Before noon on Saturdays in Ramadan, Iman, a certified preacher from the Ministry of Waqf (religious endowments), arrives at the Al-Sayed Al-Badawi Mosque in Tanta in the Delta for the noon prayers that are followed by a session of Quranic recitation by women and for women.
She joins three other certified women preachers in taking turns in reciting the verses of the Quran for an audience of women that flock from across Tanta, the wider Gharbiya governorate, and the entire Delta to a mosque that carries the name of the 13th-century Moroccan-born Ahmed Al-Badawi, a leading Sufi figure.
“This is a new tradition that was started this Ramadan by the Ministry of Waqf in four governorates across the country, Cairo, Alexandria, Gharbiya and Menoufiya,” Iman said. She added that creating a maqreit Al-Quran (Quran recitation session) for women in key mosques in these governorates was designed to accommodate the large interest of women to attend such sessions, particularly in Ramadan.
Traditionally, the maqreit Al-Quran is a strictly male sphere, and in the Delta, but not in Upper Egypt, women’s recitation of the Quran is firmly confined to women’s gatherings during azaa (condolences ceremonies).
“In Ramadan, it was customary to have maqreit Al-Quran for men not just in central and big mosques but even in the small mosques in small cities and villages,” Iman said.
She added that the burgeoning trend of women frequenting mosques, especially in the big cities, to attend taraweeh (extended evening prayers) and post-taraweeh dars (preaching sessions), had prompted the introduction of the Quran recitation sessions for women only.
According to Iman, who was certified as a preacher close to 25 years ago, it was particularly during the past 15 years that more women would show up in mosques for the taraweeh dars or even for the late afternoon dars (sermon) that follows the Asr prayers. Initially, she explained, the trend started as a Ramadan activity but later developed into an all-year commitment for many women.
“It was mostly the middle-aged and older women who came at first, but now there is a clear increase in the number of younger women who frequent these sessions, particularly in Ramadan,” she said. The monthly schedule of preaching and Quranic recitation “doubles at least” during Ramadan “because the interest is higher and the numbers are bigger”. she added.
She explained that the content of the preaching sessions in Ramadan, designed by the preachers in coordination with the Ministry of Waqf, is mostly relevant to the practices of the holy Muslim month. “Outside Ramadan, we approach all kinds of topics in pursuit of making Islam core to the choices and behaviour of each individual,” she said.
She added that often enough women or girls who started attending her sessions in Ramadan continued to frequent her classes, irrespective of frequency, beyond the holy month. “But in Ramadan there is much more commitment to join the dars on a daily basis. It is part of the Ramadan mood in a way,” she said.
During Ramadan, across the country, Al-Azhar, the Ministry of Waqf and the different Sufi orders provide taraweeh dars in as many mosques as possible, with top preachers leading the sermons in the bigger mosques like that of Al-Hussein, Al-Sayeda Nafissa, Amr Ibn Al-Aas, Al-Morsi Abul-Abbas, Al-Aref, and Ibrahim Al-Dessouki.
During the first 10 days of Ramadan, preachers have been focusing significantly on re-branding the Muslim holy month away from being one of excessive production, especially of food, to one of chosen austerity and higher spirituality.
Their sermons have focused on the significance of the fast as an opportunity for self-restraint and the family bonding opportunities that come with the holy month.
OPTIONS: “The sermons I attended in the first few days of the month were predictable with no significant content. I mean at the age of 24 I already know enough about the significance of Ramadan,” said Ahmed, a pharmacist from Alexandria.
He added that he had been surprised by the “simplicity” of the implicit political messages that some preachers had tried to promote in some of their sermons about what it takes to preserve the nation and its stability.
On the tenth evening of the month, Ahmed decided to drop the dars al-Asr (the afternoon sermon) and to just go to the taraweeh prayers. Given that the dars falls in the break between the segments of the prayers, Ahmed had “just to sit there and listen”.
“It is not that I mind what I hear, but this is what has been said over and over again,” he said. “I have been hearing the same thing since I became regular in attending prayers at the mosque.”
