Nour al-Hoda al-Gammal preaches to women in Cairo. Credit:Abdel Rahman Mohamed Egypt's growing radicalisation problem has led it to turn to women preachers in a bid to change hearts and minds. More than 140 women preachers will soon take part in a state-led campaign to combat religious extremism and promote national loyalty. The move is a first for Egypt, according to the Ministry of Religious Endowments, but female preachers have long played an important role in ministering to Egyptians. "There was a grassroots movement that developed starting in the early 1980s of women beginning to preach in the local mosques. It was only once this trend had become widespread that the state tried to regulate it and bring the women preachers under its administrative structure," said Saba Mahmood, a University of California anthropology professor. The ministry is aiming to give licences to around 2000 women preachers by year's end.

Nour al-Hoda al-Gammal: "We wanted to move beyond the idea of traditional sheikhs or that we are unapproachable scholars; rather we are at your service, to teach you." Credit:Abdel Rahman Mohamed They are expected to undergo four years of religious instruction in an institute recognised by either the ministry or al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning. Egypt embarked on a similar project in 2015 in collaboration with the National Council of Women, a state body set up during Hosni Mubarak's rule, but this quickly faltered as its responsibilities were so ill-defined. People look at damage inside St George's church after a suicide bombing in the Nile Delta town of Tanta in April. Credit:AP But some critics are troubled that the state is encroaching on already dwindling personal freedoms under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Sisi, who was defence minister under Islamist president Mohamed Morsi until he overthrew him in a 2013 coup, has been keen to portray himself as a moderate who can promote reform in Islam. An ambulance outside Saint Mark's Cathedral following a suicide bombing that killed several people, just after Coptic Pope Tawadros II finished services in the city of Alexandria. Credit:AP It was a point he returned to after the Palm Sunday terrorist attacks on Coptic churches, which killed 44 worshippers and injured dozens. Imposing a national three-month state of emergency after the bombings, Sisi also ordered the formation of a supreme council to combat terrorism and extremism. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi addressing the UN General Assembly in September. Credit:AP

He has routinely cast the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group in league with Islamic State – a claim the Brotherhood denies – and has been locked in an ideological battle with al-Azhar, which includes a university, a mosque and a network of schools, over his vague promises to modernise the faith. Egypt's armed forces have been battling the Islamic State-affiliated Wilayat Sinai (Sinai Province) as the insurgent group has stepped up its attacks on Coptic Christians. Female preacher Mona Salah wears a sash showing she has been approved by Egypt's Ministry for Religious Endowments. Credit:Mona Salah Al-Azhar's Grand Mufti, Ahmed al-Tayeb, has come under pressure since the most recent attacks for comments he made in 2015 refusing to denounce IS militants as infidels. Islam is an integral part of public life in Egypt; three out of four Muslim Egyptians believe religion is central to their lives. The revolution in 2011 laid bare the fault lines of religious expression, between Egyptians who view faith as a matter of personal belief and those who see religious values as inextricably linked to political ones.

Egyptians voted for Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's nominee for the presidency, in 2012. His slim victory suggested that for some it was not so much a vote for a religious candidate as against his rival, Ahmed Shafiq, who was strongly identified with the ousted Mubarak regime. However, Morsi's disastrous year in power saw the Brotherhood clash with the military and alienated many Egyptians, leading to his overthrow in July 2013. The state, even under monarchic rule before 1952, has had to strike a delicate balance in trying to authorise a version of Islam that appeals to a wide spectrum of the population. Egypt's constitution maintains Islam is the religion of the state and that sharia is the main source of legislation. The decision to appoint female preachers explicitly to tackle extremism is an endorsement by the state of female leadership and fits with Sisi's vision of a "centrist Islam". However, Mahmood says it is also part of a larger pattern of the state asserting control over citizens' lives. "In the early 1990s … the state started requiring that all women who were preachers in mosques be licensed through the government-run centres for dawa [preaching] and those who did not have this licence were then forcibly removed," she explained to Fairfax Media.

