Amr Khaled: Islam's Billy Graham
More popular than Oprah Winfrey, the world's first Islamic television evangelist commands an army of millions of followersDavid Hardaker reports from CairoPublished: 04 January 2006In a tiny house on the West Bank a young Palestinian woman is jogging the
length of her hallway and back. Again and again. The pain becomes unbearable.
But she keeps going. Eventually she completes two thousand laps. Why? Because
Amr said so. He called on young Muslims to get fit, and the woman could find no
other safe place to run.
In the choking grime of Cairo, another young woman is tending to a small
tomato vine, struggling into life atop a 10-storey city block. Why? Because Amr
wants his young followers to see something grow. It will provide hope - and
maybe a small income - in a part of the world where both are in short supply.
The greening of rooftops in the filth and decay of this Arab mega city is a
story being repeated again and again throughout the Arab world.
It is a powerful metaphor for the work of a religious and marketing
phenomenon called Amr Khaled, who is trying to pump oxygen into the arid lives
of Muslim youth. Amr (rhymes with "charmer") Khaled is the Arab world's first
Islamic tele-evangelist, a digital age Billy Graham who has fashioned himself
into the anti-Bin Laden, using the barrier-breaking power of satellite TV and
the internet to turn around a generation of lost Muslim youth.
"When you look at the reach of what he is doing and when you look at the
millions he is touching, I don't know another single individual in the region
who is having the impact that Amr Khaled is having," says the American Rick
Little, an adviser on youth issues to the UN who has worked with Khaled on job
creation schemes in the Middle East.
Khaled, 38, defies the stereotype of the Islamic preacher. In his Cairo
office it would be easy to mistake him for a City banker. No flowing robes for
him. He wears a hand-tailored cream suit, an open-necked sky-blue shirt,brown
loafers and a Bulgari watch. The accountant-turned-preacher shifts easily
between the worlds of religion and business.
To demonstrate the success of Khaled Inc, the CEO has at the ready a series
of graphs and pie-charts in a tastefully designed Annual Report. Inside he
points to the proof of his proudest boast: that Amr Khaled is more popular than
the US talk show juggernaut Oprah Winfrey.
Certainly, it seems to be the case. A corporate graph shows the number of
hits on the Amrkhaled.net website soaring far and beyond the Winfrey line. It is
a strange point of reference for an Islamic preacher. He explains, though, that
he is neither a preacher nor an Oprah. "I am in my own box," he laughs. And
perhaps he is.
Unlike other Middle Eastern preachers, Khaled has had a taste of life on
the other side of the religious and cultural divide. Three years ago he was
banned from speaking in Egypt because of his popularity. In self-imposed exile,
he set up shop in London, where he says he lived "a wonderful life, in
freedom".
Khaled has returned to his home country in the past few weeks, but his
experience of the West sharpened his perspective on the problems facing young
Muslims, in England and in the Arab world. He has come back with a dream: "I am
going now to build a bridge between the East and the West," he declares.
There is more than a touch of the thespian in Khaled, and he is well aware
of the power of his words to motivate. His prime target is the youth of the Arab
world, who feel that they are second-class citizens in a world dominated by the
United States and its values. To these young people he has a tough message about
the destructive force of self-pity. "We Muslims are living as parasites on the
world. Our problem is that we have got used to taking without ever giving," he
says. "Don't tell us it is a Western conspiracy against us, it is not."
Khaled's words capture what official reports into the Middle East have been
pointing to with increasing alarm: that rising poverty, unemployment and
illiteracy have made a toxic cocktail. Combined with authoritarian governments
and hostility to the United States, the cocktail has turned deadly and made its
young people easy prey for the likes of Osama bin Laden.
Khaled's remedy is a tough personal regime of self-renewal, based on what
he says are real Islamic values. His messages are drawn from the Koran, but they
are shaped to the 21st century. Muslims are told why it is contrary to Islam to
smoke, to litter the streets or to be lazy, and why it is good to collect
clothes for the poor or to vote in elections.
One devotee is the Egyptian business graduate Iman Salama, 24. She listens
to Khaled through a Walkman tucked under her veil while she does the housework.
