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The terrorist attacks of September 11 reinvigorated fears about “Islamic
Fundamentalism,” a term used in the media to conjure images of bearded
and turbaned zealots spoiling for holy war against the West. Throughout
the search for answers and preparations for war in the tragedy’s
aftermath, such images have continued to obscure the true nuance and complexity
of Islam and its practice across the modern world. After all, the “most
fashionable face of the faith” in Cairo today is a young accountant
who wears sharp suits and a trim moustache, speaks in an elegant but easy-to-follow
blend of colloquial slang and Classical Arabic, and moves listeners to
tears and laughter with his retellings of Qu‘ranic stories and promises
of God’s redeeming love. Amr Khaled, a soft-spoken 36-year-old lay
preacher, works the crowds with a charismatic style that combines the
trendiness of Egyptian pop singer Amr Diab with the down-home missionary
appeal of Western televangelist Billy Graham, and the self-help wisdom
of popular American TV psychologist Dr. Phil. Ever since he began giving
inspirational talks on Islam in private homes and clubs in the late 1990s,
Khaled’s fame has grown to the degree that observers hail him as
the most popular television preacher in Egypt since the beloved Sheikh
Sha‘rawi, who died in 1998.
Significantly, Khaled declines to discuss domestic politics or issue fatwas,
prefering to emphasize emotion, God’s love, and issues of personal
piety, such as dating, family relationships, veiling, hygiene, manners,
Internet use, and leisure. In one of his most popular taped sermons, The
Youth and the Summer (A-shubab wa a-sayf), Khaled addressed the question
of whether it is a sin to go on a vacation to trendy beach resorts on
the Red Sea coast, laying out step-by-step guide of how to enjoy the break
constructively while avoiding Satan. But it is his style of preaching
on TV—in a talk show format featuring audience participation and
testimonials from both ordinary and famous people—that sets Khaled
apart and makes him such a favorite with privileged youth and women. They
say he looks like them, speaks their language and makes their religion
relevant to their lives without shouting at them about fire and brimstone
in incomprehensible Classical Arabic. His tapes, videos and CDs reportedly
outsell Cairo’s top music stars, while his lectures in mosques and
clubs around the city have attracted thousands, many of whom reportedly
stand listening in the streets, moved to public displays of emotion by
his oratory skills. His numerous television shows on cable and satellite
channels are among the most eagerly watched and talked-about programs
during Ramadan. In the words of one 24-year-old Egyptian friend, “During
Ramadan, it’s nothing but Amr Khaled, Amr Khaled, Amr Khaled.”
I first heard Khaled’s name when visiting an Egyptian family I met
in Cairo in the summer of 2002. An Egyptian-American classmate had invited
me to her family’s holiday apartment at the private Agamy beach resort
outside Alexandria. In the course of conversation, she mentioned her aunt
had only recently decided to wear higab, or Islamic dress in the form
of a headscarf and modest clothes. My friend said a popular new television
preacher had inspired greater religious observance in scores of other
women like her aunt, an upper-middle class professional who long resisted
the social pressure to wear higab, even as it became an increasingly obvious
presence on the streets of Cairo over the last few decades. I began asking
questions, and soon discovered a fierce debate in the Arab press and on
the streets of Cairo over Khaled’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune
as an “Islamic televangelist.” The following week, the rumor
went out that the Egyptian government had banned Khaled from preaching
at a mosque in an affluent suburb of Cairo, having already banned him
from speaking publicly inside the city. By November 2002, Khaled had been
ordered to halt all preaching activities and forced to leave the country.
Everyone I spoke to about Khaled seemed to find it both amusing and fascinating
that an American graduate student was studying him. Consequently, I stumbled
into useful conversations about him when I least expected it, like the
time I found myself in an hour-long discussion with the man who was Xeroxing
articles about Khaled for me at a copy center. Some people, however, seemed
to think it disconcerting that if I wanted to learn about Islam, I would
choose to focus on Khaled and not a “real” sheikh, properly
trained in Azhar University. Such comments reflect the way in which Khaled
straddles spheres of popular culture and religious tradition, refusing
to fit neatly into conventional categories. The fluid ambiguity of his
image enables Khaled to articulate a position betwixt and between normative
images of sacred authority, marking him as potentially subversive, but
also making him powerful.
