When Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments launched a campaign last week to introduce a unified written Friday sermon, it sparked a lot of controversy. Some questioned whether having a single text read from the pulpits across the country could effectively achieve the ministry’s stated goals, namely preventing those who harbor extremist views from influencing worshippers through the weekly sermon and correctly explaining Islamic concepts through an academic, enlightened and restrained prism.

To push the other imams and preachers to comply with the written sermon, Minister of Religious Endowments Mokhtar Gomaa gave a sermon July 15 at Cairo’s Amr Bin al-As Mosque based on a written text that had previously been posted to the ministry’s website.

However, he stressed in a statement given to the official Egyptian News Agency after the sermon that the preachers in mosques would be free to choose between the written text or a chosen theme.

During a tour of mosques affiliated with the Ministry of Religious Endowments in the governorate of al-Giza, one of the governorates of Greater Cairo, Al-Monitor saw that preachers held to the prescribed topic of "forbidden money" but did not keep to the text released by the ministry. A preacher in one of these mosques, who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, said he had been adhering to the ministry’s chosen topic for the sermon since that guideline was first promulgated in 2014, despite the fact that adhering to a previously decided topic is constricting and prevents him from addressing issues that more directly affect the locals in his neighborhood. He added that while he intends to adhere to the written text or theme in accordance with the ministry’s instructions, he is opposed to this style of preaching.