A
microbus sponsored by the al-Nour Party offers voters free rides to
polling stations during 2011/2012 Egyptian parliamentary elections.
While the ruling
Muslim Brotherhood has received a great deal of attention in Egypt, the
varied Salafi groups have been far less studied. At times allies and at
times rivals of the Brotherhood, the Salafists are widely varied.
Whether the two groups can cooperate will determine the future of
Islamist rule in Egypt. The Salafists pull the Brotherhood to take
stronger action more immediately and may have faith in the larger
organization or consider it to have betrayed the revolution. Moreover,
the Salafists operate with a wide deal of autonomy, being able to take
extra-parliamentary action ranging from terrorist armed struggle to
violent attacks on Christians and other opponents of the regime. The
fact that there are now four competing Salafi parties shows the
different streams of ideology and strategy. This article was written prior to the army action, but still shows how the Salafists are organized and their different camps.
The overthrow of the Mubarak regime in
Egypt in February 2011 unleashed Islamist forces there to the point that
the Muslim Brotherhood took over the presidency, parliament, and
writing of the new constitution within the next 18 months. While the
Brotherhood was the strongest single force in Egypt, the number-two slot
was held not by liberals, moderates, or secularists but by the even
more radical Islamist groups called Salafists. Who are the Salafists and
what is their strategy and ideology?
The principal question in Egypt
regarding the Salafists was whether they could work together effectively
enough to remain a strong political voice in the country with actual
influence on the national level. A second issue was how their
extra-parliamentary activity–possibly including violence–would help
consolidate a Shari’a state and intimidate the political enemies of both
the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. A third question is the
degree to which Islamists and the Brotherhood can work together, even if
the Islamists try to outflank the Brotherhood in terms of greater
militancy. If the Salafists are in effect a lobby on the Brotherhood,
they can simultaneously play the role as the shock troops for the
Brotherhood regime, giving it the rationale for moving more quickly and
toughly to impose Islamism on Egyptian society.
What seems to be not at all likely,
however, despite the fact that this idea is at the center of U.S. and
Western policy, is that the Brotherhood would repress the Salafists or
pose a serious alternative in principle and not merely on the timing and
tactical levels. It should be stressed at the outset that the
Brotherhood is also actually a Salafi organization. Yet since the term
has been used to define the disparate, even more radical Islamist groups
in Egypt, it will be employed for that purpose in this article.
Basically, too, the Brotherhood has the same ideology as the Salafists.
The differences are in strategy and tactics.
Of course, since the goal is not merely
to institute Shari’a rule but to take power in one’s own hands, the
Brotherhood and Salafists are competitors for control of Egypt. At
times, the Salafists support the Brotherhood–which now also means
supporting the government; at other times, they compete with the
Brotherhood–as in elections–or criticize it for not going farther
faster. The most important difference is that the Salafists are
impatient. They want the Islamist program to be fulfilled much more
quickly than the Brotherhood and are willing to take far greater risks,
both domestically and internationally. If the Brotherhood is “pragmatic”
or “cautious,” that only signifies its willingness to go more slowly in
order to better achieve the same goals.
A central idea in Obama administration
policy has been to support the Brotherhood being in power in order to
restrain the Salafists. This is a foolish concept based on a
misunderstanding of the situation. First, the two groups have the same
goal. Second, the Brotherhood does not want to repress the Salafists but
rather to use them for its own purposes.
This is true for such matters as the use
of violence against Christians, foreign embassies, moderate
oppositionists, modernist social practices, women, and Israel. If
Salafists act, the Brotherhood–and hence the government–can then claim
to be innocent of responsibility for, say, an attack on the U.S. embassy
by a mob. This would be the case even though it did not attempt–as a
movement–to discourage the anti-American frenzy (On the contrary, it
encouraged that sentiment.) or–as a government–to protect the embassy
properly (On the contrary, its security forces were ordered to stand by
and do nothing until the last moment when a repeat of the Iranian
hostage crisis of 1979 became possible.).