Having tried going to several mosques outside his home neighbourhood, including the larger city mosques, Ahmed decided that he would pursue knowledge elsewhere, including on the YouTube channels of some of the preachers and through the old recordings that are available online.
According to Aya, a 21-year-old sociology graduate who lives in one of the high-end residential compounds in eastern Cairo, there are “many good options out there, especially in Ramadan”.
Aya has also attended several sermons hosted in the privacy of the homes of some women who invite women preachers over for prayers and sermons during the holy month.
“I have been doing this for the past five years, and I have gone to many very good sermons where the preachers talk about real matters of interest,” Aya said. She added that it was due to these that she had come to reconcile herself with the “sad fact” of her parents’ divorce and her disappointment with her father’s choices.
In this exclusive environment, Aya said, women are not expected to observe the prayer dress code during the preaching session, and nobody is judged for their nail polish or the style of their jeans.
Last Ramadan, Aya had tried to venture out to a sermon in one of the bigger mosques in eastern Cairo, but she had been put off by the judgmental remarks she had heard from some of those present about her looks.
In addition to the sermons she attends, Aya is always keen to follow the online sermons of Mostafa Hosni. She follows his YouTube channel and his podcast. “I find the content to be very spiritual, and I like the stories shared about the Prophet Mohamed and the early Muslim community,” she added.
Hosni is arguably today’s most popular preacher for many of the upper-middle and upper classes in the country, and his TV appearances and books have given him an even larger audience. The high level of following on his YouTube channel and social-media pages indicate that his influence goes well beyond the usually packed halls of mosques in the west of Cairo where he offers his sermons in Ramadan.
Hosni is the latest star in the world of the so-called “modern preachers”. Like many others from this line, he is not a graduate in Islamic theology, and, with a degree in business, is largely self-taught, having embarked on a career in preaching in the wake of Amr Khaled, star of the late 1990s and early 2000s, or Moeiz Massoud, star of the second decade of the 21st century.
These preachers have a modern look, speak in a simple language where the colloquial is dominant, and avoid making harsh statements. While Khaled came at the end of the era of sermons on cassette tape, started in the late 1970s by the firebrand preachers who were opposed to former president Anwar Al-Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel, Massoud emerged at the beginning of the dominance of social media in Egypt between 2008 and 2011.
Hosni joined the scene when online sermons, including during the holy month of Ramadan, became resoundingly popular.
These “modern preachers” have reached out to an audience, mostly of young people, who have not been attracted to prominent ulama, like Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmed Al-Tayeb, whose appearances in Ramadan this year have been compromised by some health issues, or old-school TV preachers like Mohamed Metwali Al-Shaarawi, who, close to three decades after his death, remains arguably one of the most popular among the older generations.
The younger preachers’ independence from Political Islam and their apolitical sermons have also kept them in the good books of the authorities, who in the past carried out a series of confrontations with firebrand preachers from the 1970s. Many of these echoed preacher Abdel-Hamdi Keshk, whose cassette-tape sermons were secretly shared, or ulama like Youssef Al-Qaradawi, whose political positions forced him into self-exile in Qatar where he died in 2022.
In an article published earlier this Ramadan, researcher into Islamism Hisham Gaafar warns that the way Islam is presented in the discourse of the “modern preachers”. While the style of these preachers is likeable enough to attract a wide audience from the younger generation, their content is simplified and may not be religious at all, Gaafar says, since their sermons increasingly look like versions of meditation or self-help.
Comparing the content of Khaled’s sermons to those of Hosni, Gaafar argued that Islam is being increasingly presented in them in a way that makes it a space for self-acceptance rather than one of deliberate acts of adjustment.
“This is a preacher-influencer model that does not put across the core of Islam as an action-oriented religion. The call for Islam is one of action and not just of acceptance,” Gaafar said.
However, according to Naila, the mother of a teenager who started attending Hosni’s sermons last Ramadan with a cousin, it is specifically this approach that “connects well with Generation Z”.
“Maybe it is too simplistic in a way, and maybe there is a class element there as well, but it works, at least during the month of Ramadan, and it keeps the young people’s interest and faith in religion,” she said.
