Somalia: Weddings at the Peace Hotel used to be a lavish affair. More often than not, hundreds of people would finish the night dancing in the car park inside the hotel's fortified compound.
But for the past week, the car park has been silent.
"The Islamic courts have told us there can be no pop music," says a waiter "It is very sad. We all hope that things are not going to be like Afghanistan."
The same question has floated around western capitals for the past week and a half, ever since the Union of Islamic Courts announced that its militias had vanquished the warlords who kept Mogadishu in a state of anarchy for 15 years.
Its leaders advocate strict adherence to Sharia law and are accused of having links to al-Qaeda. Cinemas have been shut down and new year festivities have been banned in parts of the city.
But their victory has also brought a halt to the bloodiest round of fighting seen in a decade, with more than 350 people killed this year. The city's residents are left to wonder whether this is a only a lull in the fighting or whether the Sharia courts will continue bringing order to a country riven by anarchy since President Siad Barre fled in 1991.
Some of the answers lie in a simple whitewashed villa which has been the headquarters of the Union of Islamic Courts for just a month. Its rooms are bare and wires dangle from the ceiling where light fittings should be.
Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the union, breezes into the room wearing a checked yellow shirt and red headdress, full of apologies for being late. He is desperately keen for outsiders not to jump to conclusions about his movement's aims.
"Our only political aim was to save the security of the people of Somalia, especially in Mogadishu, as well as their properties, their lives and their dignity," he says, in the harsh, consonant-heavy language of Somalia.
"We have no other agenda."
Mogadishu's Sharia courts began life in the mid-1990s. The driving force came from businessmen sick of seeing their enterprises hampered by a motley assortment of military strongmen, gangsters and thugs who became known as warlords.
Today, 11 courts administer justice to their own particular subclan. Each has its own backers able to donate thousands of dollars from their telecoms businesses, while others offer their private militias.
In the vacuum of this failed state - where water is delivered by donkey cart and the paved roads have crumbled to dust - they have managed to set up schools and clinics. Eleven days ago, they defeated the warlords, allegedly funded by the United States to check the influence of the Sharia courts and to root out al-Qaeda suspects.
Since then, they have pushed out of the city northwards, sending shockwaves through western capitals and Somalia's neighbours who fear the rise of a hardline Islamic power.
Sheikh Ahmed says the courts have no interest in turning Somalia into an Islamic state or governing it like the Taliban, and denies the presence of al-Qaeda elements within the courts.
Instead, he accuses the West of assuming all Muslims are extremists. "We ourselves have a question: the westerners are against our religion, but we don't know why," he says.
His words - designed for an international audience - do not tally with previous statements at home, and his movement includes jihadists such as Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of al-Ittihad, who has admitted to meeting al-Qaeda leaders and is wanted by the United States.
Analysts are waiting to see whether Sheikh Ahmed's words of conciliation hold sway over the more extreme elements, who want to conquer the rest of Somalia.
David Shinn, a former director for east African affairs at the United States department of state, said American backing for the warlords had backfired by strengthening the courts and the extremists within the movement.
"Certainly the situation in Somalia is that there are extremist elements in the Sharia courts that are hostile, and should their view prevail in the coming months then it would be a very negative development indeed. On the other hand, the majority of the Sharia courts and the people associated with them, are relatively moderate," he said by telephone from Washington.
"If the moderates prevail, then the situation is not catastrophic at all."
Mogadishu shows all the signs of 15 years of war. Minarets and mobile-phone masts are the only structures that stand more than two storeys high. Mango trees and acacia bushes have spread through the rubble, as the African scrub reclaims the tumbledown edges of Mogadishu.
The dirt roads fill with stinking brown sludge at the first sign of rain. Amid the squalor are many who believe the Sharia courts' triumph in Mogadishu should be the first step to an Islamic state.
They include Sheikh Mohamed Siyad, the governor of Lower Shabelle and a key ally of Sheikh Ahmed. His militiamen and "technical" battle wagons - Toyota pick-ups mounted with anti-aircraft guns - provide much of the Islamic courts' muscle.
"We are Muslims and we must work at implementing Koranic law. Democracy will never work," he says, slurping noisily from a cappuccino as he holds court at a friend's home in the city. As far as he is concerned, the militias are engaged in a war against infidels.
"The warlords are killers, looters. So we are at war with them and the people who supported them - including the Americans."
Somalia's fledgling government, set up 18 months ago with United Nations backing, is watching developments warily from its base in Baidoa about 210 km (130 miles) away. Its influence has crumbled to almost nothing, although it has the support of the international community.
Ministers opened negotiations with the Sharia courts soon after they took Mogadishu last Monday, but talks collapsed within days when the government made plain that it wanted international peacekeepers to shore up its shaky position.
For now, there is a sort of peace on the streets of Mogadishu. Its people can move around the city freely now that the warlords' roadblocks have been dismantled. Few people express any fear that the courts will impose further fundamentalist laws. For the time being, it is enough that they have driven out the warlords.
"The last 15 years have been lived under the anarchy of the warlords," says Abdullahi Alasow (70) as he sips sweet tea in the shade of Bakara market.
"This has been an uprising of the people of Somalia to get rid of them and to make peace."