"I am a big fan," she says. "I like that he wants to make the beliefs of Islam
more something that you can do in your day-to-day life." Like thousands of
others, Iman Salama has grown impatient with the establishment preachers, who
are determined not to move with the times. "They are not really up to the
standards that are needed to make the Muslim people relate to Islam in a
changing world," she says.
In the eyes of Arab elders, though, the TV preacher is little more than a
showman, a judgement which is reinforced every time another high-profile
celebrity signs up to the Khaled cause. Around Cairo's establishment dinner
tables there is much tut-tutting about the lay preacher's lack of formal
religious training. Muslim scholars scorn his "air-conditioned" brand of
Islam.
However, in the best traditions of United States tele-evangelists, the
Khaled style on stage is a big seller. With eyes shut tight the preacher will
summon a message as though from the depths of his soul. His face contorts.
There's a rush of emotion. His voice rises to an excited squeal. In a trice he
brings his audience back down again, his voice dropping to a near whisper.
Khaled's connections range far and wide across the spectrum of politics and
business. Little, who is also CEO of an international philanthropic
organisation, ImagineNations, first heard of the preacher's influence when he
was interviewing young Muslims for a book he is writing with Queen Rania of
Jordan.
"I was shocked by the number of young people from a diverse number of
countries and backgrounds and socio-economic levels who kept on talking about
Amr and the influence he was having in their lives," he said from his Maryland
office in the US. "I thought whoever this guy is, he is someone I would like to
get to know and learn more about."
Khaled is a favourite of Queen Rania. His brochures are littered with happy
snaps of him with the influential: with the President of Yemen, being presented
with a UN award, signing a deal with the chief of Dubai police.
It makes the preacher a powerful political lever for the West in its quest
to neutralise the anger of young Muslims. The British Government has already
seen the potential. In mid-2004, leaked Cabinet papers named Khaled as a figure
worth promoting as a counterweight to the imams preaching jihad in
England.
In the face of evidence of hostile intent from within England's own Muslim
communities, Tony Blair asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, to
come up with strategies. Sir Andrew reported: "We need to find ways of
strengthening the hand of moderate Muslim leaders, including the young Muslims
with future leadership potential, through the status which contact with the
Government can confer, and through practical capacity building measures."
The British Government has been happy to back Khaled's efforts. Last
August, the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells sent a message of support for a
conference organised by the preacher, praising him for his "courage and
strength" in attempting to bring cultures together.
A month before, Khaled was in London when the terror attacks killed 52
people. "This," he hisses, "is nowhere in Islam. If anyone kills children or
women, this is not acceptable not only in Islam, in the Jewish faith, in
Christianity, in all the religions."
Khaled's words are music to the ears of Western interests. But while the
preacher might be hip, he is deeply conservative.
The Khaled phenomenon is being fed by a range of forces, not only companies
such as the Nike Corporation, but by billionaire Saudi businessmen as well. Of
the latter, Khaled says: "I chose the moderate people, not just anyone from
Saudi Arabia."
It certainly makes the man with the simple message a more complex
proposition. One of Khaled's toughest hometown critics believes the West has
been tricked by Khaled. "His appearance is calculated to deceive," says Hala
Mustafa, who is one of Cairo's prominent liberals and the editor of a
government-funded academic journal, Democracy. "He is just like the other
Islamic theocrats, but he says it with a smiling face."
Mustafa has written widely on the growth of Islamic fundamentalist groups,
and exhibit No 1 in her prosecution of Khaled is the headscarf, the emblem of
conservative Islam. He is commonly held to be the single major force behind
young women taking the veil. Removing it, he has told his followers, is "the
biggest sin, the biggest sin, the biggest sin".
In one of his lectures he directed a tirade towards any Muslim girl who
wished to mimic the West and not wear the veil: "Who respects the woman more?
Islam or the ones who cannot even sell a box of matches without painting a
half-naked woman on it? Are they the ones who have respected women or
ill-treated them? Has not Islam respected women, covered them and liberated them
from such exploitation?"
Khaled has saved some of his fiercest rhetoric for the ethics of the West.
