In theory, Islam is a religion without a clergy. On the ground, things look different. Before Patrick Gaffney decided to pay attention to Islamic sermons in the late 1970s, no comprehensive study of contemporary Islamic preachers existed. He spent hundreds of hours in mosques in Egypt, recording and analyzing what he heard. His curiosity was ahead of the curve. A couple of years into his study, Islamic preachers ceased to be viewed as irrelevant. Today, Gaffney is your man if you want to make sense of what's being said at mosques worldwide.

A polyglot, Catholic priest, and chair of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Gaffney found that modern Islamic preaching represents variations on three ideal types, based on the kind of knowledge from which the preacher derives his authority—hence preacher as saint, preacher as scholar, and preacher as warrior. This typology structures Gaffney's book, The Prophet's Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Univ. of California Press, 1994), which includes a sample sermon of each type. He is also coauthor of Breaking Cycles of Violence: Conflict Prevention in Interstate Crises (Kumarian, 1999).

In November, the animated and witty redhead described to Agnieszka Tennant—with abundant hand gestures and with words—the power that resides in the Islamic preacher's pulpit.

What sparked your interest in Islamic preachers?

The center of my interest was authority. I wanted to study why some religious traditions and social institutions carry weight and some don't. With the help of a professor at the University of Chicago who had studied Arab politics in Jordan, I came to realize that authority in the Islamic world was a topic virtually invisible in the literature. Before I went to Egypt to study it, I read virtually everything I could find, and it was much easier to find information about preaching in the twelfth century than preaching in the twentieth century. I thought, What's going on here? Preaching is being heard in mosques ...

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