Every day, the first thing that Mohammed Sabir does when he starts up his taxi is to push a taped reading of Islam's holy book into the car stereo.
"Before I start work, I have to listen to the Koran," said the 27-year-old Egyptian, weaving his black-and-white cab through the busy streets of Cairo.
He is no exception. Expressions of Muslim piety pervade life in Egypt, be it a taxi driver listening to "the revealed word," a well-used prayer mat folded on an office desk or the muttered invocation of a veiled woman in a bank queue.
Yet, even in the birthplace of political Islam that counts several fiery members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group among its sons, Sabir's religious piety -- like that of most ordinary Egyptians -- has limited political expression.
"More important than the government implementing sharia [Islamic law], people themselves should follow the requirements of sharia in their everyday lives," Sabir said.
A ban on Islamist groups has helped prevent political Islam securing a foothold on power. For some, it is the key reason why Egypt's religious piety hasn't translated into an Islamic state.
"In one word: `dictatorship.' Dictatorship supported by the West," Essam el-Erian, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said when asked why religion and state were still largely held separate in Egypt.
Others say political Islam has failed to take a grip because of the moderate religious outlook of many Egyptians. Egypt's history has been touched by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as an ancient pharaonic creed.
Diverse views are part of everyday life for Egypt's 70 million people, of which about 10 percent are Coptic Christian. Egypt has a major brewery -- until recently Muslim-owned -- and has long links with the West, from imperialists to tourists.
Tempering extremes
"This moderate nature of Egyptian Islam helped to somewhat ameliorate the rise of political Islam as an ideology," said Gawad A.G. Soltan, a researcher at Egypt's state-backed think-tank the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
Instead of heading to extremes, he said Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and more militant groups have in recent years toned down their revolutionary rhetoric to broaden their appeal.
But this trend may be threatened by growing anger at the West, seen by many Muslims, including those in Egypt, to be riding roughshod over Islam to impose a Western vision of political development.
"If this divide between the Muslim world and the West is to continue, it will have a very negative impact on the spreading or receptivity of liberal ideas," Soltan said.
The state has traditionally relied on al-Azhar mosque and university, the seat of learning for Egypt's dominant Sunni Muslim tradition, to counter the political call of Islamists.
Some analysts say Egypt's institutional Islam is failing to address a youth which is angered by US policies in the region, worried by globalization, which they see as Western hegemony, and frustrated by a limited political voice at home.
"If you do not address these issues ... they [youths] will go to younger people from their own generation who speak their language of anger and resentment and call for activism," said Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd, a lawyer and member of al-Azhar's supreme council of research.
Islamist ideas gained currency in Egypt in the 1970s amid disenchantment with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's nationalism after Israel's victory in the 1967 Middle East war and as expatriate Egyptians encountered stricter versions of Islam in oil-rich Gulf states.
But even as the Islamic veil replaced the fashionable short skirts of 1960s Cairo, Egyptians declined to follow the lead offered by Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution or the Islamic militants who assassinated president Anwar Sadat in 1980.
The government has periodically clamped down on Islamists, especially in the 1990s militant uprising against the state and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US. Analysts say such tactics may have boosted support for Islamist tactics and bottled up problems.
Brotherhood opposition
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 to fight British occupation, is believed to be Egypt's biggest opposition group, helped by the failure of liberal or other opposition parties.
It is banned by the government, although it has not backed violence for years. It has secured much of its support by providing social services where the state has failed. Analysts say it is voicing increasingly moderate views to attract supporters.
"The Islamic system and Islamic regulation are very, very malleable to give you many varieties [of governance] ... I believe in dialogue, in negotiation, in a peaceful change of mind, not in a confrontation with force," said Erian, a doctor who has spent six years in jail during crackdowns on the group.
Some doubt the depth of commitment by Islamist groups to liberal or democratic ideals.
The Brotherhood's previous members include Sayyed Qutb, executed in 1966, who espoused violence to create a Muslim state. Qutb is seen by many as an ideological forebear to al Qaeda and its top officials like the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri.
Leaders of al-Gama'a al-Islamiya, infamous for the Luxor massacre of 58 tourists in 1997 that marked the bloody finale to a militant uprising in the 1990s, have renounced violence and admitted past mistakes, albeit from harsh government prisons.
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