Opinion

The opening in Egypt

Cairo

This week’s violence on the streets of this sprawling city is one sign of ongoing change. Another, more hopeful, one can be found in Cairo’s mosques.

Until the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the main nuisance caused by the city’s hundreds of mosques came from minarets broadcasting the call to prayer. But since “liberation,” as Egyptians label the events that led to Mubarak’s fall and the holding of free elections, many mosques have been transformed into political clubs — with minarets servings as loudspeakers to broadcast heated debates.

Under Mubarak, the message from government-controlled mosques came in the form of Friday sermons written by scribes at the Ministry of Religious Affairs and faxed to imams on its payroll.

Anyone who wished to hear a different tune had to go to clandestine mosques operated by Islamist groups alternating between semi-legal existence and underground “jihad” against the regime.

All that is beginning to change.

Most clandestine mosques now operate openly, with new mosques being built with money from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich states.

And the government of President Muhammad Mursi, inspired by an experiment under way in Turkey, has opened discussions about privatizing the state-owned mosques.

The scheme would mean the firing of over 100,000 government preachers, who’d then have to persuade the boards of privatized mosques to hire them. In protest, hundreds of preachers went on strike this week, refusing to deliver the Friday sermon.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a traditional Islamist movement to which Mursi belongs, is positioning itself to get the lion’s share in what amounts to a distribution of the spoils — for many mosques are linked to endowment trusts that include real estate, trading companies, farms and factories.

Taken together, Egypt’s thousands of endowments account for a good portion of the national economy. Controlling even a slice of that would give Islamist parties a permanent source of finance.

The mosques are also important because they provide Islamist parties, coming out of the shadows, readily available buildings in thousands of towns and villages.

Yet secularist groups also seek to control some mosques, especially in poorer neighborhoods, to offer an alternative to the Islamist discourse.

To compete with secularist parties, Islamists are trying to re-modulate their message, de-emphasizing religious themes and focusing on political issues. “Secularists want to persuade Egyptians to defy the command of Allah,” says Muhammad Rizq, the preacher in a mosque in Shibra. “Our duty is to use the pulpit to warn of the dangers of such attitudes for the Islamic ummah.”

Many can’t yet gauge the emerging landscape. “We are in one big mess,” says Adel Ibrahim, who is part of a group seeking to control a mosque south of the capital. “The imams have lost their monopoly on preaching and are forced to allow just anyone to take the microphone and say what he likes. Where will all that end?”

The message coming out of mosques is attracting Egyptians because it sounds new.

Instead of the traditional obsession with “licit” and “illicit” under sharia, the talk is now of pluralism, multiparty politics, transparency, accountability, the rule of law, liberalism, civil society, social reform and economic development. To many Egyptian ears, these phrases sound magical and mysterious.

And the previously forbidden concepts have spread from mosques to teahouses, shops and offices, turning Egypt into a large seminary on politics.

“We don’t quite know what all that talk is about,” says Latif Jamil, a 22-year-old shop assistant who attended several sessions in a “secular” mosque during Ramadan. “But what I heard sounded good, and I intend to find out what it really means.”

One mosque has hosted several sessions on the so-called Turkish and Iranian models of reconciling Islam with modernity. The idea is to help Egyptians shape a model of their own by learning from the mistakes of Turkey and Iran.

Under successive military dictators, Egypt was prevented from playing its traditional role as part of a trio (with Turkey and Iran) of nations that shaped the debate within Islam. With the end of despotism, Egypt means to regain its position.

Under attack in mosques controlled by Salafist parties for his alleged “religious timidity,” Mursi counts on his promise of an Egyptian model to broaden his narrow electoral base.