The Televangelist by Ibrahim Essa

Author:Ibrahim Essa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2015-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE STREET WAS PACKED TIGHT and people in the crowd were reaching out to shake hands with Sheikh Hatem. Tawhid Abdel-Qadir, with his vast frame and his long arms, was waving to his men and his aides to keep people from harassing Hatem, who was surrounded by bodies. Loudspeakers in front of the shop were blasting out religious poetry at high volume, and the contractors had arranged rows of chairs on the pavement and on half the street, completely blocking the traffic, although there were policemen standing around to greet him too. Hatem realized that Tawhid was throwing velvet bags containing dozens of pound coins into the crowd. This attracted more people and created chaos as they scrambled to pick up the money. Hatem had a splitting headache as he cut the ribbon to open the enormous store, and the video cameras pursued him everywhere he went. The noise almost burst his eardrums and dozens of people raised their cell phones above their heads to take pictures. Others came up and took pictures of themselves standing next to him. When he was pushed into the store by the crowd and the chaos, he found young people in uniform with fixed smiles on their faces waiting to greet him with religious anthems like the ones taught to elementary school children. Some of the people in the crowd pressed pieces of paper and envelopes into his pocket and he was sure they were requests for jobs and for financial help from people who saw him as someone famous or lucky or successful who could give them help. With Tawhid he inspected the clothing section, including the underwear section and the women’s and children’s departments, the shoes, the perfumes, and the electrical appliances, as well as a section for the special clothing that pilgrims wear, with a large model of the Kaaba in the middle.

“Tawhid, you have succeeded where Abraha failed!” joked Hatem, an obscure reference to a Yemeni ruler who attacked Mecca before Islam. No one understood it.

At every step there were pictures with the crowd and the noise. Hatem had come all the way from Cairo to this small town a few kilometers from Kafr el-Zayat in the Nile Delta as a favor to Ahmed el-Faisal, a senior officer in the branch of State Security that specialized in monitoring religious activities. In fact Hatem fell under the authority of two branches of State Security: one of them, called Religious Activities, had probably been monitoring him since he was a preacher employed by the Ministry of Religious Endowments. The imams of mosques had to have security clearances vouching for their good conduct, to prevent them from deviating from government instructions, which were essentially instructions from the security people. The process began with a plain-clothes policeman assigned to the mosque, and if the mosque was important it would be assigned to the officer in charge of the department, and if the sheikh was popular and succeeded in attracting a large congregation then the State Security officer for the whole area oversaw and monitored the mosque and the preacher.

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