Egypt: The New Puritans

Egypt's Salafi Nour Party is the only Islamist party that will compete in the upcoming parliamentary elections on October 18 and 19. The party supported Egypt's military during their 2013 crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, which has since been banned and declared a terrorist organization. "Our philosophy is to avoid confrontation," said Nour leader Younes Makhioun in October. The following is an overview of Egypt's Salafi parties by Khalil al Anani.

Salafism emerged as a new force in Egyptian politics following the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. The rise of ultraconservative ideologues has been particularly striking because Salafis had previously renounced participating in politics altogether. In Egypt, the Salafis emerged from the political backwater to win the second largest vote in the 2011–12 elections for parliament. They played a pivotal role in the political transition. But they eventually fragmented over policy and President Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in 2013. By early 2015, Nour, the largest Salafi political party, was aligned with President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, while other Salafi parties opposed the military-backed government.

Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis historically have been a loose coalition of groups and individual sheikhs who espoused strict interpretations of Islam and called for implementation of Sharia law. To them, the ideal Islamic society emulates the first three generations after the founding of the faith in the seventh century. They generally hold conservative and often illiberal views on gender relations, minority rights, and personal freedoms.

Yet political Salafism is also a heterogeneous phenomenon encompassing different groups with socioreligious views ranging from the far right to the left. Some sheikhs would like to re-create God’s rule on earth. Others more modestly want to implement traditional mores and forms of justice. The sheikhs also differ in terms of the time frame and context for implementing Sharia. Some want to begin moving soon; others are committed to gradually implementing the Sharia, even if it takes decades or centuries. The various sheikhs are often stronger locally than nationally, another contrast to the Brotherhood.

As in other Egyptian movements, the Salafis have a generational divide. The older generation tends to be more puritanical, while the younger generation is more willing to reach beyond its own circle. The sheikhs considered the act of suicide by the Tunisian street vendor, which sparked the Arab uprisings, to be forbidden, or haram. The older generation of Salafis also did not support the 2011 uprising, whereas many in the younger generation turned out at Tahrir Square and other protest sites. One group of young Salafis launched the Costa Salafis, named after a popular coffee chain and complete with a page on Facebook.

The Salafis developed a large support base by providing grassroots social services, including welfare, medicines, and food for the needy. Although many Salafis are middle-class professionals, they are also religious populists who play to the lower-class resentment against Egyptian elites. Ironically, Salafis made inroads in Egyptian society partly because the government tolerated their social activities as a counterweight to the more political Muslim Brotherhood. Salafis are often (although not always, as younger members insist) distinguishable by their untrimmed beards and prayer marks on their foreheads, symbols of the practice of their faith.

In Egypt, the chief Salafi political actor is the Salafi Call, or al Dawa al Salafiyya. Its political arm, the Nour Party, was formed only in mid-2011, after the Egyptian uprising ousted President Hosni Mubarak. But within six months, the Nour Party won 25 percent of the vote in the first free and fair election, or 125 of 498 seats in the lower house of parliament. Together with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamists captured about 70 percent of the vote.

But relations between the Nour Party and the Brotherhood soured quickly, a reflection of a decades-old political rivalry between Salafis and the Brotherhood. Salafi leaders resented the Brotherhood for not treating them as equals. The Nour Party capitalized on mounting opposition to President Morsi. They supported his ouster by the military in July 2013. Other Salafi parties, however, opposed the coup, leaving the Salafi block more fractured than ever.

The Beginning

Salafism in Egypt originated when university students broke away from the Islamic Group, or al Gamaa al Islamiyya, an umbrella network of Islamist factions that emerged in the 1970s to counter leftists and Nasserists (sometimes with the encouragement of President Anwar Sadat’s government). By the mid-1970s, the breakaway factions ranged from radical and violent Islamists to conservative but peaceful groups. The students at Alexandria University created their own movement, the Salafi Call, or al Dawa al Salafiyya, in the late 1970s.

The Salafi Call was created largely because of political and ideological differences with other Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to dominate the Egyptian Islamist scene in the 1970s. The Call’s chief founder was Sheikh Mohammed Ismail al Moqadim, a surgeon who received his religious education in Saudi Arabia. He was influenced by Saudi Salafi thinkers such as Sheikh Abdel Aziz bin Baz and Sheikh Mohammed ibn Saleh al Othaimin, who were religious leaders of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s own brand of Salafism. Saudi Arabia was created by the merger of Wahhabi clerics and the al Saud family.

