He wants his father freed and Shari‘a imposed unquestioningly on Egypt. Other than that, Mohammed Abdel-Rahman doesn’t want to cause trouble

To even approach Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, you have to take off your shoes. The son of the man Americans call the Blind Sheik — Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for seditious conspiracy in a North Carolina prison — spends part of each day calling for his father’s release at a makeshift open-air sit-in outside the walls of the U.S. embassy in Cairo. A collection of blue straw mats are spread across the concrete, ringed by about eight pairs of shoes along the edges. Several times a day, the mats become prayers rugs, so no shoes are allowed.

I went looking for him to talk about the role of Salafis — the controversial and conservative Islamists who are wielding new and often troubling political influence, in the eyes of Westerners and secular Arabs — in the new Egypt and in the Arab world after over a year of uprisings. The interview would be part of a major story by Bobby Ghosh in the Oct. 8 issue of TIME (available to subscribers here).

Sitting beneath banners displaying his father’s bearded visage, the 39-year-old Abdel-Rahman comes across as placid and pleasant. He departed for Afghanistan in 1988 at age 16 to join up with the mujahedin. “Back then, all the world was with us, especially the U.S., because we were hitting the Soviet Union,” he says. He was captured by U.S.-led forces in 2003 and says he spent a few months being interrogated at Bagram Air Base before being rendered back to Egypt, where he spent several years in jail. He was released in the fall of 2010, a few months before the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

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