This thesis investigates Khaled’s controversial new form of preaching
and its implications for the evolving role of religion in everyday modern
life in Egypt. Analysis focuses on video and audio tapes of Khaled’s
sermons, articles from the Egyptian and English press, and interviews
with Egyptians who have been following the trend. I gathered materials
and conducted interviews during two trips to Egypt: for three months in
summer 2002 and a return trip for eight days in December. The interviews
with professors, journalists and officials were conducted quite formally,
while most of the discussions I had with ordinary Egyptians were couched
in the course of normal conversations and carried out in the context of
personal relationships and interactions. In particular, my relationship
with my Arabic teacher, Abeer Heieder, and her extended family proved
instrumental, as she not only helped me translate the four tapes I am
using as the focus of my main analysis, but she and her family also became
quite engaged with my research and with the tapes themselves, responding
strongly to Khaled’s presentations and explaining their reactions
when asked. An interesting side-effect was that I inadvertently “converted”
my teacher’s husband to become a dedicated Khaled fan because I left
the tapes with Abeer between translation sessions in the couple’s
home. One day when I arrived for a lesson, Abeer informed me that her
normally reserved husband had watched all the tapes and had been so affected
by them, he had wept. Usually a very shy and laconic man, he gushed to
me that evening about how much he admired Khaled.
The public debate that has arisen around Khaled and other “new wave”
preachers like him resounds not only in Egypt, but across the Muslim world.
In an age of rapidly advancing technology and mass communications, how
will traditional religious structures and discourses adapt to the diffusion
and fragmentation of both authority and information, and who will lead
the way? Some analysts, like sociologist Asef Bayat, argue that the emergence
of popular lay preachers like Khaled—who uses a variant of Western-style
televangelism to promote a non-political message of personal piety and
salvation—may signal an important shift in the tone and character
of Islamism. Egyptian newspaper columnist Fahmy Howeidy sees Khaled as
a key figure who can woo troubled young people away from both the vices
of religious disengagement and the dangers of extremism and violence.
Others, like Dr. Hala Mustafa of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and
Strategic Studies, say Khaled offers modernism without substance, manipulating
people into embracing his socially conservative Islamic discourse by giving
it a “modern” face.
In the summers of 2001 and 2002, the secularist Egyptian tabloid Rose
al-Youssef launched a bitter campaign against Khaled, accusing him of
being elitist, dangerous, and “in it for the money.” As for
Azhar, it has remained officially silent, though some individual sheikhs
and professors from the institution are quoted in both the Arabic and
English press deriding Khaled as a dangerous, unlicensed and untrained
imposter: a Muslim Brother, false prophet, or extremist in disguise. They
know they are vying with him for the attention of Egypt’s middle-
and upper-class women and youth and worry they may be losing the battle.
Even after Khaled had left Egypt, the media circus continued. The latest
uproar arose when a Coptic television producer was quoted on the Internet
calling Khaled the “Rasputin” of Egypt, a comment he denies
having made, but which was repeated and criticized ad nauseum over the
airwaves and in tabloids for the entire week I was in Cairo in December.
None of the speculation about Khaled’s motives described above offer
a satisfactory answer to the pressing question of why this seemingly moderate
and apolitical preacher is so controversial, and moreover, why the government
felt compelled to ban him from speaking, eventually driving him from the
country. If he did not give fatwas, preach violence, present an extremist
version of Islam, or discuss his opinions about government policy in public,
what was so threatening about his discourse? Why did the government not
encourage Khaled’s da‘wa to counteract the political Islamists
and radicals as a powerful voice for moderate Islam, instead of attempting
to silence and discredit him? The answer lies in his successful presentation
of an alternative Islamic discourse that not only threatens to be more
popular and better marketed than the Azhar’s official version, but
also wrecks havoc with the state’s attempt to categorize Islamists
as poor, uncouth, fringe extremists. According to the state’s construction
of “official” Islam versus “unofficial” Islamism,
a fundamentalist does not look and talk like modernized, westernized “us”;
he is a backward, dangerous “other.” Khaled’s genius is
to style himself as an Islamist who is one of “us.” The phenomenon
of Khaled’s rise to popularity and his subsequent banishment can
only be understood by examining the implications as well as the pitfalls
of this dichotomy in the context of Egypt’s ongoing Islamic Revival.