In his addresses to his Arabic-speaking audience he has alleged that Western
people are "fatigued by depression, suicide, addiction, broken families. We pray
they will go back to the right path, Allah's system. We don't want to lead lives
like the West."
He claims that Muslims are being "oppressed and tortured all over the
world". So how does this square with his vow to build a bridge between the East
and the West?
"To say we are building a bridge does not mean we are making a copy of life
in the West," he says. "There are some things we don't accept in your vision of
life. We have many things in our culture [where there is a] big difference
between you and us, and if we say we need to take the West and to make a copy of
the [West's] civilisation then no one will listen to me, because no one thinks
like that."
Pause.
A confession is on the way: "Yes, I did say these points but I will be very
honest to tell you Amr Khaled's vision after he went to stay in the UK is not
like Amr Khaled's vision before he went to the UK."
The concession only adds to the riddle of what Khaled really stands for.
Mustafa says it all adds up to one conclusion: "He is very close in style to the
Muslim Brotherhood," she says, invoking the name of the Middle East's original
political Islamic organisation, which is pursuing Islamic government through the
ballot box and which recently made massive gains in Egypt's elections.
"Whether they use extreme language or moderate language, they all have the
same aim."
It remains to be seen where Khaled is leading his army of young believers
and whether or not the plants springing into life on Arab rooftops might
ultimately be a bitter harvest for the West.
The Khaled phenomenon is a work in progress, one which might yet see the
accountant-turned-preacher take another turn, perhaps into politics.
"Anything at the right time," he says. "Now I have good dialogue with the
West and I give them my ideas. I have millions of people who are listening to
me. So what is the next step? Let's wait and see." In a tiny house on the West Bank a young Palestinian woman is jogging the
length of her hallway and back. Again and again. The pain becomes unbearable.
But she keeps going. Eventually she completes two thousand laps. Why? Because
Amr said so. He called on young Muslims to get fit, and the woman could find no
other safe place to run.
In the choking grime of Cairo, another young woman is tending to a small
tomato vine, struggling into life atop a 10-storey city block. Why? Because Amr
wants his young followers to see something grow. It will provide hope - and
maybe a small income - in a part of the world where both are in short supply.
The greening of rooftops in the filth and decay of this Arab mega city is a
story being repeated again and again throughout the Arab world.
It is a powerful metaphor for the work of a religious and marketing
phenomenon called Amr Khaled, who is trying to pump oxygen into the arid lives
of Muslim youth. Amr (rhymes with "charmer") Khaled is the Arab world's first
Islamic tele-evangelist, a digital age Billy Graham who has fashioned himself
into the anti-Bin Laden, using the barrier-breaking power of satellite TV and
the internet to turn around a generation of lost Muslim youth.
"When you look at the reach of what he is doing and when you look at the
millions he is touching, I don't know another single individual in the region
who is having the impact that Amr Khaled is having," says the American Rick
Little, an adviser on youth issues to the UN who has worked with Khaled on job
creation schemes in the Middle East.
Khaled, 38, defies the stereotype of the Islamic preacher. In his Cairo
office it would be easy to mistake him for a City banker. No flowing robes for
him. He wears a hand-tailored cream suit, an open-necked sky-blue shirt,brown
loafers and a Bulgari watch. The accountant-turned-preacher shifts easily
between the worlds of religion and business.
To demonstrate the success of Khaled Inc, the CEO has at the ready a series
of graphs and pie-charts in a tastefully designed Annual Report. Inside he
points to the proof of his proudest boast: that Amr Khaled is more popular than
the US talk show juggernaut Oprah Winfrey.
Certainly, it seems to be the case. A corporate graph shows the number of
hits on the Amrkhaled.net website soaring far and beyond the Winfrey line. It is
a strange point of reference for an Islamic preacher. He explains, though, that
he is neither a preacher nor an Oprah. "I am in my own box," he laughs. And
perhaps he is.
Unlike other Middle Eastern preachers, Khaled has had a taste of life on
the other side of the religious and cultural divide. Three years ago he was
banned from speaking in Egypt because of his popularity. In self-imposed exile,
he set up shop in London, where he says he lived "a wonderful life, in
freedom".
