolerate apostasy … ?

Nah! Pigs may figuratively fly, but never very far.