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.
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. 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. Earlier this year, Sheikh Mohammed sent an aggrieved letter to the ministry. 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.
