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The Salafi movement in Egypt illustrates that the dynamics of sectarianism are fluid and sometimes contradictory. Over the last five years, the Salafi party, Hizb al-Nour, has taken a pragmatic, flexible approach to politics, but maintained its intransigent religious stances. While the party has made several political concessions and decisions that go against the Salafi doctrine, it considered them necessary to protect the “interest of the Da‘wa” and hold its position of influence among society—justifications that the Salafi Da‘wa, the religious organization behind Hizb al-Nour, has largely accepted despite some internal conflict. Arguably, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb al-Nour does not behave like an Islamist party, at least in its current form; for Salafis, politics is just a means to an end. 

Hizb al-Nour’s Political Aims and Internal Divisions

• Hizb al-Nour was founded in 2011 by Salafis who decided that, in the postrevolution era, they needed a party of their own to have a say in the transition.
• The president and founder of Hizb al-Nour, Imad Abd al-Ghaffour, envisioned a party separate from the Salafi Da‘wa, believing that being a politician is different than being a sheikh.
• However, Yasir Burhami and other Da‘wa sheikhs contested this view over the next year, asserting that the party should principally act as the organization’s lobbying arm.
• In essence, these Da‘wa leaders resented Abd al-Ghaffour’s independence, especially after Hizb al-Nour had proven its relevance during the parliamentary elections. Through reminding his audience of the religious lines Salafis should not cross, Burhami succeeded in gaining control of the party in December 2012. However, Abd al-Ghaffour’s forced resignation has not dramatically changed Hizb al-Nour’s approach to politics.

Hizb al-Nour’s Pragmatism and Why It Is Not an Islamist Party

• Hizb al-Nour has consistently taken a pragmatic approach to politics, but the reasons for that pragmatism have changed over time, depending on the nature of the party’s leadership.
• From 2011 to 2012, the pragmatism of Hizb al-Nour was somewhat comparable to that of other mainstream Islamist parties—in that, as it adapted to the political game and aimed to become a viable political force, the party moderated its positions by revising (or putting aside) some of its doctrinal tenets. 
• Since 2013, Hizb al-Nour, led by sheikhs, has adopted a purely instrumental approach to politics. The party aims to defend the interest of the Da‘wa (in other words, protect and possibly reinforce the religious movement that it represents) and uses arguments of necessity to justify its concessions.
• The party’s recent stances, especially during the military takeover in July 2013 and in its aftermath, can best be explained by analyzing Hizb al-Nour not as an Islamist party, but as the lobbying arm of a religious organization.
• The paradox of the party’s extreme political pragmatism and its rigidity and sectarianism at the doctrinal level seems sustainable and likely to remain.

Introduction

Salafis are known for their doctrinal intransigence and strong condemnations of any group or movement that does not share their religious views. Before the Arab Spring, with a few minor exceptions such as in Kuwait, Salafis limited their presence to the social sphere and refused to join the political game. This trend was reversed in the wake of the Arab Spring, when Salafi political parties started being established in various Arab countries, most successfully in Egypt. So, how did this politicization of Salafism affect the movement’s religious stances and its relationship to other social and political forces?

The party adopted an extremely pragmatic attitude toward politics, allying itself with groups and parties that shared little of its religious ideology.

One of the biggest surprises of the postrevolutionary period in Egypt was not the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood, which many had predicted, but the emergence of Hizb al-Nour (the party of light), a Salafi party founded in June 2011, as a strong contender to the Brotherhood and the second-largest party in the parliament.¹ The political behavior Hizb al-Nour adopted from the start puzzled most observers, who had expected it to become an Islamist party on the far right of the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore much more politically intransigent. It is true that the Salafi sheikhs behind Hizb al-Nour, belonging to a religious organization called the Salafi Da‘wa, were repeatedly taking virulent religious stances against non-Salafi religious groups, such as Sufis, Shia, or Christians, as well as against competing political forces, including liberals and the Brotherhood. Yet, the party adopted an extremely pragmatic attitude toward politics, allying itself with groups and parties that shared little of its religious ideology. Following the July 3, 2013, coup, Egyptian pro-army liberals commonly praised Hizb al-Nour, which had backed the coup, labeling the party as moderate while describing the Brotherhood as intractable radicals. However, many liberals reconsidered their view once it became clear that the party’s political pragmatism did not entail the renouncement of its religious views, despite apparent attempts at backtracking on some of its more controversial positions.

Hizb al-Nour offers the rare example of a party that has been both extremely pragmatic in its political positions and strongly sectarian and intransigent in its religious stances. The balance between those two sides of Hizb al-Nour’s discourse has depended on power shifts within the party. Initially, the party’s founders made a genuine attempt to resolve some of the contradictions between its political and religious stances by arguing that politics was by nature a distinct domain from religion and entailed separate rules. But in late 2012, the sheikhs took control of the party, leading to a different, and purely instrumental, approach to politics based on what was perceived to be in the interest of the Salafi Da‘wa. The party’s recent stances can thus be better explained by analyzing Hizb al-Nour not as an Islamist party, but as the lobbying arm of a religious organization whose goal fundamentally remains changing society from below, not from above.

