On the first Friday after the bloodiest week in recent Egyptian history, when eight hundred people died in political violence, the preacher at the Aziz Bellah Mosque gave a sermon about patience. He began by proclaiming, “I see desperation, and I smell it!” It was late August, and Sheikh Mohammed Fakeeh had never spoken before at Aziz Bellah, an influential mosque in eastern Cairo. For years, he had been campaigning for a chance to preach to a large congregation. He grew up in a poor farming family on the banks of the Nile, where a childhood illness left him blind. Despite the disability, he had become a brilliant student, completing a Ph.D. with highest honors from Al Azhar University, which is part of the most important Sunni institution in the Arab world. But he had yet to receive a good posting from the Ministry of Religious Endowments, the government bureau that oversees mosques in Egypt. The ministry had previously assigned the sheikh to a cramped mosque that stands directly beneath a highway overpass in central Cairo, and then it transferred him to another obscure position. The sheikh, who is thirty-one years old, believed that he had been disrespected because he is blind. He also felt that politics had played a role—in the past, he was thought to have been critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won Egypt’s first democratic elections, in 2012. Earlier this year, Sheikh Mohammed sent an aggrieved letter to the ministry. “I want a big mosque,” he wrote. “I have degrees and talents and qualifications. Don’t you people have any conscience? They said, ‘Mohammed, if we see you again we’ll put you in the zoo, because you’re blind.’ ” He signed the letter “Known in the ministry as The Blind Man.”

Now, on one of the worst Fridays imaginable, the ministry was finally sending Sheikh Mohammed to speak at a big mosque. He had been told of the assignment just a day earlier. The ministry had changed the Friday preachers at a number of mosques that were reputed to be sympathetic to Morsi. In early July, after millions of anti-Morsi demonstrators marched in cities all across Egypt, the military had forcibly removed him from office. Since the coup, Morsi had been held virtually incommunicado, and his supporters had staged a sit-in at the neighborhood around the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque. Rabaa is only a few miles from the Aziz Bellah Mosque, and many members of the congregation had joined the sit-in. On August 14th, security forces brutally cleared Rabaa and the site of another sit-in, al-Nahda, killing more than six hundred people, most of them unarmed. Two days later, Morsi supporters declared a Day of Rage, and clashes with security forces resulted in more than a hundred deaths. Since then, Cairo had remained tense; there had been periodic outbreaks of violence, and the government had declared a state of emergency and instituted a strict curfew. Everybody was waiting to see what Friday would bring—it had been named the Friday of Martyrs. Another march was scheduled to leave Aziz Bellah after Sheikh Mohammed’s sermon.

From the pulpit, the sheikh talked about enduring hard times, and then he told the story of Job: “Job said, ‘I’ve had troubles, but you’re the most merciful God.’ And God answered Job’s call. God, please unite our country!” The sheikh was a big man, dressed in a snow-white galabiya, and he threw his head back proudly when he spoke. If he was nervous, his voice didn’t show it. In recent days, a few imams had been suspended, and all of them had been warned not to preach directly about politics. Certain words and phrases were regarded as off limits—“coup,” “legitimacy,” “injustice,” “military rule.” But avoiding the subject entirely was also a risk. If a sermon seemed too bland or apolitical, members of the congregation might shout down the preacher. At the al-Salam Mosque, not very far from Aziz Bellah, the crowd responded angrily to a substitute imam, and the mosque was closed the following Friday. . . .

Peter Hessler, Letter From Egypt, “Keeping the Faith,” The New Yorker, October 7, 2013, p. 38