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Financial Times 

Islamist rivalry heats up in Egyptian election

A Salafist supporter waves an Egyptian flag in Cairo’s Tahrir Square

For decades Egyptian secularists have groused about the rise of Islamists and both have united in despising the military elite. But, after the revolution, the hottest and most novel political rivalry taking hold in the run-up to November 28 elections pits the old-school Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood against more fundamentalist Salafists and their political proxies.

You can see the rivalry at play on the streets of Alexandria, where someone has been ripping down the Muslim Brotherhood’s party posters and replacing them with advertisements for the Salafi-linked Nour party.

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In the city’s poorer neighbourhoods the parties are trying to outdo each other with charitable deeds and give-aways. And in private talks, they disparage each other as too liberal, too radical or too under the sway of foreign interests, even as their leaders claim to be united.

“Salafis were a movement of people who came from Saudi Arabia,” grumbles one Muslim Brotherhood candidate. “But we are an Egyptian movement.”

The rise of both the brotherhood and the Salafists in a post-Mubarak Egypt is a trend that terrifies the country’s secular liberals and Coptic Christians and has alarmed some foreign observers. Whether the Muslim Brotherhood can moderate the Salafists or whether the Salafists force the brotherhood to become more radical will also be an important factor in deciding the country’s future political course.

In public, the two Islamist movements have made a show of unity.

On Friday, both political movements will take to the streets of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in a big show of force against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ insistence that the military assigns 80 of the 100 members of the future constituent assembly and retains power over its own budget. At a recent pre-election conference in the grounds of a Cairo mosque, leaders of the brotherhood, Nour and other Islamic groups such as the Gamaa Islamiya, a once outlawed terrorist organisation that has sworn off violence and spawned a political party, spoke one after another from the dais and urged their followers to campaign ethically while trying to maximise Islamist gains.

But there are important doctrinal and political differences between the two strains.

Fifty parties fight for 500 seats

Egypt’s first free parliamentary election in more than 60 years is scheduled to start on November 28 and to take place over six weeks, writes Heba Saleh in Cairo.

About 50 parties and more than 5,000 independent candidates are competing for the 500 seats in the new parliament, which will oversee the drafting of a democratic constitution.

More than 40m Egyptians are eligible to cast ballots.

The election is being staggered because the law requires judges to preside over each polling station. Their numbers are insufficient for the entire country to vote at once.

Politicians view judicial supervision as a safeguard against fraud, which has been a hallmark of most previous Egyptian polls.

Freedom and Justice, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, is regarded as the frontrunner. Seeking to reassure the military and foreign partners anxious about Islamist rule, the brotherhood said it was not aiming for a majority. The party has candidates in about 65 per cent of seats.

An array of other Islamist groups is also competing. Nour is the largest Salafi party, but its electoral weight is hard to predict.

Other formations, from socialists to liberals, are also in the race.

Members of Hosni Mubarak’s disbanded National Democratic party have set up seven parties, while others are running as independents.

The brotherhood has long been a fixture of Egyptian political life and played a key role in the uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak. Its members walked arm in arm with the Facebook and Twitter activists who led the January revolt against the former regime.

Their decade-long experience as members of the parliament under Mr Mubarak left them familiar with both the mechanics of politics and the complexity of the Egyptian body politic. Its leaders almost always pay lip service to democracy and pluralism. The brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party even includes a couple of Christian candidates.

The Salafists, on the other hand, outline a draconian vision for an Islamic utopia ruled by sharia law. They have spent the past 30 years holed up in mosques and religious schools, immersed in books and websites produced in Saudi Arabia. They speak about justice and wisdom in abstract terms, sprinkling their responses to questions with Koranic verses.

“Even if we can’t provide economic renewal, it’s enough if we can lift the non-believers up and show them monotheism,” says Said Abdul-Azzim Ali, the leader in Alexandria of Nour, which means light in Arabic and carries religious connotations. “In Islam, religion and the state are the same thing. Politics, economics, society, ethics – it’s a comprehensive religion that encompasses all aspects of life.”

No one knows how many seats Egypt’s Salafists will win in upcoming elections for the new parliament, which will play at least some role in shaping the country’s constitution. Arcane new rules, staggered vote dates spread out over several months and the presence of more than 5,000 candidates from dozens of new parties exponentially expand the variables.

But Islamists are expected to gain a large share of the vote and, though rivals, the brotherhood and Salafists are in communication and fine-tuning their poll strategy to maximise seats.

“In some districts for some seats where we’re both running, of course there’s competition,” says Sobhi Saleh Musa, a leading candidate for the brotherhood in Alexandria, a bastion of Islamic activism as well as a home to many Coptic Christians who feel threatened by the Salafists. “In other districts, we are pulling out so that one of us wins.”

But analysts believe the overwhelmingly poor and pious Egyptian masses, many of whom resent the wealthy urban elites, are likely to respond well to the thick-bearded politicians and their simple message of justice.

“Salafists are struggling between urban and rural, Bedouin and modern,” said Said Sadek, a political sociologist at the American University of Cairo. “They want to cover over this struggle with religious terminology. They depend on poor, disgruntled youth from the countryside.”

Much as they may want to break down that divide, the Salafists sometimes appear to lack political savvy. On television they can appear too honest about their views on morality, sexuality and the role of Islam in public life. And for may urban Egyptians they remain the butt of jokes for things such as the flowers they feature on posters as substitutes for photos of female candidates in keeping with strict Islamic mores.

They remain a target of suspicion for many secular political activists, who suspect the ruling military has given the Salafists free rein even as they crack down on the civil society activists to draw votes away from the brotherhood and cause secular Egyptians to scurry into the army’s arms out of fear.

Many openly accuse Saudi Arabia of funding the Nour party as a way to control the direction of the Egyptian revolution. Nour party activists insist they are no one’s tool and that they will turn the tables on anyone seeking to take advantage of them.

“Even if they are using us this is a good opportunity for us to show the people who we are,” says Imad Abdul Ghafour, a leading Nour party candidate in Cairo. “This doesn’t mean we won’t criticise the military when they do something wrong.” After the election results are announced early next year, “the military should go back to its barracks and leave the rule to civilians”.