Egyptian meeting between the Nour Party and the National Salvation Front on January 31, 2013. A number of parties, religious groups and coalitions are holding dialogue aimed at resolving the political crisis., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
July 7, 2013
Islamist Party a Surprise Force in a New Egypt
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times
CAIRO — A party of ultraconservative Islamists has emerged as an unexpected political kingmaker in Egypt, shaping the interim government after the military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.
The Al Nour party, widely regarded two years ago as bumbling and amateur, now has unique leverage. It was the only Islamist party to support removing Mr. Morsi, despite his ties to the more moderate Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the sight of Al Nour’s bearded sheik, standing behind the general who announced the takeover on television, was the only signal to Egyptian voters that the move had not been an attack on Islam, as some of the ousted president’s supporters are saying.
The party played a starring role in the military’s choreographed presentation of its takeover as the chance to reunify a country on the brink of civil war between opponents and supporters of Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. But while Al Nour’s leaders say they intend to build bridges, some liberals say the party is pushing potentially divisive demands, from picking a new prime minister to keeping Islam prominent in any new constitution.
Over the weekend, Al Nour tested its leverage for the first time to force the retraction of an announced plan to name a liberal icon, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei, as interim prime minister.
“You just can’t do something like that, after we had appeared right next to you on the scene” at the televised announcement, Younis Makhyoun, a Nour party leader, said on Sunday. “We have grass roots,” Mr. Makhyoun added, “and they don’t agree on the choice of ElBaradei.”
Instead, state news media outlets reported on Sunday that the interim government was close to naming as acting prime minister Ziad Bahaa el-Din, a former head of Egypt’s investment authority. A Nour leader blessed him in a radio interview as “one of the liberal figures that we greatly respect.”
The party’s ability to block Mr. ElBaradei from the premiership raised new alarms from liberals about what the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, might demand next, even after the expulsion of the more moderate Brotherhood.
“This stage of the revolution was against this type of Islamist party,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers of the anti-Morsi protests. “We will not have any concessions when it comes to writing the constitution, and we will die for that,” he added, vowing that the charter should include “a separation of religion and politics, because parties should not be built on religion.”
Other organizers of the protests that helped force Mr. Morsi from office said they would stage new demonstrations in part against Al Nour.
Many of the party’s old Islamist allies, meanwhile, are denouncing Al Nour’s leaders as traitors, if not apostates, for turning on Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood.
“They are being used to beautify or whitewash this military coup,” said Gehad el-Haddad, a Brotherhood spokesman. “They are making enemies on both sides.”
For the sheiks of Al Nour, though, the Brotherhood’s fall is also an extraordinary opening. “They have a chance to be the main Islamist player in politics in post-Morsi Egypt,” said Samer Shehata, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma who studies Egypt’s Islamists.
“They see an opportunity to capitalize on the Brotherhood’s loss of support,” he said. “Who is left in formal politics under the banner of Islam now? It is the Nour party.”
The bedfellows could not be stranger. Since its inception two years ago, the Nour party has campaigned more than anything else for constitutional provisions enshrining Islamic law, not just “the principles of Islamic law,” as Egypt’s charter read for three decades. Al Nour and other Salafist parties sought to give religious scholars a constitutional power to strike down any legislation that they deemed contradictory to Islamic law. But in the drafting of the country’s new Constitution last year, the Muslim Brotherhood sided with the liberals to block such a provision. Al Nour succeeded in preventing an express guarantee of equality for women from being written into the new charter, and it has defended prohibitions of heresy.
When the ultraconservative Islamists first entered politics here two years ago, liberals called them Neanderthals for demanding literal-minded Islamic law, and the leaders of the Brotherhood wrote them off as neophyte rubes.
But the party’s tactics have demonstrated that it has developed skill at compromise and hardball.
Before the Egyptian revolution of 2011, most Salafis — the name refers to the companions of the Prophet Muhammad — shunned electoral politics. Their sheiks taught respect for the ruler of the state and a focus on obeying God’s law.
But after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure came more open elections, and Salafi parties captured nearly one-quarter of the seats in the new Parliament. They were led by Al Nour, which won the second-most seats after the Muslim Brotherhood.
As Egypt became acutely polarized between the Brotherhood and its opponents in the run-up to last week’s takeover, the Nour party was almost alone in urging both sides to compromise for the good of the country.
Al Nour broke with other Islamists in the weeks before the mass protests started against Mr. Morsi’s rule, issuing a call for him to resolve the political crisis with a sweeping package of concessions. Al Nour asked the president to name a new consensus cabinet including more of his opponents, to remove an unpopular prosecutor he had appointed and to reconsider his gubernatorial appointments.
The party urged all sides to stop justifying violence even in their own defense, to stop allowing their debates to be portrayed as for or against Islam, and to cool off their provocations before the country descended into “chaos,” Mr. Makhyoun said, “so that we don’t become a reason behind interposing the armed forces in the circle of infighting.”
Then, when millions of Egyptians took to the streets against Mr. Morsi, Al Nour’s leaders were the only Islamist politicians to call for an early presidential election.
“We offered many initiatives, but the president rejected all of them, until we were all shocked by the numbers” of people in the streets, Mr. Makhyoun said. “How did he expect to run a country like this?”
When he was summoned to a meeting between the military leadership and opposition political groups on the morning of the takeover, Mr. Makhyoun said, he urged the opposition to give Mr. Morsi more time.
“But we found that it was already over,” he said. “The armed forces had made up their minds, and the military was already moving on the streets.”
He said Al Nour had decided to accept the removal of Mr. Morsi by the military as the lesser evil, in the hope of lessening strife in the country.
Now, the party intends to use its new influence to protect the incorporation of Islamic law into the Constitution, which was approved in a referendum in December.
Bassam Al-Zarqa, the party’s vice president, said the liberals who called instead for a separation of religion and politics “want to incite a war between Islam and secularism.”
“They want to impose themselves as guardians of the Egyptian people, who should be the only decision-maker about the foundations of the political process,” Mr. Zarqa said.
Al Nour is now uniquely positioned to broker a new reconciliation of the political divide, he insisted. “We have been the only party between two extremes, the only one not playing a zero-sum game, “ he said. “We are the only ones who considered it a strategic mistake all along.”
But to anyone hoping the Salafis will now step aside, Mr. Zarqa warned: “We’re not a cartoon party or a group of puppets in others’ hands; we are deeply rooted among the people.”
Trying to exclude so large a segment of Egyptian society, he said, “has a very, very costly price.”
Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.
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