52 Middle East and Africa

2 and of beating their farmers. When farm-

ers try to replant the olive trees, Israeli soldiers bar their path.
In the run-up to Israeli elections, settlers
are likely to grow more emboldened as
politicians compete for their votes and
those of an increasingly right-wing electorate. On December 8th the government approved the transfer of an additional $28m
to the settlements. The defence minister,
Moshe Yaalon, proudly told settlers near
Bethlehem that Israel is building homes in
settlements faster than anywhere else.
Haaretz, a liberal daily, reported that Israels army has mapped 26,000 hectares of
West Bank land for possible transfer to settlements. These include 3,500 hectares

The Economist December 13th 2014

designated for firing zones, an army category that keeps Palestinians off their land.
Such plans are far from fruition. But
polls predict that Jewish Home, a religious
party representing settler interests, will
come second in the race between a possible 13 parties. Its leader, Naftali Bennett, has
already proposed annexing the rural 60%
of the West Bank, officially known as Area
C, that is under full Israeli control. He is
also eyeing the post of defence minister,
which would make him in effect the sovereign in the occupied lands of the West
Bank. With or without Palestinian security
co-ordination, rural communities like Turmusaya will find themselves increasingly
on the front line. 7

The state and Islam

Converting the preachers

CAIRO

Across the Arab world, rulers tighten their grip on the mosque

AUDI ARABIA has long used a simple

method to regulate mosques. The oil
kingdom lavishes clerics with money and
perks that can suddenly vanish if their
preaching goes astray. If that does not work
they are fired or parked in jail. Now Saudi
preachers face a new constraint: starting
next year authorities will install centrally
monitored cameras in every mosque to record what goes on inside. The move is ostensibly meant to prevent theft and regulate energy use, but few doubt the real
intention is to tighten the states grip on Islam, part of a trend across the Middle East.
Critics have long reviled Saudi Arabia
for its sponsorship of a rigidly puritanical
brand of religion. The ruling Al Saud family, whose legitimacy rests in part on a 270year-old pact with the Wahhabi school of
Sunni Islam, has tended to shrug off the
complaints. But in recent months it has
worried about a backlash from conservatives angered by the governments enthusiastic support for the crackdown against the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as its
participation in the American-led military
coalition against Islamic State (IS) in Syria
and Iraq. Apparently fired up by IS propaganda, radicals in the kingdom have lately
targeted infidel Westerners and deviant Shias in a string of small but deadly
terror attacks (see previous story).
In fact, the Saudi effort to tone down its
clerics is mild, hesitant and belated compared to what some Muslim states do. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan already routinely use cameras. Kuwait has
long installed tape-recorders to monitor
Friday sermons. Preachers in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates need not

write their own sermons. Except for a few

trusted senior clerics, they read instead
from a text delivered weekly by the government department for religious affairs
that also pays all their salaries. Protecting
Youth from Destructive Ideas and Our
National Flag, Symbol of Affiliation and
Loyalty provided two stimulating recent
topics. Similarly, Turkey has for decades enforced a monopoly of Islamic discourse
via a religious bureaucracy, known as Diyanet, that wields121,000 employees and a
budget of $2.3 billion.
Other governments aspire to such dom-

inance. Tunisias government has in recent

months restored strict state control of
mosques that had slipped following its revolution of January 2011, leading to a brief
flowering of Wahhabist-style jihad promotion. Morocco, whose king has traditionally posed as Commander of the Faithful,
delivering televised Ramadan sermons,
has steeply boosted state promotion of a
relatively tolerant version of the faith. Its
budget for training imams, including a
growing number of foreign students, has
swollen tenfold in the past three years. The
unspoken aim is to counter the spread of
extreme Salafist ideas in places such as
Mali and northern Nigeria.
Egypt is conducting a still more radical
overhaul. As long ago as the 1990s its government responded to a wave of Islamist
violence by declaring the aim of bringing
every mosque under full state control. The
goal was never met, and by the time of the
July 2013 army coup that toppled an elected government led by the Muslim Brotherhood, barely half of the preachers in the
countrys 100,000-plus mosques were vetted or salaried by the state. The wide-scale
infiltration of religious institutions by the
Brotherhood and more radical groups
markedly boosted their social standing
and political influence.
Egypts government has of late
clamped unprecedented controls. In January it decreed that all Friday sermons must
adhere to a weekly theme set by the religious-affairs ministry, establishing a hotline to allow worshippers to denounce
preachers daring to voice political dissent.
Further decrees required all preachers to
be government-licensed, imposed a code
of ethics forbidding discussion of politics
in mosques, and banned smaller prayer
halls from holding Friday prayers. The
ministry fired 12,000 preachers and now
allows only those trained in governmentapproved institutes to deliver sermons.
As a foil to the powerful Brotherhood,
the state had long allowed followers of
quietist forms of Salafism to run some
7,000 mosques. But the ministry in September decreed it would take over their
mosques too, after reports of a sermon forbidding the faithful from buying interestbearing government bonds.
Amr Ezzat, an Egyptian researcher, sees
the effort to impose state-ordained orthodoxy as misguided and possibly dangerous. Religious institutions will lose legitimacy with time, pushing more Muslims
towards radical margins. And by acting in
effect as the imam, the state takes upon itself a duty to enforce morality. It is perhaps
as a sop to religious conservatives, for instance, that Egyptian authorities have
mounted an increasingly lurid campaign
against homosexuality, most recently by
staging a midnight raid on a Cairo bathhouse on national television, dragging a
score of naked men to prison. 7