Naila is also “very happy about the strictly apolitical content and atmosphere” of the sermons. “For me, Ramadan is an opportunity to have my son go to some sermons, and it would be very difficult for me to let him go if I thought even for a second that there would be something even remotely political about the setting or the discourse in them,” she said.
“I want my son to keep an affinity towards religion at a time when more and more young people are going astray, but I don’t want him to do so in the context of a security hazard,” she added.
PAST AND PRESENT: According to Maged, a preacher-turned-teacher, the state has introduced regulations to make sure that the content of all sermons, especially during Ramadan, focuses on good manners, a kind nature, piety, and “accepting difficulties as the will and order of the Almighty.”
The outlines of the Ramadan sermons are decided by the Ministry of Waqf just like that of Friday prayers.
“I don’t see much difference between the kind of material that is shared by the new preachers and that offered in the mosques, if we exclude of course some top preachers like the Grand Imam [Al-Tayeb] or those who are well-established like Ali Gomaa,” Maged said.
With the state being very involved in the selection and training of preachers, Maged argued, there is no room left for “anything that would be problematic from the point of view of security.”
The idea is to block any chance for radical Political Islam to find a podium and an audience. “However, there is little room left for individuality, and this is perhaps one of the reasons that make many sermons unappealing for the younger generations,” he said.
Mosques could also cease to be the place for non-seminary teachings of Islam.
Historian Khaled Azab argues that appealing as they might be for young mosque-goers in Ramadan, the modern preachers cannot be entrusted with the responsibility of teaching Islam to the wider public.
“This is a task that requires institutional capacity like that of Al-Azhar,” Azab said. He added that some scholars, like Ali Gomaa, have also been able to create their own “institutional set-up” whereby Islamic teaching on different levels is mixed with charity work and other societal activities.
However, he said that the question is more complex than that of the role of the preacher or of the Ramadan sermons. The essence of the matter, he said, is the modern understanding of the role of the mosque as it has evolved over the centuries.
“Historically, the mosque has been a place of learning, not just of Islam and its teaching of theology. It has even hosted some elements of the applied sciences,” Azab said. He added that with the advancement of science, as part of modernity, the teaching role of mosques had declined into theology alone, followed by the establishment of faculties of Islamic teaching where mosques became places for non-seminary sermons.
However, Azab said that with the growing interest in learning more about Islam today, more preachers were appearing and more independent sermons were being offered, with different levels of quality. He added that when Al-Tayeb took over Al-Azhar in 2010, he re-introduced the Al-Azhar Mosque as a go-to place for those interested to learn about Islam, with many preachers offering sermons that are particularly well-attended, and not only in Ramadan.
He noted that Al-Azhar also offers classes in Arabic calligraphy and Arabic rhetoric for those who are not particularly interested in Islamic teaching alone. “This is a very significant move to re-introduce the role of the mosque in modern times, because in its Islamic essence the mosque is not just a place for prayers or for sermons,” he said.
According to Azab, it is hard to trace the beginning of the dars al-taraweeh because there is no historical evidence about how or when or where the practice was introduced. Attempts to make mosques into a prayer space alone or just a space for pre-prescribed teaching is incompatible with the historic nature of mosques in Islam, he added.
“Historically, mosques and politics were never fully dissociated, even at moments of confrontation like that [in 1977] when a radical group [Al-Takfir wal-Higra] assassinated Mohamed Al-Zahabi, a prominent scholar of Al-Azhar,” Azab said.
He added that the role of Al-Azhar has always been particularly significant in underlining the essential role of Islam in the lives of observing Muslims. “In the 16th century, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar Zakaria Al-Ansari overruled the ruling of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who had prohibited the drinking of coffee for its alleged stimulating influence, for example,” he said.
According to Azab, this is why the sermons of top scholars like those from Al-Azhar, even if offered only for brief sessions like those of dars al-taraweeh in Ramadan, are much more capable of engaging with core societal issues than any others, no matter the popularity of the preachers concerned.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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