Getting a prayer in edgewise

Cairo —  THE preacher’s voice whirls like a storm down a sunlit alley.

It rumbles toward the corner, colliding with an echo from another preacher about 150 yards away, and that voice seeps into a third voice rising from a different corner and soon sermons from six preachers are entangled, like a chorus trying to soften the trills of a few showoffs. Streets become rivers of prostrate men, women in head scarves flutter at the edges; cars don’t pass because they can’t, and the neighborhood is at prayer, except for a few boys wrestling among their bowed fathers.

The holy cadences do not flow from mosques; on these dusty lanes there is nothing so grand. Instead, they come from small community prayer rooms, known as zawiyas, where loudspeakers are nailed to outside walls and many Muslims in this cramped city of 16 million gather to get their religion.

Served by traveling imams and sustained by sparse donations, zawiyas float amid car horns and grime, donkey carts and swelter. They peek from beneath underpasses, they dot the banks of the Nile; some are converted apartments, workshops and kiosks, and at least one is a former garbage collection center wedged between two busy streets where prayers spiral like whispers through the traffic.

The zawiya has endured since the days of the great caravans when merchants sought rest and God on journeys across the desert. Partly inspired by the mystic Sufi branch of Islam, zawiyas spread from hinterland to city, providing spiritual fulfillment and help for the poor. These days, with Egyptians disgruntled over a corrupt government and President Hosni Mubarak’s aloofness and failure to improve their lives, zawiyas have become entrenched community outposts.

Some have been radicalized in strategic battles between Islamists and a state that since the mid-1990s has tried to bring them under its control. Today, the Ministry of Endowments oversees 75,111 mosques and nearly 23,000 zawiyas. There are no figures on independent zawiyas; the government claims they don’t exist, but others say the state has failed to regulate a scattering of defiant voices on the fringes.

“In the beginning, the state cared only about regulating the big mosques,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist and human rights activist. “It wanted to establish a very mainstream, noncritical Islam. But those with different ideas began to turn toward the zawiya.... It’s become an urban phenomenon popular in the slums. The government will try to step in and nationalize it. But as soon as they succeed in regulating one zawiya, others will mushroom. It’s almost like an informal guerrilla war.”

Abdel Baset Saqr is not so much concerned with ideological war or the pretty, false words of politics. A fix-it man with 14 grandchildren -- there may be more, after a certain number it’s difficult to be exact, he says -- Saqr manages a zawiya in his neighborhood in east Cairo. Boys sell watermelons and hot puffed bread in the streets, and around the corner, Saqr sits in a shop of broken radios studying the zawiya‘s ledger.

“I started a program to collect medications instead of money. People donate cough medicine, heart pills and antibiotics,” he said, pointing to a page listing the names of worshipers who contributed. “One guy gave five aspirin. Another guy gave seven. When someone buys a box of medication, he’ll use seven pills himself and donate the other five to me. People donated more money in the past. They used to give 10 pounds, now it’s down to two pounds.” One Egyptian pound is equivalent to 17 cents.

Saqr’s zawiya was founded 12 years ago and named after local hero Hassan Reda Khafer, a military pilot killed in the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. Khafer’s family made a “big donation” to open the zawiya, which draws more than 300 worshipers at Friday prayers. A traveling imam, vetted by the government, delivers the weekly sermon for a fee of about $6.

NOT much bigger than a living room -- in fact it once was a living room -- the zawiya is a dim crack in an alley. It holds about 30 men; the rest spill onto the dirt road where they unfurl prayer mats and squint toward the preacher, who seems a silhouette in a faraway window.

Just beyond the range of the loudspeaker at Saqr’s zawiya, Abdel Qader Ibrahim has been sewing shirts for 50 years. He is the funds manager for a tin-roofed zawiya that sits in the shade of the Dome Gardens neighborhood. He collects about $25 each week in donations, barely enough to help the poor families, mostly widows and the sick, whom the zawiya has adopted.

“The government doesn’t put a penny into this,” said Ibrahim, his fingers rough from needle pricks and mending. “People used to have to travel far away to the mosque. The zawiya brings us closer together as a neighborhood. It makes us love each other. When we built this about 20 years ago, people donated steel and wood and we built it along the sidewalk.”

