Source: The New York Times

CAIRO — When President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi opened a much-heralded extension to the Suez Canal in August, the official Friday Prayer sermon that week hailed it as a “gift from God.”

When Egyptian voters elected a new Parliament in December, a preacher on state TV urged its members to “obey those in authority, specifically the highest authority,” and referred indirectly to Mr. Sisi as “God’s shadow on earth.”

And when a Russian airplane leaving the Sharm el Sheik resort crashed in the Sinai Desert in October, killing 224 people and crippling Egyptian tourism, the Ministry of Religious Endowments encouraged clerics to vacation at the deserted resort — notable because many observant Muslims here view it as a sinful fleshpot.

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Fears of Islamist rule helped propel Mr. Sisi, then a military general, to power in 2013 following giant protests that led to the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government. But as Mr. Sisi wrestles with militant attacks and a struggling economy, he has increasingly turned to religion to bolster his authority and justify a crackdown on his rivals.

In the latest decree, the Ministry of Religious Endowments on Monday instructed preachers that any call to protest on Jan. 25, the fifth anniversary of the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, would lead to “sabotage, murder and destruction,” and constituted a “full crime.”

Such tactics are not novel: Arab leaders have tried for decades to use Islam to boost their legitimacy. Mr. Sisi, the former head of the armed forces, has also presented himself as a reformer, calling publicly for a “religious revolution” to help combat extremism. But rather than spurring discussion about Islam, his approach — shutting unregistered mosques and banning unauthorized preachers while drawing the religious establishment into an uneasy embrace — has had the effect of constricting the debate here.

Those tensions came to the fore recently when a television host who appeared to take up Mr. Sisi’s call for change was assailed by Al Azhar, the 1,000-year-old bastion of Sunni Muslim scholarship in Cairo and Mr. Sisi’s designated vehicle for religious change.

Islam Behery, a popular satellite TV host known for challenging Islamic orthodoxy, has urged Muslims to think critically about some of the sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that jihadists have used to justify violence. “We must confront those books, and break the taboo,” said Mr. Behery, a 37-year-old law graduate, in an interview early last month.

To some Western observers, Mr. Behery seemed to be taking Mr. Sisi’s call for a revolution in Islam at Al Azhar last January. In that address, Mr. Sisi urged Egypt’s clerical leaders to purge Islam of the ideas he said were used by extremists to justify violence and had made the religion “an enemy of the world.”

“It is inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world,” Mr. Sisi warned.

But Mr. Behery’s ideas offended the scholars at Al Azhar, who accused him of “violating the foundations of Islam” and, with others, brought a slew of court cases against him. One of those cases resulted in a criminal prosecution, and on Dec. 28 Mr. Behery began serving a one-year sentence.

“Egypt is the country of injustice,” Mr. Behery wrote in a Facebook post before he was imprisoned.

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