What is taking place, then, is not
“moderate Islamism” by the Brotherhood but deniability. In fact, the
Salafists are incapable of taking power in Egypt, largely because their
ranks are so badly divided and their strategies are so unrealistic. What
is really happening, however, is that the Salafists are helping the
Brotherhood make sure that Egyptian nationalists and liberals can never
gain power and that the social revolution of thoroughly Islamizing the
society takes place.
THE SALAFI REVOLT
The Salafi movement was born in the
1970s out of rejection of the Brotherhood’s strategy of caution,
especially by young militants. The Brotherhood did not act so carefully
because it had moderated–its ideology and literature show this not to be
true–but because it feared the kind of total repression faced in the
1950s and 1960s at the hands of the Arab nationalist regime. Salafi
leaders either quit the Brotherhood in frustration or developed their
own version of Islamism in parallel, sometimes with cultish features and
always with a greater willingness to confront the Mubarak government,
at times with violence. This history has been discussed in great detail
in the current author’s book, Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics.[1]
The Salafi groups were more fearless in
saying and doing things that led to government crackdowns against them.
This battle culminated in the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat
in 1981 and built to the near-civil war in the 1990s when the government
was forced to repress a Salafi insurgency. During all of these events,
the Brotherhood exercised discipline on its members and avoided
involvement. Only when President Husni Mubarak seemed to be on his last
legs, the regime weakened, the elite disaffected, and the United States
weak, in October 2011, was the word given by the Brotherhood leadership
to move into a revolutionary stage.
Nevertheless, within the Brotherhood,
there had always been more militant factions, which sympathized with the
revolutionaries and perhaps even imitated them. Periodically,
individuals and groups had left the organization to join or establish
radical groups. Moreover, by spreading Islamist ideas and taking over
major institutions–including mosques and professional groupings–the
Brotherhood was extending its influence throughout the society and
providing a potential base of ideology and supporters for the militants’
violence.[2]
Again, it should be stressed that the
Brotherhood and the Salafists openly made clear that they agreed on
goals. Their dispute was only over the best methods that would most
likely achieve those goals. The Brotherhood believed, based on its
experience, that the regime would defeat any insurgency. Nevertheless,
in the 1990s, Egyptian Islamists–especially the al-Jihad and the Islamic
Group, which emerged from the Jam’iyat Movement (al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya)–waged
a revolutionary war against the regime that peaked during the decade’s
first half and declined thereafter. They were defeated for a variety of
reasons, including the government’s clever, multi-layered strategy; the
strength of the regime’s institutions and the security agencies’
loyalty; the lack of popular support for the radicals; and the divisions
among the insurgent groups.
Among the Salafists’ weaknesses
then–like today–were their many splits. A cleric involved in al-Jihad
remarked that the real reason there were “thousands” of groups and
factions was that “everybody wishes to be a leader.”[3]The
broadest divide would be between those who came out of the Jam’iyat
groups, who were Islamists involved in grassroots community organizing,
and the al-Jihad forces, which originated as a group bent on armed
struggle. An estimated 300 to 700 al-Jihad members had fought with the
mujahidin in Afghanistan against the Soviets. This gave them military
experience as well as a basis for misestimating the problems of staging
an uprising at home.[4]
Jam’iyat insurgents were the first to
abandon the armed struggle, when they concluded it was not working. In
contrast, while some in al-Jihad were ready to give up violence by the
end of the 1990s, others wished to continue the battle against Egypt’s
government or joined Usama bin Ladin in proclaiming that the United
States should be the prime target. As the original Islamist activists
from the 1970s and 1980s were killed, imprisoned, or lost interest in
revolutionary action, those staging the revolt became younger and less
educated.