Understanding the Revival’s impact on Egyptian society means appreciating
how religion can affect political discourse and institutions both formally
and informally. James Piscatori and Dale Eickleman argue that “politics
have as much if not more to do with bargaining among several forces or
contending groups as with compulsion.” Thus, a full appreciation
for the politicization of Islam and its influence in the contemporary
Middle East should not be limited to a measure of formal participation
or the actions of revolutionary militants challenging the state. To do
so runs the risk of ignoring how political interests are shaped by “socially
defined values [that] play an important part in formulating the identities
and goals of individuals and collectivities.” These values often
are understood and expressed symbolically, through words and images that
help define social relations. A range of both state and sub-state forces
seek to manipulate this symbolic language through what Eickelman and Piscatori
refer to as “boundary setting,” defined as a political process
to determine the dividing line between public and private, modern and
traditional, religious and secular, “high” and “low”
culture, moral and immoral. While the centralized state tries to delineate
these boundaries using a roadmap of shared Islamic symbols, its authoritative
interpretations are becoming increasingly contested as access to mass
education and mass media technologies enable more people to produce their
own interpretations. More and more, “new” Islamic thinkers,
writers and lay preachers like Khaled are questioning or disputing the
“boundary setting” language employed by the state and others,
including traditional religious authority figures.
As Khaled’s popularity grows, both the Egyptian government and established
Islamist groups find themselves competing with Khaled’s innovatively
packaged “marketing” of Islam. When Khaled left Egypt for the
Britain, the most prevalent rumor was that his influence had gotten too
close to the top when President Hosni Mubarak’s daughter-in-law decided
to veil after listening to his tapes, embarrassing the secular regime
and particularly the conspicuously un-veiled First Lady Suzanne Mubarak.
Although specific reasons for Khaled’s recent “exile” may
be impossible to discover, the persistence of this particular rumor speaks
to perhaps the government’s most significant anxiety about Khaled:
that he has become too widely popular to control and that his decision
to target elite youth and women has been so successful that his influence
has even infiltrated the ranks that wield real power in Egypt.
Despite being banned in his homeland, Khaled continues preaching from
abroad, using Satellite broadcasting and Internet resources to transverse
boundaries, both literal and imaginary, as his fame across the region
grows. Over 10,000 people, including the king and queen of Jordan, attended
four days of lectures during his recent trip there in January. Lebanese
Christian satellite channel LBC picked up his shows to add to the two
already being broadcast on Saudi-owned Iqraa and ART, and a recent visitor
to Syria confirmed to me that the stores and street stalls of Damascus
are stuffed with his merchandise. A Web search reveals an active online
community dedicated to his teachings, centered around his own website,
which features regular live online “dialogues” with the preacher
himself as well as MP3 recordings of his sermons. Khaled’s mastery
of new media technologies and techniques enables him to evade the ban
against his preaching and create an innovative atmosphere in which to
couch his message of personal salvation and ethical social reform as both
compatible with and essential for finding a “culturally authentic”
path to modernization.
Constructing an understanding of this accountant-turned-preacher’s
growing appeal, as well as probing the rumors and debate provoked by his
popularity, should shed light on the direction of the modern Islamic revival
in Egypt and the dynamic role of mass media in both reflecting and shaping
discourses and authority structures in society, religion and politics.
The significance of Khaled’s new form of preaching resounds not only
within Egypt, but across the Middle East to Europe and beyond as it illustrates
the universal themes of identity politics in the age of globalized markets
and communications. Intriguingly, Khaled’s most recent programs have
all appeared with English subtitles and his next project is reportedly
a TV show aimed at Muslims living in the West.
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