Khaled has returned to his home country in the past few weeks, but his
experience of the West sharpened his perspective on the problems facing young
Muslims, in England and in the Arab world. He has come back with a dream: "I am
going now to build a bridge between the East and the West," he declares.
There is more than a touch of the thespian in Khaled, and he is well aware
of the power of his words to motivate. His prime target is the youth of the Arab
world, who feel that they are second-class citizens in a world dominated by the
United States and its values. To these young people he has a tough message about
the destructive force of self-pity. "We Muslims are living as parasites on the
world. Our problem is that we have got used to taking without ever giving," he
says. "Don't tell us it is a Western conspiracy against us, it is not."
Khaled's words capture what official reports into the Middle East have been
pointing to with increasing alarm: that rising poverty, unemployment and
illiteracy have made a toxic cocktail. Combined with authoritarian governments
and hostility to the United States, the cocktail has turned deadly and made its
young people easy prey for the likes of Osama bin Laden.
Khaled's remedy is a tough personal regime of self-renewal, based on what
he says are real Islamic values. His messages are drawn from the Koran, but they
are shaped to the 21st century. Muslims are told why it is contrary to Islam to
smoke, to litter the streets or to be lazy, and why it is good to collect
clothes for the poor or to vote in elections.
One devotee is the Egyptian business graduate Iman Salama, 24. She listens
to Khaled through a Walkman tucked under her veil while she does the housework.
"I am a big fan," she says. "I like that he wants to make the beliefs of Islam
more something that you can do in your day-to-day life." Like thousands of
others, Iman Salama has grown impatient with the establishment preachers, who
are determined not to move with the times. "They are not really up to the
standards that are needed to make the Muslim people relate to Islam in a
changing world," she says.
In the eyes of Arab elders, though, the TV preacher is little more than a
showman, a judgement which is reinforced every time another high-profile
celebrity signs up to the Khaled cause. Around Cairo's establishment dinner
tables there is much tut-tutting about the lay preacher's lack of formal
religious training. Muslim scholars scorn his "air-conditioned" brand of
Islam.
However, in the best traditions of United States tele-evangelists, the
Khaled style on stage is a big seller. With eyes shut tight the preacher will
summon a message as though from the depths of his soul. His face contorts.
There's a rush of emotion. His voice rises to an excited squeal. In a trice he
brings his audience back down again, his voice dropping to a near whisper.
Khaled's connections range far and wide across the spectrum of politics and
business. Little, who is also CEO of an international philanthropic
organisation, ImagineNations, first heard of the preacher's influence when he
was interviewing young Muslims for a book he is writing with Queen Rania of
Jordan. "I was shocked by the number of young people from a diverse number of
countries and backgrounds and socio-economic levels who kept on talking about
Amr and the influence he was having in their lives," he said from his Maryland
office in the US. "I thought whoever this guy is, he is someone I would like to
get to know and learn more about."
Khaled is a favourite of Queen Rania. His brochures are littered with happy
snaps of him with the influential: with the President of Yemen, being presented
with a UN award, signing a deal with the chief of Dubai police.
It makes the preacher a powerful political lever for the West in its quest
to neutralise the anger of young Muslims. The British Government has already
seen the potential. In mid-2004, leaked Cabinet papers named Khaled as a figure
worth promoting as a counterweight to the imams preaching jihad in
England.
In the face of evidence of hostile intent from within England's own Muslim
communities, Tony Blair asked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, to
come up with strategies. Sir Andrew reported: "We need to find ways of
strengthening the hand of moderate Muslim leaders, including the young Muslims
with future leadership potential, through the status which contact with the
Government can confer, and through practical capacity building measures."
The British Government has been happy to back Khaled's efforts. Last
August, the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells sent a message of support for a
conference organised by the preacher, praising him for his "courage and
strength" in attempting to bring cultures together.
A month before, Khaled was in London when the terror attacks killed 52
people. "This," he hisses, "is nowhere in Islam. If anyone kills children or
women, this is not acceptable not only in Islam, in the Jewish faith, in
Christianity, in all the religions."
Khaled's words are music to the ears of Western interests. But while the
preacher might be hip, he is deeply conservative.
