Cairo, Egypt ? Two young women drag their aunt to a window looking onto a hall where a young man with a microphone is surrounded by hundreds of admirers.

“Look at him, Auntie,” says one. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”

Amr Khaled preaches in front of hundreds of Egyptian Muslims at a suburban mosque in Cairo. Khaled has attracted thousands of fans, many of them from Egypt's hip and young elite, with his advice on how to become better Muslims.

Amr Khaled looks like an Egyptian pop singer, wearing the chic suits and the close-cropped hair and trim mustache favored by the young in Cairo. His cassettes and videotapes are quickly snapped up.

Khaled is not a singer, though. He’s an accountant. But his hobby of preaching for mosques, private gatherings and television has made him into an Egyptian phenomenon an Islamic televangelist with an appeal to the country’s hip and young elite.

Since he emerged from the obscurity of friends’ salons to the podium of a Cairo mosque two years ago, Khaled has attracted thousands of fans. His popularity grows from a renewed interest in traditional Islam among Egyptians and other Arabs who have come to feel that decades of experiments with socialism, capitalism and democracy have done little to improve the Arab world.

His followers tend to be young people women especially who are disillusioned with nightclubs and dating but still aren’t ready for rantings on sin and virtue by religious sheiks.

Impressed by style

What attracts them is Khaled’s understanding of the problems and temptations faced by Egypt’s youth, especially those from the upper-middle class. It helps, too, that this chic sheik has a gift for bringing to life Quranic figures like Abraham and Joseph in his preaching.

Here’s a typical problem Khaled addresses: How can someone be a good Muslim while vacationing at a beach resort where young men and women often mix freely in violation of Islam’s strict rules? His answer: Go with the intention of admiring the beauty of nature.

And how should one persuade friends to pray? Appeal to their emotions rather than their minds, Khaled’s advises.

“I thought being a good Muslim meant wearing a long robe, growing a beard and spending the whole day at the mosque,” says Karim Muhammad, a 21-year-old university student sporting a haircut similar to Khaled’s and dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans.

“But after listening to Amr, I realized you can be a good Muslim and remain a chic person and wear cologne,” adds Muhammad, who says that after he attended a Khaled lecture early this year he repented the wild life he led in the United States for five years.

Dina Dabbous, a 20-year-old student at the American University in Cairo, first heard Khaled two years ago at a private gathering where the sexes were properly segregated in traditional Islamic fashion.

“What impressed me most is his style and the topics he chose. They’re very practical and relevant to our lives,” she says. “He’s not like the sheiks who scream and yell and say we’re headed to hell.”

A passing fad?

Khaled’s rise to stardom has not been easy. The government, which has fought the rise of Islamic militancy, allows him to lecture but closely monitors his sermons and is keeping watch to make sure he doesn’t inspire a cult movement.

Khaled stays away from politics and militancy. But when his popularity soared, the government told him late last year to move his lectures from a mosque in an upscale Cairo neighborhood to an unfinished, suburban mosque, ostensibly because his fans were creating traffic jams in the city.

Rose el-Youssef magazine, which is close to the government, ran several articles attacking Khaled, saying his sermons to the rich about fancy cars and seaside resorts were “making the poor feel they have been excluded from Allah’s mercy.”

Khaled declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press, citing such negative portrayal in news media as the reason.

He also has come under attack from the mainstream religious establishment, with clergymen saying a layman who has read a few books doesn’t have the religious authority to tell people how to live their lives.

“When you’re sick, would you go to someone who’s not a doctor to have yourself checked?” asks Abdul-Moti Bayoumi of the Islamic Research Center at Cairo’s al-Azhar University. “What he is doing is not right from an Islamic point of view because he doesn’t have the proper credentials.”

Khaled, who has fans all over the Arab world from his twice weekly shows on a Saudi-owned satellite station, is not the first such phenomenon. Since the mid-1970s there have been figures like him who have risen to stardom only to fade a few years later.

“These guys have the same appeal as young singers,” says Hala Mustafa, director of research at the Center for Political and Strategic Studies and an expert on Islamic movements in Egypt. “They represent modernism … but without substance.”