Egypt's president opened the new year with a dramatic call for a "revolution" in Islam to reform interpretations of the faith entrenched for hundreds of years, which he said have made the Muslim world a source of "destruction" and pitted it against the rest of the world.

The speech was Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi's boldest effort yet to position himself as a moderniser of Islam. His professed goal is to purge the religion of extremist ideas of intolerance and violence that fuel groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State - and that appear to have motivated Wednesday's attack in Paris on a French satirical newspaper that killed 12 people.

In his Jan 1 speech at al-Azhar addressing Muslim clerics el-Sissi called on them to promote a reading of Islamic texts in a "truly enlightened" manner to reconsider concepts "that have been made sacred over hundreds of years."

By such thinking, the Islamic world is "making enemies of the whole world. So 1.6 billion people (in the Muslim world) will kill the entire world of 7 billion? That's impossible ... We need a religious revolution."

El-Sissi is clearly seeking to impose change through the state, using government religious institutions like the 1,000-year-old al-Azhar, one of the most eminent centers of Sunni Muslim thought and teaching.

Al-Azhar's vision for change, however, is piecemeal, and conservative, focusing on messaging and outreach but wary of addressing deeper and more controversial issues.

Radicals - and el-Sissi's Islamist political opponents who have wide religious followings - angrily denounced el-Sissi, saying he was trying to corrupt the religion.