The Khaled phenomenon is being fed by a range of forces, not only companies
such as the Nike Corporation, but by billionaire Saudi businessmen as well. Of
the latter, Khaled says: "I chose the moderate people, not just anyone from
Saudi Arabia."
It certainly makes the man with the simple message a more complex
proposition. One of Khaled's toughest hometown critics believes the West has
been tricked by Khaled. "His appearance is calculated to deceive," says Hala
Mustafa, who is one of Cairo's prominent liberals and the editor of a
government-funded academic journal, Democracy. "He is just like the other
Islamic theocrats, but he says it with a smiling face."
Mustafa has written widely on the growth of Islamic fundamentalist groups,
and exhibit No 1 in her prosecution of Khaled is the headscarf, the emblem of
conservative Islam. He is commonly held to be the single major force behind
young women taking the veil. Removing it, he has told his followers, is "the
biggest sin, the biggest sin, the biggest sin".
In one of his lectures he directed a tirade towards any Muslim girl who
wished to mimic the West and not wear the veil: "Who respects the woman more?
Islam or the ones who cannot even sell a box of matches without painting a
half-naked woman on it? Are they the ones who have respected women or
ill-treated them? Has not Islam respected women, covered them and liberated them
from such exploitation?"
Khaled has saved some of his fiercest rhetoric for the ethics of the West.
In his addresses to his Arabic-speaking audience he has alleged that Western
people are "fatigued by depression, suicide, addiction, broken families. We pray
they will go back to the right path, Allah's system. We don't want to lead lives
like the West."
He claims that Muslims are being "oppressed and tortured all over the
world". So how does this square with his vow to build a bridge between the East
and the West?
"To say we are building a bridge does not mean we are making a copy of life
in the West," he says. "There are some things we don't accept in your vision of
life. We have many things in our culture [where there is a] big difference
between you and us, and if we say we need to take the West and to make a copy of
the [West's] civilisation then no one will listen to me, because no one thinks
like that."
Pause.
A confession is on the way: "Yes, I did say these points but I will be very
honest to tell you Amr Khaled's vision after he went to stay in the UK is not
like Amr Khaled's vision before he went to the UK."
The concession only adds to the riddle of what Khaled really stands for.
Mustafa says it all adds up to one conclusion: "He is very close in style to the
Muslim Brotherhood," she says, invoking the name of the Middle East's original
political Islamic organisation, which is pursuing Islamic government through the
ballot box and which recently made massive gains in Egypt's elections.
"Whether they use extreme language or moderate language, they all have the
same aim."
It remains to be seen where Khaled is leading his army of young believers
and whether or not the plants springing into life on Arab rooftops might
ultimately be a bitter harvest for the West.
The Khaled phenomenon is a work in progress, one which might yet see the
accountant-turned-preacher take another turn, perhaps into politics.
"Anything at the right time," he says. "Now I have good dialogue with the
West and I give them my ideas. I have millions of people who are listening to
me. So what is the next step? Let's wait and see."
*************************************************************************** {Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom (i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue with them in a way that is better. Truly, your Lord knows best who has gone astray from His Path, and He is the Best Aware of those who are guided.} (Holy Quran-16:125) {And who is better in speech than he who [says: "My Lord is Allah (believes in His Oneness)," and then stands straight (acts upon His Order), and] invites (men) to Allah's (Islamic Monotheism), and does righteous deeds, and says: "I am one of the Muslims."} (Holy Quran-41:33) The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: "By Allah, if Allah guides one person by you, it is better for you than the best types of camels." [al-Bukhaaree, Muslim] The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also said, "Whoever calls to guidance will have a reward similar to the reward of the one who follows him, without the reward of either of them being lessened at all." [Muslim, Ahmad, Aboo Daawood, an-Nasaa'ee, at-Tirmidhee, Ibn Maajah] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- All views expressed herein belong to the individuals concerned and do not in any way reflect the official views of IslamCity unless sanctioned or approved otherwise. If your mailbox clogged with mails from IslamCity, you may wish to get a daily digest of emails by logging-on to http://www.yahoogroups.com to change your mail delivery settings or email the moderators at [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the title "change to daily digest".
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