According to an Egyptian study, only 33
percent of the 1970s militants had been under 25 years of age, while
this was true of 71 percent in the 1990s. While 79 percent of the
activists in the 1970s had an academic education, by the 1990s, this had
fallen to 20 percent. In addition, while as few as 8 percent of the
militants in the 1970s had come from rural areas, in the 1990s, this
rose to 54 percent from villages and shantytowns. The revolutionaries’
profile had moved closer to that of the typical Egyptian, but the
quality of leadership fell and the movement became more tied to Upper
Egypt, where organization was easier but seizing state power harder.[5]
There were also particular problems with
the revolutionaries’ selection of violent tactics. These focused on the
assassination of officials, attacks on security forces, attacks on
Coptic Christians, and assaults on tourists. All these types of actions
raised problems for the radicals. Murdering people who were Arabs and
Muslims challenged both nationalist and traditional Islamic thinking and
was unpopular. Copts were at least fellow Egyptians and striking them
seemed to undermine national unity. Murdering tourists–though they were
foreigners and non-Muslims–damaged the livelihood of many Egyptians.
Thus, the armed struggle failed largely due to two fundamental problems:
the government defeated the rebels militarily and the masses did not
rally to their side.
By July 1990, 1,225 al-Jihad members were in jail, and the number of prisoners increased sharply in the next few years.[6] During March 1993, 21 people were killed and hundreds more arrested in nine raids in Cairo and Aswan.[7]In
December of the same year, an attack on an island in the Nile near
Asyut resulted in the arrest of scores of suspected Islamic Group
members who, the government declared, were planning to assassinate
officials and bomb government offices. Between the end of 1992 and the
end of 1994, Egyptian military courts sentenced 58 Islamists to death
(20 of them in 1994), 41 of whom were executed (13 in 1994).[8] Still,
for a time, the level of insurgency grew. At least 70 people were
killed during 1992 in terrorist attacks and in subsequent clashes with
police, with twice as many injured.[9] Yet more than 300 people were killed in 1993, about the same number in 1994, and around 400 in 1995.[10]
Between 1992 and 1995, the war caused
the death of around 1,000 people, including Islamists, police, and
civilians. The pace of violence slowed in late 1995 and fell off further
in 1996 to less than 200 dead (some figures put it far lower) and 78
wounded.[11] Meanwhile, the police kept up the pressure arresting 3,630 alleged extremists in 1995 and 3,933 in 1996.[12]
A number of Islamic Group leaders were killed or captured. During 1996,
al-Jihad was so hard-hit that it did not even claim any attacks in
Egypt. Thus, the government defeated the insurgency, though it could not
eliminate the radical Islamists altogether.[13] The
number of deaths in 1998 from terrorist-related incidents was 47, less
than one-third the previous year and the lowest since 1992.[14]
It was at this moment that the radical
Islamists split, seeing the need for a new strategy. One group, mainly
from al-Jihad but including some Islamic Group members, joined forces
with Usama bin Ladin and redirected their target from Egypt’s government
to the United States.[15] Another
faction, mostly from the Islamic Group, called for a ceasefire with the
government, seeking to return to their earlier strategy as a more
militant version of the Brotherhood.[16]
As a result, the level of violence fell even further in 1999.[17]Though it had refused to negotiate, the government released more than 2,000 Islamic Group prisoners during the year.[18]
Despite the massive amount of suffering, casualties, and wasted
resources they had inflicted on Egypt, then, the Salafists had come
nowhere near staging a revolution.
A number of specific issues affected the
Salafists’ campaigns that continue to be of importance in the post-Arab
nationalist, Islamist era of Egypt, which followed the February 2011
revolution. One of these was their relationship to Christians. Although
the Salafists’ official line was that they would protect the right of
Coptic Christians, as long as they accepted subordinate status,
anti-Christian violence was one of their main themes.[19]There
were constant attacks on Copts, mainly in southern Egypt. In March
1990, for example, Islamists set fire to two Christian churches, a
Christian hospital, and other property in the Minya province after being
stirred up at a Friday prayer service by groundless rumors that a
Christian boy had seduced a Muslim girl. Islamist leaflets had urged
Muslims to “Wipe Out the Disgrace,” calling Christians “Crusaders.”
