CAIRO - A high-pitched voice at the back of the ornate Al-Nour (The Light) Mosque shouts through a megaphone: “This is time for us to claim our rights to this mosque. We must get our rights." A deep-throated roar immediately follows, as the crowd chants: "Yes, we must get our rights." The congregation of around 3,000 attending the main Islamic event of the week, Friday midday prayers, surges forward in what amounts to a coup against the mosque's established religious order. Even before the prayers began, policemen had marched into this iconic place of worship, then joined in the devotions. But the surging crowd seemed to provide an exit call for the more than 100 young policemen. Ignored by the crowd, they marched out in single file. It was a scene unthinkable in pre-revolutionary Egypt. A large banner was draped across the white marble of the kiblah (a recess in the mosque wall facing east, directing worshippers towards the holiest Muslim city, Mecca). Emblazoned on the banner were revolutionary sentiments. “We will all fight for our rights,” they chanted, bringing many of the worshippers to tears – not just young men clad in white religious gowns and headgear, but also many of the snappily dressed men and boys, seemingly an amalgam of different strata of Egyptian society. "This mosque is not owned by the Government," said Ahmed Fawzi, 37, a clean- shaven language school graduate who works as an accountant in Cairo's stock market. “How can the Government confiscate it and treat it as if it were its own?" The initial call that transformed an orderly prayer session into a powerful expression of political Islam had come from Sheikh Hafez Salama, a strong opponent of secularism. Departing from his stronghold at the southern tip of the Suez Canal, the elderly sheikh had made a surprise appearance at this mosque in Cairo, built by his grandfather. Accorded almost mythical fame for leading a small band of fighters resisting a brief Israeli occupation of the port city of Suez in 1973, the same sheikh became a standard-bearer for the growing revolt in Al Tahrir Square. Several days before it even seemed possible that the revolutionary protesters might triumph, he delivered a firebrand speech of defiance to the appreciative crowd. That Al-Nour Mosque should be the main source of the outburst of anti-State sentiment and pro-Salafist control in this city of 16 million people is hardly surprising. Every Friday for the past eight weeks, there has been a struggle over who will control the pulpit from where the key religious message of the week is delivered. As such, it has been the site of a portentous tug-of-war pitting hardline Salafists, who support an austere form of Islam, against the much more moderate line adopted by religious institutions that for decades have been under firm Government control. Sensing that the momentum was with them, the hardline worshippers marched outside the mosque and expressed their determination to take matters inside the mosque into their own hands and impose their full control. Manipulating events from behind the scenes was typical of the Salafists, who have emerged cautiously but firmly since the recent revolution, but who by no means have destroyed the shackles of Mubarak's multiple security apparatus. In the past few months, the Salafists have seldom indulged in the sort of defiant public display that happened in Al-Nour Mosque. It is a sign, though, of their growing confidence, and a possible clue to their numbers. A recent newspaper assessment of their support base suggested that more than 4 million of Egypt's estimated 40 million adults may espouse the hardline Islamist school of thought. Hosni Mubarak, like his predecessors, Anwar el-Sadat and Gamal Abdel-Nasser, took great pains to deprive hardline Islamists of the chance to sway the masses. For decades, almost all the mosques in Egypt have been State-controlled, with the salaries of the preachers paid for by the Government. In a cycle of violence that peaked in the eighties and nineties, hardliners formed cells that attacked and murdered scores of tourists and targeted police, leading to large-scale crack-downs, detentions and the torture of hardline Islamists. Now, however, the revolution has loosened the State's grip on the levers of religious power. Since Mubarak's ousting, emboldened Salafists have broken into nightclubs and have staged vociferous protests outside the headquarters of Pope Shenouda, who leads Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Christians (whose numbers are estimated at between 6 and 10 million), to demand the immediate return of a woman supposedly held captive by the Church, to prevent her converting to Islam. Even the small fringe of violent Salafists seems to have benefited from the sudden changes, while several Islamists serving long sentences have been freed from jail. The Salafists, who believe that Islam has been watered down and corrupted by Western influences, saw people like Osama bin Laden as their flagbearers in an ongoing battle between the truly faithful and the infidels, led by their major enemy, the United States. Outside Al-Nour Mosque, other people called for Salafist control of the place of worship, clearly indicating that the Salafists have succeeded in convincing them of their cause. "We all know who owns this mosque," said Saleh Talaly, a father of three. "Why should the State control it?"