"What makes this moment under Sisi slightly different is that it is even more oppressive than the Mubarak regime ... its censorship and regulation of the religious field [is] more intense." Sisi's crackdown on dissidents has widened to include those religious figures who don't toe the state's line. For Gammal, away from the politicisation of female preaching, she points to a spiritual essence in her pedagogy. "Renewing religious speech means that everyone has to preach goodness and elevate their ethics – it is not just a domain reserved for the [Ministry of Religious] Endowments or al-Azhar." Mona Salah, 59, sees dawa as a religious duty and a moral imperative. She memorised the Koran at 19, taught Islamic jurisprudence in Saudi Arabia for years and graduated from a preaching preparation institute in Dokki, an upmarket suburb of Cairo, in 2002.

"Sudden death of loved ones and moral corruption all around us drove me to tread down this path", she told Fairfax Media. "We want to raise a generation with solid moral values – the most important thing in our religious practice are ethics, if we focus on that then the whole umma [global Muslim community] will be fixed." Salah noted that the current political moment is sensitive for preachers striking a balance between their Koranic interpretations and the state's shifting line on what is considered "moderate". "In a lot of mosques, preachers are regularly prevented from giving their sermons based on their religious interpretations if they have become stringent or rebuking in their tone," Salah said. "We are walking next to the wall, as they say." The "centrist" version of Islam that Egypt's institutions are promoting is based on the idea of remaining loyal to its leadership and not encouraging dissent as it faces extremist threats in the region.

An avowed Salafi, Salah campaigned for controversial preacher Hazem Abu Ismail when he unsuccessfully ran for presidential elections in 2012. He, like Morsi, is now behind bars. Salafis, who are extremely conservative in their religious practice, were a critical bloc in Sisi's bid for the presidency in 2014 but have also had a contentious relationship with the authorities since 2011, where they were hesitant to participate in democratic elections. They eventually mobilised their base to enter parliament in 2011, were supportive of Morsi but then turned on him to support Sisi, who has shunned them in recent years. Their ideas have been deemed too extreme for the state's liking. Inas who has been preaching for over two years, enjoys the connections forged with women who attend her religious classes in a small institute in Alexandria. "When I ask a sheikh [male religious elder] for an example about something specific to my womanhood, he will never feel what I am going through because he hasn't experienced it. When a woman asks me I reply through an embodied response as a woman armed with my religious knowledge," she told Fairfax Media.

Mahmood, the University of California professor, says this is an important development in engendered by Muslim women changing perceptions of a conservative patriarchal society. "Issues women were reluctant to ask of male preachers are openly discussed and debated among women in the setting of mosques. This has changed the interpretive discourse on orthodox Islam as well as involved women in the study of religious sources far more intimately than was the case before," she said. Sattar views the ministry's announcement as a positive step in encouraging more women to be religiously active, but would like preaching to be even more present in the public life of Egyptians. "Through your works and actions as a Muslim woman, your behaviour with others, even the intonations in your voice, these are what show me your true Islam – it's never through your veil." The preachers Fairfax Media spoke to emphasised the need for a virtuous life as a priority that goes hand in hand with being a dutiful citizen, and lament what they see as moral decay.

This is a view that authorities under Sisi have also been trying to push forward – with mixed results. In recent years, a pro-regime Islamic preacher with a television program was imprisoned for a year, a poet and loyal supporter of Sisi has been charged with contempt of Islam and four Coptic Christian teenagers were sentenced to five years' jail for making a video mocking Islamic State and later sought asylum in Switzerland. In her newly-opened centre, the soft-spoken Gammal sitting at her desk shrugs off the idea that radicalisation can be tackled through sermons alone. "It shouldn't just be the institutions that should change the religious discourse, it is for every citizen to partake in this endeavour." With a dedicated young team updating her sermons online, she nonetheless sees her calling to preach as a personal duty.

"I am against the official designation of the term daiya [female preacher]. It's not a job – it's a role to aspire to in life."