Moderate Muslim voice falls silent

Charismatic young leader leaves Egypt as his popular sermons come under government scrutiny.

CAIRO - Outside the massive mosque, triple-parked Mercedes clogged the street. Inside, thousands of prosperous Cairenes vied for an open spot, their numbers forcing the crowd to spill outside as they waited for Amr Khaled to give his weekly sermon.

But instead of the moderate former accountant with the Western-style suit and soft voice, a government-sanctioned prayer leader took the stand - and the crowd's mood quickly changed.

"All the people started shouting, 'Where is Amr Khaled? We're here for him!' " says Mohammed Ragdy, a young man who traveled an hour by bus on that late summer evening to reach the mosque. "It was like a revolution."

It also may have been the charismatic leader's last speech in Egypt for the foreseeable future. While Mr. Khaled finally spoke that night - delivering an impassioned, four-hour speech that touched on the usually off-limits area of politics - he did not appear again in public, sparking intense speculation as to his whereabouts among supporters and detractors alike. Finally, it was confirmed last week on his website (www.forislam.com) that Khaled had moved to London to pursue doctoral religious studies.

Khaled's supporters say he was forced out by an authoritarian administration that feels threatened by uncontrolled Islamic expression. A government spokesman denied that Amr Khaled had been forced to stop preaching in Egypt. But for almost three decades, Egyptian officials have been fighting a militant movement that assassinated a president and scores of tourists, and once threatened to topple the government in an Islamic revolution.

The militants were crushed. But worried by an Islamic revival that continues to gain strength, Egyptian authorities are scrutinizing even relatively moderate religious leaders as they struggle to control a message that is reaching broad swaths of Egyptian society.

"Mass crowds, people in the streets, those manifestations in a state like Egypt are frightening to the government," says Patrick Haenni, a sociologist at the Center of Economic, Legal, and Social Studies, a French-funded institute in Cairo. "But Amr Khaled is the beginning of a new age of Islam in Egypt, and around the world. You can stop the man, but you can't stop the trend."

Khaled has little in common with political Islam in Egypt of the late 1970s and '80s that emerged from the Cairo slums. His base of support comes from the elite, and he is more flexible than some of the stern traditionalists in turbans. Khaled convinced several movie stars to cover their tresses under head scarves and choose less lascivious roles, but he didn't insist they quit acting altogether.

Salma Ashraf remembers her surprise at seeing Khaled playing racquetball in the company of women on a beach, dressed in shorts and a Nike shirt. "He told me, 'Being a good Muslim doesn't mean you have to abandon your regular life, as long as your instincts are pure,'" the young woman says.

Khaled's delivery is evangelical and emotional, but the message is morally conservative and legitimizes wealth. "Amr Khaled is introducing a new way of living Islam, but his message is neofundamentalist," notes Mr. Haenni.

In one typical Khaled story, two young women head to the mall, but the more religious one insists on visiting the mosque first. As they listen to the sermon, the unveiled woman starts to cry, and asks for a head scarf. Later that day, she is killed by a car. Fortunately, she has renewed her commitment to Islam.

Khaled's call, "Turn to God while you still have the chance," has resonated with young women looking for spiritual fulfillment to augment material wealth. Darea Kamaleddine was an instructor at a fitness college when she ditched her spandex for Islamic dress after listening to Khaled's tapes. The capri pants and spaghetti-strap tops still hang in her closet, "But thanks to God and thanks to Amr Khaled, I took the veil," she says.

Khaled's influence on men is not as obvious. Ragdy, an accountant, owns more than 40 of Khaled's tapes. He was something of a party boy, but now, "I look at women differently, not in a sexy way," he says.

Khaled was not a revolutionary, despite the outcry when he was silenced. Stifling peaceful Islamic voices is shortsighted, says Mamoun El Hodeibi, acting head of the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed political party.

