Clash between two Islams: Column Extremism is on the rise, but there remain moderate Muslim leaders who can win Islam's future.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

Islam, writes Breitbart London's Milo Yiannopoulos, has a branding problem. Thanks to terror attacks and hate speech, it is, as the headline put it, a "tarnished brand" whose purveyors will have to change their ways if they are to see the Islamic world become, or remain, part of the civilized world.

"The longer politicians and silly left-wing columnists keep parroting the old lie that there is no relation whatsoever between the faith and the fundamentalists," warns Yiannopoulos, "the longer the honesty gap widens between what is happening in our streets and what our leaders say in press conferences, brand Islam has no future in the West. Dialogue, and compromise, and understanding, cannot begin. ... Lying about the scale of the problem helps no one; nor does pretending that there is no continuum between what we call moderate Islam and the Islam of the jihadist. We will simply have to decide where on that line we stop issuing people with passports."

This may be true. Certainly the Paris mass-murder has produced some I-told-you-so's from longtime European critics of mass immigration from Islamic countries. And the social media backlash to the Charlie Hebdo killings seems to me to be bigger, angrier and less politically correct than the reaction to similar past events.

But the most significant criticism of Islam in past weeks came not from traditional critics in Europe, but from inside the Islamic world itself, in the form of a speech, little-reported in the West, by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Muslim clerics in Egypt. It was, as Roger Simon notes, a call for "a long overdue virtual ecclesiastical revolution in Islam."

Al-Sisi commented:

"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 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."

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So it is not merely Western critics who believe that Islamic fundamentalism is damaging and endangering the place of Islam in the world, but the Muslim leader of the most populous Arab nation. Al-Sisi underscored his words by visiting a Coptic Christmas mass, something that no other Egyptian president has ever done.

At a time when some Muslim spokespeople — like radical cleric Anjem Choudary — choose confrontation and threats, an actual leader is pursuing peace and reconciliation. Some have even suggested that al-Sisi should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, though it is perhaps a bit early for that kind of talk.

At any rate, it is clear, from Pakistan to Iraq to Nigeria, that there is Muslim support for the angry and violent approach. It will be interesting to see whether there is similar support for President al-Sisi's more civilized take. The future of the Islamic world, and of the world as a whole, will depend on which approach wins out.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

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