About 100 were arrested.[20]
In April 1990, after a false rumor that a
five-year-old Muslim girl had been raped by a Copt, Muslims again
attacked a church in Fayyum province, killing a guard and wounding 12
others.[21]
There were many such riots in Upper Egypt, resulting in many deaths. In
virtually every case, Muslims attacked Christians, setting fire to
houses, shops, and churches, killing people merely because of their
religion. The same pattern happened in the Inbaba district of Cairo, an
Islamist stronghold, where Copts were harassed.[22]
As noted above, by 1997, the insurgency
had been defeated and some of the Salafi revolutionaries reached that
conclusion. In July 1997, at the opening of a military trial of 97
militants accused of planning to put bombs in Cairo banks and tourist
offices, a defendant read a statement by six Islamic Group leaders
jailed for life in connection with Sadat’s assassination. They called
for an unconditional truce with the government. One of them, Abbud
al-Zumar, had been an al-Jihad leader who had joined the Islamic Group
in jail.[23]
Several imprisoned al-Jihad leaders and Umar Abd al-Rahman–from his
prison cell in New York where he had been jailed for involvement in the
first 1993 World Trade Center attack–endorsed the proposal.[24]
One of the Salafists’ main theorists was
Umar Abd al-Rahman. Acquitted of involvement in Sadat’s assassination
and again of subversion charges in 1990, he moved to New York. From
there, he sent fiery messages on audio cassettes calling for “a
merciless war, a no-holds-barred battle against the pharaohs and
atheists of Egypt.”
He told followers: “Before the flames go
out in Asyut, light more in Cairo. Before they bring Qina under
control, set the towns and villages of the Nile Delta aflame. Disperse
them before they disperse you. Fear not their threats….They are in their
death throes and will be crushed under your feet like dirty insects.”34
If a man like Abd al-Rahman could
endorse a truce in 1997, the idea certainly had appeal for the most
unbending militants. Nevertheless, leaders of both groups outside Egypt,
mainly in Europe and Afghanistan, criticized the plan, claiming it as a
regime plot to divide the opposition and end the insurgency. Some
observers considered the November 1997 massacre of tourists at Luxor as a
sign intended to show a rejection of the truce and continuation of the
struggle. Abd al-Rahman also withdrew his approval for the peace
initiative.[25]
The government, however, was equally
opposed to the initiative, branding it propaganda to prevent the rebels
impending defeat. Deals, they said, could be concluded between sovereign
states, not between a government and a “criminal” organization.[26]
In November, the jailed leaders renewed their call for abandoning
terror and shifting to non-violent action. This time, however, they
conditioned any ceasefire on an end to the government’s campaign against
Islamic groups and its agreement to break relations with Israel. Again,
the move was angrily rejected by Egyptian Islamists abroad who termed
it “defeatist and submissive” and a “betrayal of the memory of our
martyrs.”[27]
Nevertheless, in March 1999, the Islamic
Group’s leaders adopted a decision to stop violence inside and outside
Egypt. The long insurgency, or at least the main battle, was over. In
June 2002, the Egyptian government sponsored a convention in an isolated
prison where 500 jailed members of the Islamic Group discussed ending
their involvement in violence based on a rejection of killing civilians
that they now found in Islamic law. More than 1,500 members of the group
were released from prison by the Mubarak regime after signing
anti-violence pledges.
THE AL-QA’IDA DIVERSION
The importance of al-Qai’da in the
history of Islamism is actually more marginal than it might seem from
the massive study and headlines it generated. Al-Qa’ida had three
innovations of importance.
The first innovation was that the
movement be international, fighting simultaneously on all fronts. While
the Muslim Brotherhood had been an international group, it had a limited
number of branches, only four of real significance. However, this only
succeeded, because the organization–especially after the U.S.
destruction of the center in Afghanistan and long before Usama bin
Ladin’s assassination–was so loose. Basically, local groups could simply
affiliate with al-Qa’ida without being its actual creation.
The second innovation was that it would
make the West, and particularly the United States, the main target of
attack, most notably in the September 11, 2001, assault. This point,
however, became less salient once it became possible for al-Qa’ida to
operate in Muslim-majority countries. As a factor in Western psychology
and policy, then, al-Qa’ida’s focus on the West remained huge, but as a
political strategy, it was largely abandoned, except for scattered
“reminder” attack attempts.