In Egypt, the movement’s epicenter was Alexandria, where Salafism sought to enhance its presence among university students. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafi Call did not have a formal organizational structure. It relied primarily on preaching—known as the call to Islam, or dawa—and student outreach in leaflets, Islamic camps, and lectures in the city’s mosques. The major Salafi leaders included Sheikh Yasser Burhami, Sheikh Ahmed Farid, Sayyed Abdel Azim, and Mohamed Abdel Fattah.

In 1986, followers founded the Al Furqan Institute for Preparing Preachers, a school for religious education. Al Furqan became the main venue for the Salafi movement. Through the institute, the movement directed Salafi activities across the country through social, youth, and district committees in the 1980s and 1990s. The movement disseminated the Salafi ideology through a growing religious education network, and it published a monthly magazine, al Dawa. In 1994, as the movement’s influence grew, the government closed the institute, dissolved its executive council, and banned its monthly magazine.

From Piety to Politics

Yet the Salafi Call eschewed politics. Classical Salafism has a long tradition of quietism. Many Salafis believe that political participation is heresy that corrupts Muslims and therefore should be avoided. Moreover, many traditional Salafi scholars prohibit rebellion or revolution against the ruler even if he is unjust or corrupt, as long as he is a Muslim.

In more practical terms, the movement also shunned Egyptian politics because the government provided no political space for any Islamists to participate. Despite their quietism, many Salafi leaders were arrested during President Hosni Mubarak’s last decade in power. The movement even remained silent when one of its members, Sayyed Bilal, was arrested and tortured to death in January 2011, a month before Mubarak was toppled. When popular protests erupted against Mubarak, Sheikh Burhami’s faction criticized the protesters and called on Salafis to abstain from participating.

After the revolution, however, Salafi leaders became heavily involved in politics. The movement spawned three new political parties: al Nour (Light), al Asala (Authenticity), and al Fadila (Virtue). The three parties formed a coalition—the Islamic Alliance—to field candidates in Egypt’s first fully democratic election in 2011–12.

The ideology of all three parties is uncompromising. They advocate rigid application of the Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence), which they believe entails gender segregation, strict Islamic dress for women, and social restrictions such as outlawing alcohol. Abdel Moneim al Shahat, a controversial senior Nour Party official, outraged Egyptians when he dubbed democracy as “forbidden” (haram) and “blasphemy” (kufr). He described the works of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz as “atheist literature” that promoted “prostitution and drugs.” Another hardline Salafi leader urged Egyptians not to vote for liberal, secular, or non-Muslim candidates in the elections.

Salafis are socially conservative partly to preserve Egypt’s Islamic identity in the face of Westernization and secularism. As a result, they argued that a new constitution should emphasize the role of Sharia in public and political life as well as in private belief. During the new parliament’s inaugural session in January 2012, many Salafi members insisted on adding a religious reference to the official oath; they swore to uphold the constitution as long as it did not contradict the Sharia.

Electioneering

Since the 2011 uprising, Salafis have sought to inject themselves and their ideas into the center of political debates. They were surprisingly well organized in their first elections despite total political inexperience. They tapped into deeply rooted social networks to encourage support for their candidates. They also built alliances and coalitions with different political forces.

Before the parliamentary elections, the Nour and Asala parties joined the Democratic Alliance, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and including the liberal Wafd Party. But the two Salafi parties withdrew from the alliance on the eve of elections after what they perceived as attempts by the Brotherhood to marginalize Salafi candidates. The two Islamist parties then formed an alliance with the Building and Development Party, the political arm of the Islamic Group (al Gamaa al Islamiyya). (Many leaders of the Islamic Group, which had advocated violence against the regime, were imprisoned in the 1980s and 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, the group had formally renounced violence, and many of its members were released. In 2011, the group fielded candidates for parliament through the Building and Development Party.)

The Salafis did well in elections for several reasons. Islamist ideologies do resonate with pious Egyptians, but the Salafis had also delivered social services to the needy for several decades. Loose-knit but entrenched networks had built up around these services among the lower class and lower-middle class, which suffered under Mubarak’s economic reforms. The Salafis achieved sweeping victories in some rural constituencies and on the outskirts of Cairo.

