Rueters: In his battle against militant Islam, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is relying not just on bomber planes and soldiers but on white-turbaned clerics from Al-Azhar, Egypt’s 1,000-year-old center for Islamic learning. He wants clerics to counter radicalism in the classroom.

In a televised speech in January at an Al-Azhar conference center in Cairo, Sisi called for “a religious revolution” in Islam. Radicalized thinking, he told the audience of Islamic scholars, had become “a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.”

That had to change – and the scholars had a leading role to play, in schools, mosques and on the airwaves.

“You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting. The entire world is waiting for your next word because this nation is being torn apart.”

Surprised by the president’s bluntness, the scholars went “white as sheets,” some of those in the audience told a Western official.

The president’s warning is part of a much larger project. To contain the radical Islamist movement roiling his nation, Sisi has most conspicuously been using the law and brute force. But he is also promoting a more moderate and less politicized version of the faith.

In that struggle the Al-Azhar institution is one of the most important fronts for Sisi – and for the wider region. The outcome of the struggle in Egypt, the intellectual and cultural capital of the Arab world, has ramifications far beyond its borders.

The Al-Azhar mosque was built in the 10th century and is one…

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