The Roots of Hizb al-Nour: The Salafi Da‘wa

The origins of Hizb al-Nour lie in a powerful religious organization called al-da’wa al-salafiyya (the Salafi Da‘wa, or the Salafi Call). First called al-madrasa al-salafiyya (the Salafi school), the Da‘wa was established in 1977 by Alexandrian former members of the Islamist student groups known as gama‘at islamiyya who refused the decision of the gama‘at’s leadership to join the Muslim Brotherhood. Those members had embraced Salafism and saw the Brotherhood’s understanding of Islam as fundamentally unorthodox. Besides, the Da‘wa’s priority was not to strive for political change, but to spread its Salafi conceptions to society. For that purpose, although comprising all doctors and engineers by training, Da‘wa members established themselves as sheikhs, whose main activity would be to preach in Alexandria’s mosques.²

In their sermons, they preached “Sunni orthodoxy” against the beliefs and practices of Sufis, Shia, Christians, and liberal Muslims; they called for ultraconservative social practices inspired by the Prophet’s sunna (tradition), producing fatwas and books prohibiting ikhtilat (gender-mixing) and men shaking hands with women or encouraging Muslim men to grow beards;³ but they largely avoided discussing hot political topics, and when they did discuss issues of governance, they stuck to theoretical statements. For instance, they considered democracy, and all kinds of political systems claiming their legitimacy from the people and not from God, to be contrary to Islam,⁴ but they avoided publicly denouncing the Egyptian regime. They also refused to participate in elections, arguing that change would only come from below by spreading their message to create al-ta’ifa al-mu’mina (the community of the believers).⁵

Their project was, in a sense, to borrow from the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational playbook, while replacing the Brotherhood’s message with Salafism.

The peculiar circumstances of its creation thus made the Salafi Da‘wa different from previous Salafi organizations in Egypt, such as Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya (the supporters of the Prophet’s tradition), which was founded in 1926. The Da‘wa’s founders had all been student activists in the 1970s, so they decided to apply the principles of organized activism to Salafism. Their project was, in a sense, to borrow from the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational playbook, while replacing the Brotherhood’s message with Salafism. Though the Da’wa has not reached the degree of institutional sophistication that characterizes the Brotherhood, it nevertheless has developed its own organizational pyramid headed by a qayyim⁶—the functional equivalent of the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, although no formal bay‘a (pledge of allegiance) was required in the case of the qayyim. Numerous branches and sections were established, and a council of scholars including the Da’wa’s founders was tasked with running the organization. The “activist Salafism” of the Da‘wa was justified through Salafi fatwas, notably by Kuwaiti-naturalized, Egyptian Salafi sheikh Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Khaliq, about the religious legality of collective action.⁷

The Da‘wa’s influence grew from the 1980s onward, not only because of its organizational structure and resulting power to mobilize but also due to favorable political circumstances. Because of its apparent lack of interest in politics, the Egyptian security apparatus generally considered the Da‘wa as more benign than most Islamist groups. For instance, only a few Da‘wa members were detained after former president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981, when Islamists from all factions, including those unconnected to the event, were thrown in jail. In the decades that followed, the Da‘wa was generally subjected to less pressure than the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadi groups—at times, the government even saw the Da‘wa as a useful counterforce. Although the Da‘wa was sometimes forced to dismantle some of its sections and its leaders were repeatedly arrested—a sign that the security apparatus lacked confidence in the Da‘wa’s commitment to the status quo—its affiliates were generally released more promptly than other Islamists. Despite the restrictions it faced, the Da‘wa was able to expand considerably, establishing a presence across Egypt (especially in the north), far from its original stronghold in Alexandria. Although this is impossible to prove, a widespread belief is that generous donations from associations and individuals in the Gulf may have helped provide the Da‘wa with the financial means to grow.  

The growth of Salafism in Egypt was particularly quick in the 2000s. From 2006 onward, the government gave broadcasting licenses to Salafi channels, starting with Qanat al-Nas and later Qanat al-Rahma. Again, the government likely saw them as politically useful, because it assumed they drove conservative Muslims away from the politicized discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadi groups. By the end of the decade, those channels had become among the most widely watched in Egypt. Most of the sheikhs preaching on those channels were not officially affiliated with the Da‘wa—they were “independent sheikhs” such as Mohammed Husayn Ya‘qub, Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni, or Mohammed Hassan—but since the Da‘wa was by now the biggest Salafi group active in Egypt, the increasing appeal of Salafism helped to attract thousands of new members and increase its outreach.

