“This is not just a technical war, but a moral one. Facebook is reflecting what’s happening in Muslim society,” Korayem said. “I’m engaged in dialogue between Islamists and secularists. But there’s too much tension. No one wants to revise his opinions. It’s turned into a screaming war. Islamists speak to me as a disbeliever. They want to convert me. They quote verses of the Quran as if to awaken me.”

The struggle is over Islam’s role in the new century. Facebook groups like Korayem’s seek separation between the spiritual and the political. Conservative pages and groups call for Islamic states and a pulling away from liberal Western influences. One Facebook group literally wants to awaken the faithful; it provides wake-up calls so its members don’t sleep through dawn prayers.

It is an invigorating Internet landscape, a place where opinions on fatwas and female genital excision are played out in a culture that is sensitive about how far to question religion. But with no central structure, Islam, whose tenets have been interpreted differently by imams and mullahs, is now being analysed by thousands of new, young and disparate Web surfers. Korayem believes he’s living in a transformative time in Islamic history, when a new generation can express whatever it wants.

Beneath the hum of an air conditioner in Cairo’s upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Heliopolis, Amr Ali, a dental student who is a devout believer, sits in his bedroom and types furiously, “We the Muslim Youth Can Change This World.” The quest has become so consuming that Ali’s father, an orthopedic surgeon worries that his son might be unfairly tagged as a radical by security forces.

“We can change perceptions about Islam,” he said. “I now have a relationship with an American guy on Facebook. He first contacted me by calling me a terrorist. ‘Do you belong to al-Qaeda?’ But I’ve explained the nature of Islam, using Quran verses to correct his misperceptions."