The final innovation was the movement
would focus on one activity, terrorist attacks, and try to carry out a
“permanent revolution.” In other words, it was always the right time to
wage armed struggle and that battle wouldn’t stop until the movement was
wiped out. Other, smaller groups had taken that road in Egypt but had
not lasted very long before being destroyed by the government.
Understandably, this approach was not a great revolutionary strategy,
especially against more sophisticated groups that built mass bases and
knew how to change gears, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and even
other Salafi groups.
As a result of these factors, and
despite the important Egyptian component in al-Qai’da, the group did not
have much impact on Egypt. Still, it did play an important role in
Egyptian Salafi history. One critic of the 1997 ceasefire was a former
al-Jihad (and now al-Qa’ida) leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose life
embodied the Egyptian movement’s history and the ideological crossroads
at which it had arrived in the 1990s. Zawahiri joined the first al-Jihad
cell in Cairo in 1966, when he was only 16 years old. He came from a
very wealthy and influential Egyptian family and studied medicine.[28]
Zawahiri was working at a Muslim
Brotherhood sponsored medical clinic in 1980, when its director asked
him to go to Afghanistan to provide medical assistance for those
fighting the Soviets. He returned after four months but was imprisoned
for three years following Sadat’s assassination. He was released in 1984
and returned to Afghanistan in 1986. There, he played a leading role in
the development of Usama bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida group. In February 1998,
he signed the statement of The Global Front for Fighting Jews and
Crusaders. He played a leading role in the August 1998 bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Responding to these deeds, Western
governments rounded up al-Jihad leaders in exile and put them in prison
or extradited them to Egypt, including Zawahiri’s own brother, Muhammad
(for his post-2011 career–see below). At the subsequent trial, one
prominent al-Jihad figure, Ahmad Salamah Mabruk–Zawahiri’s right-hand
man who had earlier been sentenced to death–testified against his
colleagues. As a result of this case, Ayman himself was sentenced to
death in absentia in April 1999 and became a fugitive after the U.S.
offensive in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s fall in November 2001,
although he continued his revolutionary efforts and rose in the
al-Qa’ida hierarchy. Indeed, it is probable that Egyptian Islamists were
the largest group of Arab al-Qa’ida members.[29]
Despite his criticisms of colleagues and
other Islamist groups, Zawahiri depicts the Islamist revolution in
Egypt as a succession of heroic battles by courageous warriors whom the
masses will soon join. In fact, though, his account chronicles a series
of total defeats and almost total failures punctuated by factional
splits and quarrels. His description of the movement’s greatest moment
and crushed uprising–after its assassination of Sadat in 1981–is typical
in this regard. About all Zawahiri could do to illustrate his claims
for the movement’s popularity is to cite one of the lawyers voicing
support for Sadat’s killing. In other words, despite his intentions,
Zawahiri’s book is a case study of why the armed struggle, al-Qa’ida
model has always failed in Egypt.
In his book, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner: Meditations on the Jihadist Movement,
Zawahiri makes two main arguments. First, he critiques both the
strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood for not being revolutionary and using
violence and some of his own former colleagues for giving up armed
struggle. Second, he urges that the main struggle should be waged
against America and Israel, or Christians and Jews, rather than in an
effort to overthrow Egypt’s government directly. He argues, so to speak,
that the road to Cairo runs through Washington and Jerusalem. Of
course, despite his claim that the movement was now united on ideology,
Zawahiri’s own actions show this not to be the case and in fact brought
about a split in al-Jihad.
Throughout 2001, Egyptian Islamists
threatened additional terrorist attacks against American targets, often
linked with a demand for Abd al-Rahman’s release. The appeal of the
anti-American orientation was based on the failure of alternative,
anti-regime strategies. Yet whatever the impact of the September 11,
2001, attacks on New York and Washington elsewhere, it did not have any
serious effect within Egypt.
