Censoring Sermons

Every Friday at noon from Cairo to Karachi, the thin nasal wail of muezzins crying, "There is no God but Allah," calls the faithful to the salat al-jami, the obligatory Friday service. The devout shutter their shops, rush through a thorough washing, and hurry into the mosque. Clad in dignity and finery, the imam ascends the pulpit, murmurs "salaam alei-kum," recites a text from the Koran, and begins a sermon which rarely lasts more than 20 minutes. So it has been for centuries.

Islam lived through its first three centuries without any clergy at all, for each man is responsible for his own obedience to Allah. But increasingly the Friday service became a time when the imam discoursed on morals, freely relating the Koran to any contemporary subject, including politics. The opportunity was made to order for Egypt's fanatic and xenophobic Moslem Brotherhood, now driven underground by Egypt's military junta. One recent Friday an imam who belongs to the Brotherhood preached that the government had sold out to the British. He paused dramatically, then he called attention to the presence of a policeman in the congregation. The angry crowd beat up the cop and before the milling was over 23 of the faithful were behind bars. The following Friday, in the delta city of Tanta, another imam accused Egypt's rulers of being "heretics who do not comply with the teaching of the Koran." When a worshiper objected to such mingling of politics with religion, Moslem Brothers set upon the protester, and the imam himself leaped from his pulpit, knife in hand, to join in.

Last week the Egyptian government announced that henceforth the imams would all get their sermons--written and ready for delivery--direct from the Religious Affairs Ministry in Cairo. Imams who spoke their own minds would be fired by the ministry (which supports almost all of Egypt's mosques). Said Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser: "The revolution will not permit vindictiveness to triumph under the guise of religion." But not even Hitler or Stalin had ever attempted to dictate every word a preacher said.

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