The most damaging thing that can be said about a people is that none of them see what is wrong. It is seldom true. In every tradition under strain there are those who have named the trouble exactly, in their own language, at the risk of their lives. Before prescribing for a civilization, find out what its own physicians have already said.
The President at al-Azhar
On the first day of 2015 the President of Egypt went to al-Azhar to mark the birthday of the Prophet. The audience in the conference hall was the religious establishment of the Sunni world: the Grand Imam in his white turban, the Grand Mufti, the minister of religious endowments, and row upon row of senior clerics.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was a general who had taken power eighteen months earlier by overthrowing an elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was also, by every account, a devout man. He began with the usual courtesies. Then he put down his notes and spoke to the scholars directly.
It was inconceivable, he told them, in the words of one widely circulated translation, that the thinking Muslims hold most sacred should cause the entire community of believers to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing, and destruction for the rest of the world. He was not speaking of religion, he said carefully, but of thinking: the body of texts and ideas that had been made sacred over the centuries, to the point where to question them had become very difficult.
Is it possible, he asked, that 1.6 billion people should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants, that is seven billion, so that they themselves may live? Impossible.
Then he turned to the Grand Imam. I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before God. The entire world is waiting for your next move, because this community is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost, and it is being lost by our own hands.
No Arab head of state had ever said such a thing to such an audience. The scholars applauded politely. Afterward they explained that the president had meant a renewal of religious discourse and certainly no change to the texts.
5 more minutes: The Judge of Córdoba, The Roll, Interpretation, The Method
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.