Damascus, Syria -- Sheikh Abdul Rahman Koukki momentarily veers into oncoming traffic as he issues a fatwa, or Muslim religious edict, over his slender Motorola Razor.
"In this case, your father has the right to divorce his wife," he says to a son seeking marital advice for his father. "Call me back if you have any other questions -- you have my number."
Koukki, 38, wears khakis and polo shirts, his face laced with only a shadowy outline of a beard. He rarely wears a turban, a traditional Islamic outfit, except when he preaches during Friday prayers at the Abu Obaida bin al-Garah Mosque in Damascus. And he frequently gives spiritual advice over his mobile phone.
Koukki and a small cadre of Syria's Muslim spiritual leaders are trying to further a progressive and peaceful image of Islam. They promote interreligious tolerance and women's rights, to a certain degree. They denounce violence and extremists who act in the name of Islam. Most of all, they are doing this in a way that accommodates a government with a long-standing suspicion of Islamic activism. In fact, most of them work for the government.
"I am modernizing without deviating from Islam's meaning," said Koukki, who also works for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. "I am staying true to my religion's roots in a way that allows Muslims to live like modern people, in peace."
Twenty-five years ago, the Syrian regime crushed an uprising led by members of the country's majority Sunni Muslims, killing thousands and banning the vanguards of the insurgency, the Muslim Brotherhood, from the country. Since then, organized Islamic activities have been stifled or completely controlled by the state.
Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, is still punishable by death according to Syrian law, and hundreds of Islamists are said to be held in Syrian jails.
While Syria bans radical Islamist activity within its borders, its regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah use militant versions of Islam to do just the opposite, most recently with Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip earlier this month, which left more than 100 dead in clashes with rival Palestinian faction Fatah. And analysts speculate that Syria created and supported Fatah Islam, a radical group with links to al Qaeda that staged an insurrection last month in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
But the resurgence of religion throughout the Middle East and in Syria, say analysts, is forcing this once-avowedly secular government to make more room for Islam. This April's parliamentary election saw the largest number of Muslim clerics running for office and winning, with six getting seats, in the country's history. Long discouraged by Syria's Baathist leadership, the country has recently begun celebrating the Prophet Muhammad's birthday every year, where thousands toss confetti and candy in streets decorated by a sea of posters and flyers scrawled with religious slogans.
Even President Bashar Assad, who heralds from a minority religious sect that has promoted secularism as a way to legitimize its rule, publicly prayed at a Damascus mosque in 2005 to mark the occasion, grabbing headlines across the country. Celebrations for the 1963 Baathist revolution, on the other hand, are small or nonexistent.
"The government is feeling threatened by the rise of Islam, and you're starting to see it giving in to this pressure," said Thabat Salem, a political analyst and documentary film producer.
In an act of outright defiance, the director of the notoriously conservative Abu Noor Mosque, Salahadeen Kiftaru, criticized Syria's minister of information in front of thousands of worshipers last month for refusing to show Friday prayers on state-run television. The fact that he wasn't arrested, analysts say, shows the government's growing lenience.
"It suits the authorities to support certain kinds of Islamists if they don't threaten the base of the regime," said Salem.
That approach is now giving men like Mohammad Habbash an opportunity to preach his interpretation of Islam. For Habbash, an independent member of parliament who runs the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, Syria's growing religious fervor is a natural phenomenon that must be encouraged.
"People have lost trust in secularism, so you're seeing people coming back to their religious roots," said Habbash, who frequently appears on television and radio talk shows on religious issues. But he said he fears stoking the sort of sectarian strife among Syria's mosaic of ethnicities and religions that now is ripping apart Iraq and Lebanon. He and his co-religionist MPs refrain from cooperating too closely for fear of ostracizing the country's minority religious communities. They instead come together over isolated issues like combatting prostitution.
Political parties not affiliated with the ruling Baath Party are banned in Syria, but Habbash said he wouldn't form a religious party even if new parties are permitted.
"There are those conservatives and radicals who believe that the interests of the Muslims come first, and that the interests of the Christians are second. I don't believe this," he said.
Every Monday, Habbash and other Muslim leaders hold discussions with Christians, Druze, Allawites and other members of Syria's minority religious communities to foster understanding between these faiths. "The Islamic movement in Syria is not radical, and we need to show this to people," he said.
Last month, Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassun, Syria's highest-ranking religious leader, invited Jews of Syrian origin -- most left after growing religious tension followed the creation of Israel in 1948 -- to return in a step aimed at creating a rapprochement between these oft-sparring faiths.
"The politicians use religion for wars. Had they left things to the religious leaders, we would have done things differently," he said, adding that synagogues and abandoned Jewish property would be handed back to their original owners.
Despite these progressive trends, Syria's conservative clerical community has increasingly exerted its influence on the government. Two years ago, when the government tried abolishing the law that legalizes polygamy among Muslim men, a group of conservative sheikhs banded together and lobbied high-ranking officials, some say even the president, to keep the law as it is. They got what they wanted.
In April, Sheikh Mohmmad Saeed Ramadan al-Booti, a prominent cleric, declared his support for honor killings, a public contradiction of Grand Mufti Hassun, who only weeks earlier denounced such killings.
"Very many religious men in Syria reject the moderate message, mostly those who have traditional interpretations," said Safir Garad, the deputy head of the Islamic Studies Center. "Dr. Habbash and many of the moderates here are often denounced as unbelievers."
Garad said the message of the moderate Muslims is in line with the government's interest in dissuading youth from turning to radical Islam.
"Our job is to try to talk and persuade radicals away from their ideologies," said Garad. "We tell them that they can still be good Muslims without having to reject the government."
That task, observers acknowledge, has become more difficult as political liberties in Syria have been steadily regressing.
The country's secular opposition over the last year has either been rounded up and tossed in jail or forced into exile, while freedoms of expression have been curtailed. Thabat Salem, the political analyst, said this crackdown on political liberties is occurring at a time of unprecedented increases in Islamist literature, including extremist propaganda.
"You can't print books on politics, but we're seeing an explosion of religious literature and media, a lot of which has Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi message," said Salem. "And now you have a situation where the mosque is the only place where Syrians can organize and express themselves."
When you add the tremendous number of Jihadist Web sites and conservative television programming available to Muslims in Syria, Sheikh Koukki said it makes his job that much harder.
"When I tell people to be moderate in the mosques, they just go home and see all these radical messages on the Internet coming from Iraq," he said. "It sort of drowns out my message."