The Salafis’ hands-on approach was more effective than that of the social networks, based on the twenty-first-century technology used by liberal and secular activists. “They didn’t come to our streets, didn’t live in our villages, didn’t walk in our hamlets, didn’t wear our clothes, didn’t eat our bread, didn’t drink our polluted water, didn’t live in the sewage we live in, and didn’t experience the life of misery and hardship of the people,” explained Salafi leader Sheikh Shaaban Darwish. In addition, said Nour Party spokesman Mohammed Nour, “Other parties are talking to themselves on Twitter, but we are actually on the streets. We have other things to do than protest in Tahrir.”

Rival Islamists

Islamist groups won 70 percent of the seats in Egypt’s parliament, but the fiercest battles during the first parliamentary elections were actually between different types of Islamists—not between secular candidates and Islamist candidates. The Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood will not necessarily work together toward a common Islamist political or social agenda in parliament. And the divergence between the two groups—on a range of issues, including interpretation of the Sharia, gender relations, and views on democracy—represents only a segment of a wider Islamist political spectrum.

The Salafis view the Brotherhood as insufficiently Islamist and too compromising. The Brothers, in turn, view Salafi positions as naïve, overly rigid, insufficiently centrist, and inappropriate in a modern Egyptian context. The Brothers have shown during sporadic participation in past parliaments that their primary focus is on politics and not on religious or cultural issues. After the 2011–12 vote, a Freedom and Justice Party leader said its priorities would be “economic reform and reducing poverty … not (fighting) bikinis and booze.”

As the Salafis began scoring well in the phased elections, Nour Party chief Emad Abdel Ghaffour vowed that the party’s new members of parliament would not play second fiddle to the Brotherhood. “We hate being followers,” Ghaffour told Reuters. “They always say we take positions according to the Brotherhood but we have our own vision.… There might be a consensus but … we will remain independent.… They always speak of it with reproach.” He warned that the Brotherhood might try to “marginalize” Nour’s politicians and portray them as “the troublemaking bloc. The experiences of other parties who have allied with them in the past are bitter.”

The Nour Party has demonstrated occasional pragmatism in its political outlook. After the 2011–12 election, its leaders reached out to liberal forces in parliament to counter the strength of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. Although Salafis favor Islamic rule, the Nour Party’s platform called for establishing a “modern state that respects citizenship and coexistence between all people.” The party stressed the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. And it emphasized social justice as well as the people’s right to elect their leaders and to hold them accountable.

The Salafis did not perform nearly as well in the 2012 presidential election as they had in the parliamentary poll. Salafi lawyer Hazem Salah Abu Ismail initially seemed to be a key contender. But he was disqualified in April because his mother was born in the United States, not Egypt. With no other clear Salafi option, the Nour Party eventually endorsed moderate Islamist candidate Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former member of the Brotherhood. In the first round of voting, Fotouh came in fourth place, with only 17 percent of vote, and did not advance to the run-off. In the June runoff, the Nour Party supported Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi over Ahmed Shafiq, who was Mubarak’s last prime minister. Morsi narrowly won.

Fragmentation

In 2013, Salafi parties began to splinter due to personal rivalries and disputes over policy, such as membership of religious minorities. Members broke away to form breakaway parties. The Nour Party’s relations with the Brotherhood also hit a new low.

In January 2013, senior leaders in Nour led a mass defection to form the rival Watan (Homeland) Party. It claimed to follow the same Salafi approach as Nour, but it pledged to be less partisan.  “We will open up to all those qualified and [who] don’t object to the Islamic project, the Islamic view of the state,” a party vice president told al Jazeera. The Watan Party said it would welcome Copts and women on its electoral lists, in stark contrast to Nour, which opposed female lawmakers and only added women to its lists to fulfill the required female quota.

Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a charismatic Salafi disqualified from running in the 2012 presidential election, founded a second party in February 2013. His Raya (Flag) Party joined with six other small Islamist parties to form the Umma (Nation) Alliance. The coalition included the Salafi Asala and Fadila parties. 

In mid-2013, Salafis divided again as public sentiment mobilized against the Brotherhood. Nour initially said it would not participate in either pro-Brotherhood or anti-Brotherhood protests in June. But in a practical move, it supported the army’s ouster of Morsi in July. Its decision to side with the army, led by Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el Sisi, and the secular opposition implied that not all Islamists endorsed Morsi’s actions.