Equally, once again, the Brotherhood
stood aloof in the decade after 2000 and from the anti-Western terrorism
strategy, as it had during the 1990s, and the anti-regime terrorism
strategy. Only in October 2010 did the Brotherhood’s leader give the
signal for a revolt based on a mass uprising–at least in Cairo–due to
his perception that the weakness of the Mubarak regime and of the United
States made the time ripe for an Islamist revolution.
Thus while Egypt was going to have an
Islamist revolution, it was quite different from the one envisioned by
the 1990s Salafists or by the al-Qa’ida supporters. Indeed, it was a
revolution that–contrary to the revolutionaries of the 1990s–was made
with the backing of the army and–contrary to the al-Qa’ida
revolutionaries–was in fact made with the backing of the United States.
CONTEMPORARY SALAFI GROUPS
A revolution was indeed made in 2011,
but it came not from the barrels of the Salafists’ guns but from the
now-activated Muslim Brotherhood, their junior moderate allies, and the
Egyptian army. Of course, once the regime had been overthrown and
elections were going to be held, the Salafists no longer needed to
engage in armed struggle. They had a realistic chance of achieving their
goals by political means plus social intimidation.
Indeed, the Salafi groups avoided
conflict with the military during the junta period of 2011-2012. They
did not have sufficient reason to believe that the army would block them
from attaining a Shari’a state and so were patient. It is very
important to note that the reason Salafists have not engaged in a higher
level of violence against the junta, the Brotherhood, or the Mursi
regime is that they seemed to be making good progress toward their
goals.
Here is an important principle in
studying the politics of this contemporary era: Violence (including
terrorism) is not the main measure of radicalism. Instead, the way to
judge the extremism of a group is the organization’s ideology, goals,
and seriousness in seeking total victory. Strategic and tactical
flexibility should be taken into account but does not mitigate the
threat posed by the objective toward which any political force is
striving. As noted above, deep divisions stemming from rivalry among
leaders and often minor doctrinal disputes have greatly weakened the
Salafists, who cannot compete with the Brotherhood’s unity and
discipline. The key underlying issue is precisely how patient or
impatient, flexible or hardline to be on specific questions at specific
moments.
While the Salafi party received almost
25 percent of the votes in the first parliamentary elections, the
successful al-Nour Party soon split. Moreover, the Salafists were
powerless to stop the disqualification of their main presidential
candidate. It would be interesting to know how many Salafists stayed
home as opposed to those who voted for al-Mursi in the second round of
the presidential election.
There would be a huge number of Salafi
groups competing for followers, influence, and attention in post-2011
Egypt. Here are only the most important of them.
Al Da’wa al-Salafiyya (Salafi Call) and the al-Nour Party
This parent group of the al-Nour Party arose from the al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, being founded in 1984 and disbanded by the state in 1994, when its leaders were arrested.
It was reconstituted in 2011 and was an important factor in the
creation of the al-Nour umbrella party of Salafists. The group’s most
active leader is Yasir Husayn Burhami, whose father was a Muslim
Brother, who is also vice-president of the al-Nour Party.[30]
The organization does not support armed struggle. Al-Nour’s president
was Imad Abd al-Ghafour, a medical doctor, who lived mostly abroad
before the 2011 revolution–in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey–and
returned home to organize unity among Salafists. Given the many
personalities and views present among Salafists, the formation of
al-Nour–joined by two smaller parties in a cooperative election
campaign–was an impressive achievement. This unity, however–as will be
seen–did not long outlive the elections.
Those Salafists involved in these two,
widely overlapping, groups are not straitjacketed by ideology but know
how to build a mass base and how to maneuver politically. For example,
the party has a populist economic platform saying that monopolies should
be broken up, consumers should be protected, workers’ rights protected,
and that the country should be made self-sufficient in food production.
It also advocates increased research. While the party declared in its
platform and elsewhere–taking a normal stance by Islamists–that loans
cannot be taken for interest payments,[31]the leadership reversed itself after the election rather than forfeit massive international loans for Egypt.
