Being neoconservatives for the most, American pundits are without a concept of history. This was manifestly obvious during the democracy spreading mission to Iraq, a mission the British had tried a century ago and failed.

In this context, I am unsure whether Jonah Goldberg’s likening of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to “Atatürk — the Turkish strongman who modernized and secularized Turkey a century ago,” is warranted.

Addressing the assemblage of imams in the room, al-Sisi called for a “religious revolution” in which Muslim clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction Islam has taken recently. An excerpt (as translated by Raymon Ibrahim’s website):

Goldberg quotes al-Sisi as saying this, at Al-Azhar University:

“I am referring here to the religious clerics. … 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 centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world! … 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.”

The Egyptian leaders that came before President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—the unseating of the last, Husni Mubarak, was cheered by the West—governed in a secular manner. Their influences ranged from Egyptian nationalism and Pan-Arabism to socialism and anticolonialism, but not Islamism. They all fought ruthlessly against the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by this faction for making peace with Israel. But repeated attempts were made by the Islamists on the lives of the other two, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps Al-Sisi is simply an Egyptian in the mold of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak.

One thing is true: Al-Sisi is no sissy