Other Salafi parties--including Asala, Fadila, Raya and Watan--joined with dozens of Islamist groups to form the pro-Morsi National Alliance for Supporting Legitimacy, also known as the “anti-coup” alliance. In 2013, the umbrella organization called for Morsi’s reinstatement and organized demonstrations against the military-backed government, which often led to bloody clashes with security forces leaving hundreds dead.

The passage of new constitutional amendments in November 2013 opened another rift among Salafis. The amendments enshrined the military’s prominent role in politics and prohibited the formation of political parties founded on “a religious basis.” The “principles of Sharia” remained “the main source of legislation.” But the Supreme Constitutional Court retained the ability to decide if legislation conforms to Islamic law. The 2012 constitution had transferred that power to al Azhar’s clerics.

Nour announced its support of the constitution, despite the changes. “It is below our expectations, but generally speaking it is acceptable for us to say yes to these amendments, rather than to say no,” Nour spokesman Nader Bakkar told Al Jazeera. The draft constitution still “preserves the Islamic identity of Egypt,” Nour member Shaaban Abdul Aleem told Al Arabiya.

But other Salafi parties, as part of the National Alliance for Supporting Legitimacy, rejected the amendment procedures as illegitimate. “Boycott the null and void referendum which will be carried out under a fascist military coup,” said an alliance spokesman. In January 2014, some 98 percent of Egyptian voters approved the new constitution in a referendum, laying the framework for fresh parliamentary and presidential elections.

In May 2014, former military chief Sisi ran for president against leftist Hamdeen Sabahi in what was widely viewed as a referendum on Sisi’s rule. The Nour Party was the only major Islamist group to back Sisi, who won more than 96 percent of the vote. The turnout was only 47 percent. But Nour rank-and-file reportedly did not show up at the polls in large numbers. The government crackdown on other Islamists appeared to have soured party members on Sisi.

The anti-coup alliance began to fracture in 2014. In August, the moderate al Wasat Party withdrew; the Salafi Watan Party dropped out in September. Watan cited the need for a more inclusive coalition covering a broad spectrum of Egyptian politics. 

The split between Nour and other Salafis became visible in November 2014. In Suez, members of Nour formed a human chain to block plans by the Salafi Front, one of Egypt’s largest Salafi movements, to hold anti-government demonstrations. The Salafi Front still managed to mobilize thousands in Cairo for a “Muslim Youth Uprising” to “topple military rule in Egypt.”

The anti-coup alliance took another hit in December 2014 with the withdrawal of two more groups, the banned Istiqlal Party and the Salafi Front organization. The Front said that it quit the group to allow more freedom to mobilize. It also announced a new focus on “Islamic identity” rather than remaining committed to “unity” with the alliance. 

The Militants

Militant Islam has a long history in Egypt. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, founded in the 1970s, assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. And al Gamaa al Islamiyya, also known as the Islamic Group, killed hundreds during its insurgency against the government in the 1990s. But the release of extremists after Mubarak’s ouster and during President Morsi’s tenure contributed to the rise of a new Salafi jihadi groups.

The Sinai-based Ansar Beit al Maqdis was the most dangerous; it emerged after Mubarak’s ouster in 2011. It originally targeted Israeli interests, but began attacking Egyptian security forces after Morsi’s ouster in mid-2013. The group escalated attacks in October 2014, prompting the government to declare a three-month state of emergency to deal with the jihadist insurgency.

By the end of 2014, the group had killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police, including more than 30 in one particularly deadly attack on an army camp. It has used the same brutal beheading technique used by ISIS . In November 2014, it reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. It also claimed responsibility for the death of an American oil worker. 

Key Positions

Democracy

Until the 2011 uprising, the majority of Salafis rejected democracy as a Western construct that was anathema to Islam. Most Egyptian Salafis also rejected the idea of participation in any formal politics. Salafi leaders criticized the mass protests against the Mubarak regime and argued that opposition to a Muslim ruler contravened Islam. But some Salafis did participate in the protests.

The quantum shift in the willingness of Salafis to participate in formal politics does not mean that most accept the principle of democracy. Some say that democracy is a “tool” or an “instrument” that can be used to implement Sharia. Sheikh Yasser Burhami, a leader in the Salafist Call, explained, “We want democracy, but one constrained by God’s laws. Ruling without God’s laws is infidelity.”