Another interesting feature of the party
was how the demand for Shari’a was reconciled with political realities.
The transition, leaders said, could be gradual, and progress,
prosperity, and science should be respected. Party leaders said they
wanted a “modern state” but that this did not necessarily entail such a
state being secular. This did not mean that all leaders or parliamentary
candidates were so restrained with some taking a triumphalist or
deliberately provocative stance. Still, the point is that while the
Salafists are radical, this does not mean they are politically foolish.
The party platform was also very vague
on international relations and said–as did the Brotherhood–that the
Egypt-Israel peace treaty should be kept or discarded based on a
referendum. In other words, the Salafists did not put a high priority on
confrontation with the West or the United States as a matter of
principle. Clearly, the creation of a Shari’a state and the entrenchment
of an Islamist regime in Egypt was the most immediate objective.
Foreign ambitions could wait.[32]
While the al-Nour party wanted to
maintain its independence from the Brotherhood, it also clearly
recognized that the two parties were aligned against non-Islamist forces
in an alliance. Moreover, the party did not in the election attack the
Brotherhood as much as it might have as being too soft in pushing
Shari’a law and other measures it favored. While one al-Nour leader
said, “We don’t rule out the possibility of the Brotherhood trying to
marginalize us; we had already noticed that before. They might continue
to portray us as the troublemakers.” Yet the Brotherhood also did not
criticize al-Nour as too extreme either. The same party leader expressed
al-Nour’s willingness to join in a “national unity government.”[33]
Nevertheless, al-Nour backed not the
Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Muhammad Mursi, but the so-called moderate
Islamist Abd al-Moneim Abu al-Fattouh in the first round of the
presidential election. Why is this so? First, because maintaining
independence from the Brotherhood was more important to it than a united
front with the Brotherhood. Second, because Fattouh was less moderate
in the Salafi view than he was in the eyes of the West. When faced,
however, with a choice between Mursi and a non-Islamist candidate in the
presidential election’s second round, al-Nour backed Mursi.[34]
There are two other Islamist parties
that ran jointly with al-Nour in the parliamentary election and took the
same stance in the presidential election.[35]
The Asala or Authenticity party was formed after the revolution by Abel
Abd al-Maqsoud Afifi. He had an unusual previous career for an Islamist
leader, having worked for 33 years in the Egyptian government, mostly
in the Immigration and Citizenship Department.[36]
One distinctive aspect of the party’s
platform was its foreign policy, advocating that Egypt take leadership
in the Islamic world.[37]In general, though, it has no clear reason, other than its personalist nature, for remaining a separate organization.[38] Like the other Islamist political parties, it does not openly advocate violence.[39]
The third Islamist party allied with
al-Nour is the Building and Development Party, many of whose key figures
were involved as al-Jama’a cadre in the 1990s violence.[40]
Indeed, some of its leaders were convicted in 1982 in the assassination
of President Anwar al-Sadat and were released from prison by the armed
forces’ junta in March 2011.[41]
Like the other two, it demands both the implementation of Shari’a while
promising Christians and women that their rights will be respected.[42]
THE IMF LOAN AS A CASE STUDY OF SALAFI DEBATE
The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
loan issue is a good case study of how Salafists are divided over how
much pragmatism and how much ideology should be applied to any given
issue. While pragmatism–wanting to gain power, accumulate wealth, appeal
to a potentially wider audience, and solve problems effectively–is an
attractive concept, so is adhering to what one strongly believes to be
the will of Allah, a position that can be backed up with quotations from
numerous fundamental Islamic texts. The spokesman for al-Nour, Yousry
Hammad, explained that the proposed IMF loan to Egypt did not involve
usury–which Shari’a law forbids–but only the payment for the
administrative expenses of the loan–which is permitted. He criticized
those who had spoken of rejecting the loan on Islamic grounds: “The
greatest of all problems is ignorance and when non-specialists take the
seats of scientists. If ignorant people had remained silent, most of the
problems of Egypt would have been resolved.”[43]
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