Khaled still appears on satellite TV every night during Ramadan, but it's unclear how much longer his sermons will continue. The government "requested [an end to] all his activities calling people to Islam," the article on forislam.com says.

I don't understand you. You, or other freepers like you, are constanstantly demanding that there be a voice for peace and reason within the Islamic clergy.

Then when you hear of one such as Amr, you call him an extrimist and deny that peace and reason is possible in Islam.

I condemn the extreme Islamisist as much as the next freeper, but I do see that 85% of Muslims want peace. I would encourage any Muslim who dares to speak out.

If Egypt while crying that "extremist Islam" is a danger, prints in the Newspapers with government sanction that Jews are dogs and pigs and should all be killed by good Moslems, just who are the "bad" Moslems?

This guy is not a moderate, he is a soft spoken Islamic that even the Egyptians are afraid of. So now he is in london schmoozing with the ladies. With a pure heart he says.

While getting a little infidel on the side, I am sure he is doing his best to raise an army there as he was in Egypt.

You think 85% of Moslems are Moderate? You need to read the Koran. I am guessing that there is no devout Islamic that is moderate on the face of the earth. If you are devout, the torture, the bloodletting, wife-beating and forced conversion to Islam or death part is the foundation of your faith. Only the baby western Moslems are bordering on moderate, give them a couple of years of brainwashing and they will be coming to cut your throat too.

Hope you wise up before then.

Wise up yourself. If you are in Israel, as your handle says, I can see how you would think the way you apparently do. You are sorrounded by millions who say they want to kill you.

It's true that I know nothing about Amr beyond what is in the article. I doubt you do either. If you do know something more about him, I always welcome more information.

I repeat; I don't understand why some people cannot see that Islamic people are not all fanatical terrorists.

Remember how the man on the street in Afghanistan rejoiced when the Taleban was kicked over. Look at Iran, and see that young people are nearly ready to rebel against radical Islamic clerics. Everywhere I see Muslims without a gun pointed at them by the real radicals, I see the common man in the street choosing moderation and peace.

He does remind me just a bit of Roger Williams, the puritan man in the Mass. Bay Colony who was banished to the wilderness for making the authorities mad. I read somewhere where he was known as the 'gentle puritan'.

He was sent away from his family in the colony, and banished for speaking out against the authorities, or being disobedient, or something. He founded a colony on land he bought from the Indians. Then he proceeded to allow people into his colony who were not Puritans, and were being excluded from Mass. Bay Colony.

Not quite. Yes, the terrorists are a limited group, and yes, the average man in the street has to be coerced or rejects their ideas. But not because "moderation and peace" are his alternative ideals. Men of moderation are rare, and men of real tolerance - let alone pacifism - are rarer still.

As for who the Egyptian government considers too radical, it is easy enough to understand, but hardly fits the monolith our own bigots want to construct ("all Muslims agree with each other, are bad"). I don't quite see why; the reality of the thing is damning enough, if what they are after is rhetorical ammo.

There are something like 30,000 Muslim activists jailed in Egypt without trial, many of them routinely tortured. What marks them as "radicals" to the government is not their strident belief, nor hatred of foreign infidels, but hatred of *the government* as insufficiently Islamic. The government is based on successors of Nasser; its ideology is modernist Arab nationalism, not Islamic fundamentalism.

The Islamic radicals (Muslim Brotherhood types) denounce the government as secularist, unbelieving western lackies, corrupt, cowardly, and traitorous. They want an Islamic revolution to abolish the existing Arab nationalist government and impose Shariah law. That is a radical, in Egypt.

Hating Israel, in contrast, is something the Arab nationalists and the Islamic radicals can agree on. Meanwhile anyone talking mostly about morality or culture or real learning is way over on the enlightenment side. What would correspond to the center *left* in Egypt has political opinions akin to Mussolini's. The issue that defines the spectrum, incidentally, is attitudes toward modernity, not toward the economic system.

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