The cleric sent by the Ministry of Endowments to deliver the sermon in Dome Gardens stands before the microphone. He doesn’t sound like someone who’s not supposed to criticize the government or ruminate on politics and strife. He seems more of an echo from the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed Islamist organization whose members are frequently imprisoned. His attitude and his nuanced, yet pointed words are an indication of the defiance that exists even among state-sponsored clerics.

He extols the rule of Caliph Omar ibn Abdul Aziz and that pious era centuries ago when the state gave money to help young couples get married. All with God’s blessing. He then subtly shifts to today, and how, for some reason, the state is not helping: “We have 3.5 million women over the age of 35 who are unmarried.... People are unable to marry because they’re too poor.”

He talks about virtue and poverty, his voice raspy and tinny through a loudspeaker, and then, shifting to things more global, he calls for the destruction of America. He prays. The prostrate men following the preacher sweat in the early afternoon sun, palms open, bare soles pointing skyward. They rise and kneel again, murmuring a few more verses before they brush dust from their pants and head back to their stalls and shops as the watermelon boys bark out prices and the fishmongers surrender to the flies.

ACROSS town, beyond battered rooftops and alleys colored by hanging laundry, a boy with a pail of burning incense chases away evil spirits. He hurries through the shadows, his sweet wisps lingering among children and butchers and Ismail Fathi, a used-furniture salesman except on Fridays, when he tends to matters more holy.

A young man with a timeless voice, Fathi holds a microphone, his call to prayer a chant of rolling octaves, summoning tailors, booksellers, mechanics and the guy selling candy on the corner. The men come, kicking off sandals and kneeling on mats, angling for a sliver of spiritual space in a mud-brick alley of an overcrowded city.

Fathi’s zawiya, a narrow room with an overhead fan, has a green metal door, swept carpets and a high-backed preacher’s chair. The man who owns the zawiya lives upstairs, confident that his investment will, in death, gain him a sizable share of paradise. Fathi is also awaiting reward for the verses he sends into the sky. But he is in no hurry to collect it.

“I’ve been giving the call to prayer for five years,” said Fathi, wearing a cotton robe and a light blue cap. “I have one daughter and one son. This is my neighborhood. I want to stay here forever.”

One of his tasks is to listen closely to visiting imams to ensure they do not speak against the Egyptian government.

“They should be preaching the stories of old prophets, old battles and the prophet Muhammad’s miracles,” he said. “They are not allowed to talk about the present or any of today’s wars and politics. I’m here to make sure no one breaks these rules. We once had a preacher who started to hint at the conditions in today’s Egypt and I had to tell him to stop it.”

It is dusk under the overpass, where another prayer caller, Maher Abdullah Aleya, sits near the washing room of a zawiya that resembles a box tucked under a bed.

The overpass presses down on the roof and two lanes of traffic skirt its sides. A bus hit the building a few years ago, but Aleya, who was born in a village north of Cairo, has since learned not to let screeching brakes interrupt his rhythm.

The zawiya used to be a garbage collection center, Aleya said, but the “people here wanted to make their neighborhood more beautiful.” It is a way station of sorts -- a place of peace, prayer and even rest for the occasional traveling salesman who stretches out on the carpet, his head balanced on a briefcase beneath a wall of calligraphy.

“The government doesn’t want us to talk about certain things, like the Palestine question or the Iraq war. Our preacher must follow orders,” Aleya said, with the half-smirk of a man who appreciates the irony. “The preacher would only criticize the Egyptian government if the government asked him to.”

DODGING cars and nodding to one another, businessmen, clerks, waiters in aprons and street sweepers hurry toward the zawiya, slipping off their shoes, washing their hands and faces. The moon is a faint thumbprint above the Nile, but the men see only girders and concrete, and across the street, slaughtered sheep hanging in a window next to a coffee shop.

“In my village we have total quiet. I can sleep there,” said Aleya, wearing a white robe that has turned gray with time and dust. “But in this city I only sleep for two hours after dawn prayers. I didn’t expect Cairo to be so chaotic.... I think people all over are seeking relief.”

He lifts his microphone, his voice echoing under the overpass, a bit of ancient music surviving amid the grit, fumes, neon, horns and whorl of the modern.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

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Special correspondent Noha el Hennawy contributed to this report.