Women’s Rights

Most Salafis believe that the most important role for women is in the family, as wives and mothers. Many Salafis object to the idea of women in leadership roles, and some claim that women should minimize their activities in the public sphere. The 2011–12 elections mandated that all political parties include at least one woman on their party-list ticket. The Nour Party’s female candidates always appeared at the bottom of the ticket. Their faces never appeared on campaign material, and they were instead depicted by a flower or a party symbol.

In 2013, the Nour Party objected to Article 11 of the draft constitution, which sought to balance the representation of women in parliament and local government. “We cannot have a quota for every marginalized group,” argued a party leader.

In late 2014, Nour Party head Younes Makhioun outlined qualifications for women to run on its list in the next parliamentary elections. Aside from experience, women should have good manners, a respectable reputation and wear hijab, Makhioun said. 

Some Salafis also call for the separation of boys and girls in educational institutions after the primary level. Although several prominent Salafi leaders have said that they would not force women to wear the veil or the niqab, the full-face veil, some Salafis have suggested imposing restrictions on dress in public.

Minorities

The Nour Party and other Salafi parties hold decidedly illiberal views about religious minorities and personal freedoms. They do not subscribe to the principle of full and equal citizenship for all Egyptians, regardless of religion. Several Salafi leaders have said that they oppose full political rights for non-Muslims.

The Salafis draw a distinction between private and political practice. The Nour Party contends that Sharia ensures Christians the right to practice their beliefs, including the right to handle personal status and family affairs according to Christian traditions. But the party has stated that non-Muslims cannot hold the presidency. On the subject of Coptic Christians, who make up 10 percent of Egypt’s population, Sheikh Burhami went further. He specifically said, “Copts do not have the right to run for political office in Egypt.” No Copts appeared on their electoral list in 2011.

But in late 2014, the Nour Party announced that it would include Copts on its lists in accordance with the revised elections law. The Salafi Watan Party has also said it would run both Christians and women on its electoral lists .

The Salafis take a tough position on Sufi Muslims, a tolerant mystical form of Islam. Burhami has accused them of heresy and of being supported by the United States. He has been even tougher on the Bahai. Burhami said that he opposes allowing the tiny Egyptian Bahai community to hold religious services in Egypt or to list their religion on national identification cards.

The United States and the West

The views of Salafi parties toward the United States are still not clearly defined, however. Although most Salafis are hostile toward Western civilization generally, the Nour Party claims to advocate relations with foreign states based on respect and peaceful coexistence. But Salafis have demanded the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in New York after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Many Salafis are outspoken against what they view as U.S. meddling in Egypt’s domestic affairs on issues of religious freedom.

Israel

The Nour Party has shown some pragmatism in its position on Israel. Its platform does not specifically address the party’s stance on Egypt’s peace treaty with the Jewish state, although in an interview with Israeli Army radio, a Nour Party spokesman said that the party would respect Egypt’s international commitments and would not abrogate the Camp David Treaty. But like the Brotherhood, the Salafis are sympathetic to Palestinian issues and to Hamas.

The Future

By early 2015, Salafism in Egypt had evolved from a movement that rejected democracy into a major political force. Despite ultra-conservative views and inexperience, the Salafis demonstrated they could adapt to Egypt’s new political environment and succeed in amassing popular support. Their ability to influence politics in the near future, however, is not assured and may depend on the outcome of elections scheduled for early 2015.

Egypt’s government under President Sisi is likely to discourage or block Salafi parties that had opposed the military coup from reentering politics. The only major Salafi group likely to contest the elections is the Nour Party, which aspires to win a quarter of seats in parliament.

By early 2015, the Nour Party faced a more difficult future than its early years in politics. Other Islamists have called Nour members “traitors” for supporting the military coup and standing by the government during its violent crackdown on the Brotherhood and pro-Morsi Islamists. The party is unlikely to be able to count on the same level of support it rallied in 2011and 2012. But secular groups view rigid versions of Islam as a threat to Egypt’s political life. Even if Nour secures some seats in parliament, other parties may be reluctant to cooperate.

Khalil al Anani is a scholar of Middle East politics at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University in Britain. His books include Elections and Transition in the Middle East in the Post-revolutionary Era (forthcoming), Religion and Politics in Egypt After Mubarak (2011), Hamas: From Opposition to Power (2009), and The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Gerontocracy Fighting against Time (2008).

Garrett Nada, a program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, contributed an update of this chapter in early 2015.

Photo credits: Nour Party logo via the party's Facebook page (cropped); Younes Makhioun via Nour Party's Facebook page (cropped)