Kneeling in Judgment

At Cairo Mosques, Angry Egyptians Turn Their Rancor on the West

CAIRO -- By late morning on a Friday, the streets of the Hada'ek al-Zaytoun neighborhood are already clogged with vendors, women in full veils and men in white robes and traditional beards. They come, every Friday, for weekly prayers at the al-Aziz Billah mosque, which has a reputation for attracting old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone sheiks whose preaching and rhetoric push the limits of the Egyptian government's strict control of religious expression. Conservative Muslims -- angry at a fallen world, contemptuous of their own government's secular leanings and convinced that behind much of what is wrong with Egypt is a failure to stand up to the United States and its client, Israel -- flock to the streets outside this thoroughly unprepossessing mosque. Undeterred by the blistering summer sun, they lay out prayer mats on the dusty ground, and wait for the hour of 1 o'clock.

When it arrives, the high, plaintive chant of the azan, the call to prayer, ascends in semitones through the air. Metal grates slam shut on storefronts. Latecomers rush to find a spot within earshot of the loudspeakers that will carry Sheik Abu-Amar Masry's words to the hundreds of faithful gathered outside the small mosque. Carved out of a dull, brutally square apartment house, the interior of the mosque can only hold a few dozen at most.

Al-Aziz Billah is not one of Cairo's great historic mosques with minarets and a dome and hundreds of lanterns dangling in a cool, cavernous space. It is almost literally a hole in the wall, in a neighborhood that was one of Cairo's finest -- a place of villas and gardens for the wealthy. But that neighborhood is long gone, and now Hada'ek al-Zaytoun (the name means garden of olives) is overcrowded, poor and falling apart. Ugly high-rises have been shoehorned in among the old villas, most of which are crumbling. Cats haunt the forgotten gardens, and scamper over what were once fountains.

Masry begins by evoking a world of peril. The day of judgment can come at any time. Few are ready. Few are sufficiently without shame that they would dare invite the Prophet into their homes. The arc of his speech, which flows in increasingly rapid and urgent tones for an hour, with only one short pause, is a long crescendo. From the certainty of death and imminent judgment, the sermon, as it is translated by an interpreter, grows in force and scope, taking in more particulars of this world, moving from the abstractions of sin and death to the failure of contemporary Muslims to lead their lives with the purity of the first generation of Islam. When he reaches the traditional prayers for the defenders of Islam, Masry cites the victims of Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya, a commonplace troika of anger in this part of the world.

He refers to America and Israel only glancingly before concluding, but he has, like so many other people in this society, been talking about them the entire time. There is a code, in these prayers, that allows preachers to reach their audience without speaking in particulars.

There is no doubt, for example, that when he mentions the cities of Ad and Thamud, he is talking about the United States. Like the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, Ad and Thamud were renowned in the Koran for their wickedness, though their particular sin seems to have been arrogance. Ad, a city famous for the strength of its people, was destroyed by a storm that raged for eight days; Thamud was swallowed up in an earthquake. Masry uses Ad and Thamud to stand for the hollow achievements of America. The catastrophic fate of these ancient people comforts those who wish to see America, "the second Ad," brought to account.

Masry's prayers were pallid compared to what can often be heard at al-Aziz Billah. A week before, according to a street vendor selling cassette tapes of previous prayers, the renowned sheik Muhammad Hassaan gave a far more blistering sermon. Sale of these tapes is a brisk business. Hassaan's sermon, called "Crisis of a Nation," is preceded by a slickly packaged introduction, using excerpts from the text, punctuated by a low, ominous voice repeating the title as a refrain. Masry's sermon is a passionate denunciation of the humiliations suffered by the Arab people -- betrayed by their rulers, shamed by defeat, martyred in their homelands by colonialist powers, and especially Israel. Rape is a binding metaphor, a crime of control, humiliation and despoliation that is both a literal problem in a corrupt, increasingly Westernized world and an encompassing vision of what it means to be an Arab.

His speech reaches a harrowing climax with an allusion to an image -- of uncertain authenticity but supposedly from Abu Ghraib and widely known from the Internet -- of an Iraqi woman apparently being raped by American soldiers. That brings the sheik (and his listeners) to the point of tears.

"Ah-rab! Ah-rab!" cries Hassaan, prolonging the word into harrowing, searing and tremulous screams. It is a call to battle, a demand to stand up from the dust and confront America and the West. It is the sound of no compromise.

Power and Persecution

Although they speak directly to only a minority within a society like Egypt, voices like Hassaan's and Masry's have come to represent, for many Americans, the mind of an entire region. From the outside, their language sounds like incitement. To Egyptian ears, where the rhetoric of anger at the United States and Israel is all but universal, the fact that there is no explicit provocation against the Egyptian government means that these sermons fall within the accepted parameters of religious discourse. Even so, the status of religious fundamentalists -- the men who preach, the people who listen, and the political activists who seek religious rule -- is both perilous and powerful in this heavily-policed state on the Nile.

Those suspected of belonging to active Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Gamaa Islamiya (the radicals whose spiritual leader was implicated in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993), are subject to periodic harassment, arrest and persecution by the government. They argue -- and there is wide acceptance of this belief -- that the root of this persecution is pressure from the United States and Israel, which force a craven secular government to suppress political movements threatening to the West.

The sense that the government is indiscriminate in its abuse of fundamentalists, rounding up not just the politically active but anyone who even "looks" like they might belong to Islamist groups, strengthens the feelings of persecution among many conservatives.

"This feeling of persecution really increased after September 11th," says Diaa Rashwan, who studies comparative politics at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "Before 9/11 you would hear it from Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, but not from the majority [of Muslims]. After September 11, because of this very heavy and I think stupid pressure from the Bush administration, it helps to increase such feelings -- of persecution, humiliation."

Though they may be relatively few in number, the rhetoric of the most incendiary believers has a reach well beyond neighborhoods like Hada'ek al-Zaytoun. Hatred of America, which cuts across all social and class divisions, is a significant point of contact between the fundamentalists and the rest of Egyptian society. A new religious conservatism, thriving among young members of the middle- and upper-middle classes, is as much about forging an Egyptian identity through resistance to Western encroachments as it is about religion. The wind in the sails of this new conservatism is blowing out of places like Hada'ek al-Zaytoun.