Gaza City - The 150 men stuffed into Gaza City's A-Shamma Mosque were riveted by each word of the Friday sermon.
Over the past year, Amjad Abu Seedo, a baby-faced 13-year-old, has captivated a swelling throng of faithful with his spellbinding Quranic tales and trance-like delivery.
The boy's sermons, punctuated by sweeping gestures, have injected a dose of vitality into mosque life, where sermons had become monotonous during the recent years of the intifada, or Palestinian uprising. "Our mosques in the intifada have become too politicized," says A-Shamma Mosque's muezzin, or regular prayer leader, Muhammed Fayyis Radwan. "We hear the same sermons over and over, and now we need to go back to social issues. Amjad was great in this respect, because he delivered something different."
Jihad Yassin, a 15-year-old carpenter's apprentice, couldn't believe that "a boy his age could utter the words that came from his mouth." Amjad's sermon so moved Yassin that afterward he vowed to "be in the mosque a lot more," and to stop "wasting time watching TV."
And the appearance of the imam prodigy may be just another sign of Islam's growing hold on Gazans.
Since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, "there has been a marked increased traditionalism," says Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research. "In a society under stress with a weak central government, people return to traditional sources of protection: generally family and religion."
Over the past five years, hundreds of mosques have sprung up all over Gaza, where unemployment hovers near 40%, according to the World Bank.
The mosque increasingly has become the hub of male social activity here. Gaza's Islamists shuttered movie theaters more than a decade ago. Palestinian-brewed Taybeh Beer was banned in Gaza in 2000, Nadim Khoury, the beer's master brewer, says in a telephone interview.
Amjad, who spends hours a day poring over the Quran, discovered his talent for oration only a year and a half ago. A friend at the Waqf School, where he is in eighth grade, asked him to present a composition he had written. "So I memorized the sermon and delivered it, and people kept asking me to do it again." Since then, at an age when his peers in Israel celebrate their Bar Mitzvahs — the Jewish ritual passage into manhood — Amjad writes and then pumps out his sermons.
Swaying in his preacher's robes, and showering the kneeling men and boys with fire and brimstone, Amjad riffs on mystical Islamic fables, and harangues the faithful, "I beseech you to cease sinning ... to return to the mosque, the critical place in your life, the place to reach God."
The men on their knees in the gallery murmur in assent. Women pray at separate times.
Amjad has preached in 40 mosques in the Gaza City area over the past year, and his popularity is growing. While Islam commands its faithful to pray five times daily, preachers only deliver sermons at noon prayers on Fridays.
Most imams are older men, who have studied for years, and few people can recall an example of a preacher as young as Amjad.
"To preach at such a young age is indeed unusual, but it is possible if the lad memorizes the Quran and is well learned," says Muhammed Abu Layla, chairman of Islamic Studies at Cairo's Al-Azhar University. Amjad himself says there are stories in the Quran, Islam's holy book, of teenage boys leading Islamic armies into battle.
Outside the mosque, the flags of the militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad flap in a dusty breeze. Portraits of "martyrs" — Palestinians who either blew themselves up trying to kill Israelis or died in urban fighting against the Israeli army — decorate the street. (Related story: Sharon warns against Palestinian violence)
Amjad says militant groups constantly try to recruit him. At home after the sermon, he logs into his e-mail account and produces an angry message from a group purportedly linked to the Palestinian Authority's ruling Fatah Party. Amjad says he has rejected their recruiting attempts.
A newspaper clipping with a headline calling Amjad, "Hamas' Wonder Boy," hangs over the young preacher's desk. While he likens himself to Quranic Islamic warriors who in their teens led Islamic armies into battle, he angrily denies any affiliation with the militant group.
"There are some youth who hold a gun in their right hand," he says, "and others, like me, who hold the Quran in their right hand. ... I depend on God."
During his life, Amjad could depend on little more. His father, who left his mother to marry a woman 20 years her junior, has had no contact with the family in years. Amjad's home is a five-story walk-up in Gaza's Shejahiya neighborhood. Plastic flowers complement the red, plastic lawn set that serves Amjad and his five siblings as their living room furniture.
He receives nothing for his preaching. "It is a holy duty," he says. The family is supported with the help of his older siblings.
While he delights in pleasing his mother, Zinat, through his preaching, Amjad insists, "I am a normal child. I play with my friends and love swimming in the (Mediterranean) sea."