Secular youth used Facebook and Twitter two years ago to help topple President Hosni Mubarak from power, but now Salafi Islamists are gaining sway in Egypt because of TV sheiks like Khaled Abdullah.
Mr. Abdullah, a bearded 48-year-old, isn't a real sheik. But he plays one on a popular Egyptian religious satellite station, where he has blasted the secular-leaning opposition as homosexuals and atheists and decried legislation that would ban marital rape.
"Here in Egypt, anyone who has a beard can be called a sheik," said a smiling Mr. Abdullah, whose daily show on the Al Nas network is watched by millions.
Mr. Abdullah is one of the most prominent of the tele-preachers in Egypt and neighboring countries who are carving out a political constituency in the Arab Spring. They are considered a prime reason why a bloc of Salafi parties won more than 27% of the votes during Egypt's first post-revolutionary parliamentary elections that ended early last year, better than expected.
The religious channels also supported the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, in his successful presidential bid last year and backed an Islamist-tinged constitution that passed in December.
Salafism is an austere practice of Islam that seeks to imitate the lifestyle, and even dress, of the Prophet Muhammad and early Muslims. Most Egyptians who identify with Islamist policies, such as imposing some form of Islamic law, don't adhere to Salafism.
As many tele-preachers waded carefully into Egypt's deepening sectarian discord following clashes between Muslims and Christians that killed eight people recently, Mr. Abdullah put Egypt's Christians on notice. "Do you think Muslims are cripples? Will they just let you fire? You think we'll be afraid and run?" he said. "Do not aggravate the Muslims in Egypt."
The battle here between Islamists and secular-leaning liberals is increasingly fought on the air. The TV sheiks in Egypt attract viewers throughout the Arab world. Mr. Abdullah fields telephone questions from the Persian Gulf, North Africa, Europe and North America. His words are rebroadcast on YouTube, multiplying his global reach.
Nobody knows exactly how many people watch the TV preachers because the Egyptian TV ratings don't include the rural areas where such shows are most popular. The total viewership of the preachers is believed to be much smaller than the polished productions from more mainstream channels such as Al Hayat, ONTV and CBC. Still, the TV sheiks—most of whom are qualified sheiks in real life—have tremendous influence with certain segments of Egyptian society, and that could be important as the country heads toward another parliamentary election season this fall.
"The channels, they are the soft power of the Salafis," said Khalil al-Anani, an expert on Islamic movements at Durham University in the U.K. "It's the main tools to reshape the identity and mind-set of many Egyptians, particularly the low- and lower-middle classes."
At the Al Gohary Grill in the middle-class Cairo neighborhood of Agouza, the rotisserie chicken is delicious, the tables are none too clean and the volume on Mr. Abdullah's nightly show is turned up so loud patrons have to shout to make themselves heard.
"When some things are unclear, he clarifies them," said Farag Al Gohary, 50, who owns the grill. Mr. Gohary voted for the Al Nour Party, Egypt's largest Salafi political party, during parliamentary elections in late 2011 and early 2012 partly on Mr. Abdullah's televised advice. He intends to vote for it again.
The Salafi TV preachers advocate restrictive views on women, railing against female protesters and even advising audiences of what they see as the Islamically correct way for a husband to beat his wife.
Even so, many viewers of TV preachers are women. In the most conservative Egyptian households, women rarely leave their homes and account for nearly two-thirds of television viewers, according to Ipsos, a Paris-based global polling group. During the runoff of presidential elections last June, 76% of women voted for the Brotherhood's Mr. Morsi, propelling him to a win, according to telephone exit polls by Baseera, a private Egyptian polling firm. Overall, Mr. Morsi received 51.7% of the vote.
"The advantage of the channels is that they reach those groups that the mosque will never reach," said Aatif Abdel Rashid, one of the founders of Al Nas who is now a presenter on Al Hafez, another Salafi satellite station.
Al Nas was started by Saudi investors who owned a media group called Al Baraheen in 2006 as a "cultural" station that featured tame music videos, dance routines and religious dream interpretations—a variety show with an mildly Islamic slant.
But six months later, the people weren't tuning in. Nasser Kadsa, one of the Saudis who owns the station, approached Mr. Rashid, one of the founding managers, with an ultimatum: Make the channel work, or it closes, according to Mr. Rashid. Mr. Kadsa couldn't be reached for comment.
Along with Mohammed Abdel Gawad, one of the station's managers, Mr. Rashid proposed switching to a Salafi format—a novelty in Egypt under a secular regime that exercised tight control over the media.
But the media environment was changing: Mr. Mubarak, who was facing pressure from the West to demonstrate democratic reforms, had recently given Egyptian media more leeway.
"I wasn't thinking to do something for my religion," said Mr. Gawad. "I was looking to do good business for me."
The management started billing itself as "Al Nas: The Screen that Takes You to Paradise" in late 2006. Mr. Gawad and Mr. Rashid enlisted several sheiks, such as Mohammed Yacoub and Safwat Al Hegazy, who were well-known in Salafi circles for their preaching.
