In an exclusive interview, speaks about the prospects of his campaign is the first Islamic televangelist whose moderate preaching, highly charismatic personality and clever use of barrier- breaking technology have influenced the lives of millions of young Muslims across the world. He has acquired immense popularity in Europe and the United States for his two recent TV programmes, "Life Makers" and "In the Steps of the Prophet". Both promote social activism, job creation and development as the means to fight despair, unemployment, extremism and injustice. His logic throughout the series is that those who do not learn how to help themselves will never be able to decide their future, nor will they be following in the footsteps of the Prophet Mohamed. Today, Khaled says, youth should know that abandoning smoking, fighting drug addiction, cleaning their streets, planting crops on their building rooftops, educating the public in self-hygiene and even engaging in fitness exercises are all part of their worship of God. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has honoured Khaled for his anti- smoking TV campaigns after a large number of his audience heeded his call to kick the habit. Addiction is a very complicated issue that has stumped experts worldwide. Why did you think of launching a campaign that may be irrelevant to your career as a preacher? I know that addiction is a very big and ever- growing issue, but I also have faith in youths and society as one positive part in the equation. I believe that if society joins forces and engages in solving the problem, people will come up with positive results. We should not always look at our problems as unsolvable no matter how complicated they may seem. We should not remain negative in the face of big problems. Neither should religious discourse remain in seclusion. [The campaign] is part of a modernised religious discourse that aims at achieving social development via faith. There are many verses in the holy Quran which encourage people to be positive as one way of getting closer to God. [Khaled quotes a verse from the Quran which implies that those who take positive action and call for justice are far better than those who stay idle, negative and dependent on others. To corroborate his viewpoint he also quotes another verse that makes clear that the reward for saving one person's life is worth the same as saving a whole universe]. That, and my faith in youths that they are not negative, not a zero, urged me to launch the campaign. Who does the campaign target, addicts or potential addicts? Both. We have two main objectives: we want those who are healthy to remain so, as well as to urge 5,000 addicts from the Arab world to start a rehabilitation programme. That, we thought, could be attained by posting and distributing one million stickers carrying the campaign's logo [between four and five million have already been posted and distributed in public venues in the Arab world]; organising 5,000 events and establishing a call centre and a secret e-mail [on Khaled's official website www.amrkhaled.net ] through which addicts and their families opting for treatment can get in touch with the campaign. The events may be as simple as a word [about the hazards of addiction] in a morning school queue, in a school match, in a Friday sermon, or even a poster that a housewife can stick in the basement of an apartment block. How far has the campaign succeeded in attaining its goals? We have received hundreds of calls, and what is really positive is that while in the first week most calls were made by parents who want to save their children, in the second week, the majority of callers were from addicts themselves saying "I want to receive treatment." We received 1,153 calls in the first 10 days of the campaign [the number jumped to 3,235 four days later with female addicts accounting for two per cent of all callers]. Families accounted for 70 per cent in the first week; now most of the calls are made by the addicts themselves. Those who have actually filled in applications to start treatment in the first two weeks of the campaign number 1,470. That means that the campaign is moving towards achieving its goals. What did the addicts and their families say? "We want to be treated". That is what most addicts said. We also received hundreds of calls from mothers who cried and pleaded "please do something to save my son." They [the mothers] were in great pain. They feel unfairly treated because many people have blamed them for not having raised their children properly, which is not true in many cases. Mothers are victims. If parents are not to blame, what then are the main reasons for addiction as you gathered from the calls? There are two main reasons why many youths take drugs as I discovered over the past few days. Youths live in a vacuum that they do not know how to fill. Plus, many youths feel frustrated. They feel that the future is so uncertain in light of the unemployment rate. [About 65 per cent of addicts aged between 21 and 35 who phoned were unemployed]. How then do you expect your campaign to be effective when all the reasons you mentioned are chronic and cannot be solved by campaigns? Of course trying to find solutions for the two reasons I mentioned are far beyond the capacity of the campaign. Those are big issues that need big solutions. But there is another serious issue that the campaign tries to tackle: addicts are in dire need of someone to listen to them and care, and that is exactly what we are trying to do. This need on the part of addicts was reflected in the number of calls we received from them, starting from the second week of the campaign. They call because they know there is someone on the other end of the line who wants to listen to them, who looks at them as patients needing help and mercy rather than criminals. The logo we chose for the campaign conveys that message clearly. Unlike other traditional logos, ours carries a green apple reading "change your life" -- a message of hope and love. Is this what differentiates your campaign from others? Or is it the fact that you employ faith and spirituality in tackling social ailments like addiction? Engaging society in the campaign and sending a message of love and hope to addicts are two main elements in our campaign [100,000 people have already heeded Khaled's call and took part in the campaign in the first week. Students staged dozens of sit-ins wearing t- shirts carrying the campaign's logos, youths posted millions of posters in public venues, mothers posted stickers in the basement of their apartment blocks, the Jordanian minister of health announced his ministry would join in the campaign and the manager of the Egyptian basketball national team decided to earmark part of the team's revenue to the treatment of addicts]. Faith and spirituality can be protective and helpful, of course, but it is vital that addicts have their problems solved. It will not be of any benefit that I talk to an addict about religion and devotion and ignore life and the reasons which forced him to take drugs. There are problems that have to be solved on earth. Though many other national and non- governmental anti-drug campaigns have been launched, we find addiction on the rise. The number of addicts may decrease for a while, but they are back to normal after a hiatus of perhaps just a few weeks or months. What can you do to keep the momentum going? There are two types of campaigns. One is [as fruitless] as the circles which appear in the water when you throw a stone and they quickly disappear. The other is more like a locomotive dragging a long train of carriages behind. This is exactly how our campaign works. Hemaya is the locomotive, the first step in a long journey ultimately handled by specialists. My role here is no more than a motivator. This five- week campaign is to motivate 5,000 addicts to start treatment -- they can't become totally cured of course -- since rehabilitation takes like four to six months whereas our campaign will last for only five weeks. I know that addiction is a chronic illness that needs long-term rehabilitation. The campaign is to make those addicts move and say they want to get treated, which is the first step of treatment [it may take at least one to two months to persuade an addict to get treated, a period that has been cut down to a few weeks, thanks to Khaled's initiative. Experts say an addict's determination to get treated helps prevent relapses]. No one can challenge your influence on youths and the ability to mobilise the masses. But the catch, according to some experts, may lie in the fact that facilities may fall short of accommodating the huge number of addicts that may heed your call. Is the campaign braced for that challenge? We agreed with 22 rehabilitation centres in the Arab world, mostly in Egypt, to provide treatment for 5,000 addicts with a 50 per cent discount, and free service to 15 per cent of patients who cannot afford the expenses. After that, the whole project will be handed over to specialists working in the field, governmental and non-governmental, under the umbrella of the United Nations which sponsors the campaign and which will follow up on the results. The UN also has a long-term anti-drug programme that will start after the campaign. I would finally like to send a message to all those who read this interview: you have to be positive and do something to help 10 million addicts in the Arab world, especially female addicts who are stigmatised as social outcasts, who may be thrown on the streets where they will resort to prostitution to get money for their habit. You can download a brochure and a 30- minute CD in which addicts talk about their personal experience with drugs, and distribute them everywhere. Increase awareness among youth about the dangers of addiction.