Within 10 days of the channel's reformatting, Mr. Gawad said, half of the employees had grown beards just like the TV preachers.
The channel found a ready audience in the millions of Egyptian workers who had returned from guest labor work in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s. Many of the workers had taken to the austere Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism, an Islamic practice similar to Salafism.
The channel rocketed the sheiks into low-stratosphere fame in Egypt. In low-income neighborhoods, throngs of supporters would greet the TV sheiks as celebrities.
Rising viewership wasn't enough. Al Nas was working against self-imposed restrictions that prevented advertisers from showing women or using music to pitch their products.
Multinational companies and prominent Egyptian businesses refused to advertise, and revenue came in drips from Islamist-owned companies, such as pilgrimage tour groups and small-time clothing manufacturers.
In lieu of advertising breaks, ads were run on crawl script at the bottom of the screen and displayed on televisions positioned behind the talk show hosts.
Ali Saad, the other owner of the station, stepped in to fund the channel when it fell short of cash, said Shady Salama, who handled advertising for the channel beginning in 2009. A spokesman said Mr. Saad declined to be interviewed.
Another problem: Other Salafi stations sprang up. Mohammed Hassan, one of the most popular preachers on Al Nas, left the channel in 2007 to found Al Rahma, now the second most popular religious TV station in Egypt.
At first, Mr. Mubarak tolerated the Salafi stations as long as they shied away from discussions of politics.
But during Mr. Mubarak's final months in power, the regime grew increasingly apprehensive about religious stations. Shortly before Mr. Mubarak's ruling party won disputed elections in November 2010—two months before the revolution that would upend his regime—security officials shut down Al Nas and several other religious stations.
When protesters first filled the streets in late January 2011 to demand Mr. Mubarak's overthrow, many of the celebrity sheiks who were still broadcasting hewed to their usual apolitical tone. Some called on Egyptians to stay away from protests rocking the country.
But when Mr. Mubarak stepped down in February 2011 and ended 30 years of a secular dictatorship, everything changed. Suddenly, Islamist TV stations wanted their say on how the country should be run.
Two weeks after Mr. Mubarak's resignation, Al Nas was back on the air. Program formatting switched. Mr. Abdullah's and Mr. Hegazy's shows went from once-weekly magazines in February to daily talk shows that took the Islamist party line.
Mr. Abdullah already was broadcasting daily in March when he and other television preachers encouraged voters to vote "yes" in a referendum on constitutional amendments that had been blessed by Salafi politicians who had campaigned to keep Article 2, which enshrines Islamic law in the constitution.
After voters accepted the amendments in overwhelming numbers, Mr. Yacoub, an Al Nas preacher, boasted to a Salafi audience off-air that Islamists had won "the battle of the ballot boxes."
Throughout the following two years, Mr. Abdullah has continued to take the Salafi party line, slamming protesters against the government and secularists in general. It was Mr. Abdullah who unearthed the "Innocence of Muslims" videos that sparked rioting throughout the Muslim world last September.
Under Hassan Elwan, who took over the channel's management last August, Al Nas's viewership has grown. Mr. Elwan, who had founded channels in Spain and Saudi Arabia, added sports, medical shows with frank discussions of sex and cooking shows while maintaining an Islamic tone.
The broader format helped Al Nas compete with secular-leaning channels that added their own liberal-leaning Islamic tele-preachers.
During Ipsos polling last July, Al Nas was ranked as Egypt's 25th most-watched channel. It was 19th in surveys in March. But Salafi satellite channels score much higher in terms of viewer loyalty, measured by a metric called "target rating points" or TRPs.
Advertisers use TRPs to gauge whether their messages are effectively reaching a target audience. According to Ipsos, Al Nas's TRP rating has surged over the past year as Egyptian politics have grown more polarized, nearly doubling to 30.85 in February from about 16 in July 2012.
Al Nas gets much of its advertising from mom-and-pop businesses, upstart local brands and businesses owned by the devout, most of which cater to Egypt's poor. Its revenue has climbed to 1.3 million Egyptian pounds, or about $188,000, per month, said Mr. Elwan, the channel's general manager.
The Four Brothers car dealership advertises during Mr. Abdullah's daily show. The dealership also advertises with some of Egypt's secular media, including the anti-Islamist Al Tahrir newspaper.
"We have had several calls asking us if we are with the Brotherhood or the Salafis, but, no, we aren't," said Mahmoud Ramadan who handles advertising for Four Brothers. "We don't advertise there because of the religious nature of the channel, we advertise there because it is popular."
Even as the station tried to go more mainstream, Mr. Abdullah has stuck to his fiery rhetoric. In September, when Egyptians were preparing to vote on Egypt's new constitution heavily influenced by Islamists, Mr. Abdullah raged against attempts to prohibit child marriage and marital rape. He and other clerics consider such concerns foreign to Egypt's traditional society.
"Our goal is to show people that Islam includes everything in life: food, drink, sleep, politics, economy," he said following one of his nightly broadcasts. "Islam and secularism will never meet."