Entering the Political Sphere

The January 25, 2011, revolution against former president Hosni Mubarak took the Salafi Da‘wa by surprise. The sheikhs had never believed that any genuine change could come through politics, so they first reacted by denouncing the event as a fitna (chaos, sedition) and advising their members not to participate in the protests.⁸ It was only a few days before the fall of Mubarak that the Da‘wa finally joined the demands for change. Just as the Muslim Brotherhood’s initial lack of commitment to the revolution prompted internal criticisms against the leadership, the Da‘wa was also internally criticized. Among the critical voices was Imad Abd al-Ghaffour, a medical doctor who had played a crucial role in establishing the Da‘wa in the late 1970s. While his ties with the organization declined over time—especially while abroad, including in Turkey where he had spent most of the 2000s—Abd al-Ghaffour still carried a lot of weight among the sheikhs. A few days after Mubarak’s official resignation on February 11, Abd al-Ghaffour, who claimed to be an early supporter of the revolution, decided that in the new revolutionary era that was emerging, Salafis needed their own political party to have a say in the transition. He went to see the sheikhs one by one, eventually convincing them to allow the creation of Hizb al-Nour, which he would head.⁹

The relationship between the party and the Da‘wa was quite strained from the beginning. Interviewed in April 2011, Yasir Burhami—who had officially become the Da‘wa’s number two after the qayyim Abu Idris but was in reality the organization’s strongman¹⁰—acknowledged the relationship between the Da‘wa and Hizb al-Nour but refused to describe Hizb al-Nour as the Da‘wa’s political arm.¹¹ The sheikhs either did not believe Abd al-Ghaffour’s project could be successful or were afraid the party’s stances could harm the Da‘wa.

The relationship between Abd al-Ghaffour and Burhami would continue to deteriorate steadily, although for different reasons. By fall 2011, it was clear that Hizb al-Nour was becoming a success. The party’s membership had grown exponentially, and it was now fielding candidates in all districts for the parliamentary elections. Its electoral posters were seen everywhere, and it had received the support of many prominent independent Salafi sheikhs. Hizb al-Nour went on to earn—as part of an “Islamic coalition” in which it was the senior partner—about 25 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections, making it the second-largest political party in Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.

To achieve that, Abd al-Ghaffour had endorsed moving away from the contentious religious discussions that were so prominent in the Salafi Da‘wa. He constructed a political discourse that in many ways was quite unexpected, leading the party to (1) pledge respect to the procedures and rules of democracy;¹² (2) put forward young men as spokesmen, both as a way of presenting itself as harboring the aspirations of the youth and of insisting that its officials were new (or clean) players; and (3) portray itself as favorable to the revolution and open to other political players both domestically and internationally.¹³ Its discourse even had almost leftist undertones, especially when the Salafis were trying to cast themselves as the real representatives of the poor, implicitly accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being the candidates of the conservative bourgeoisie.¹⁴ The party proudly retained its Islamic identity and continued calling for the implementation of shari‘a (Islamic law), but it insisted on a gradual and benign process, and Abd al-Ghaffour was adamant about focusing on politics, not theology. He even rejected the label “Salafi” for the party, arguing that it is a “party for all Egyptians.”¹⁵

Debating the Purpose of Hizb al-Nour

The party’s huge electoral gains awoke the interest of Yasir Burhami, who had not initially believed in the project.  He was now convinced that Hizb al-Nour could be a powerful tool in the hands of the Da‘wa. All he needed was to gain control of the party. For him, it was merely justice, since he believed the party’s achievements had only been possible because of the strengths of Da‘wa networks and not, as Abd al-Ghaffour proclaimed, because of the appeal of the party’s political discourse.¹⁶ Thus, in 2012, the party split into two factions: those loyal to party president Abd al-Ghaffour and those loyal to Da‘wa strongman Burhami.

The split did not simply revolve around the power dispute between Abd al-Ghaffour and Burhami; there was a more profound issue at stake. For Abd al-Ghaffour and his associates, Hizb al-Nour was to be a political party like all others,¹⁷ meaning that it would fully embrace the rules of the political game. It still saw itself as a religious party, but it was open to myriad alliances to advance its goals and be a government party with an applicable political program.¹⁸ To draft that program, Abd al-Ghaffour even put together a team of mostly non-Salafi academics.¹⁹

Abd al-Ghaffour believed his goal could only be achieved by making the party fully separate from the Da‘wa. As one close aide of Abd al-Ghaffour argued, “We may consult the Da‘wa sheikhs, whom we deeply respect, if we need a fatwa from them on a specific issue, but we don’t want them to meddle with the party’s daily business because this is politics and politics is not their specialty.”²⁰ Many who had been involved in the party since the beginning agreed with Abd al-Ghaffour. This was partly because—as a result of the Da‘wa’s initial reluctance toward Hizb al-Nour—many of them had not been closely tied to the Da‘wa and few were even religious scholars per se.²¹ After becoming an active part of the political game, many members of Hizb al-Nour saw themselves more and more as politicians and understood how different this was from being a sheikh.²²

Burhami had a different plan for the party. He believed the party’s gains should benefit the Da‘wa and maslahat al-da‘wa (the interest of the Da‘wa)should be the party’s main consideration in determining its positions.²³ Burhami was, of course, happy with the idea of Hizb al-Nour pushing for shari‘a-based legislation when possible, but he believed this should never be at the expense of the Da‘wa. Thus, Burhami was unwilling to see Hizb al-Nour as a regular political party; he considered it, above all, the lobbying arm of the Da‘wa in the political sphere. One could argue that Burhami’s position had not really changed since the pre-2011 period. He still did not consider politics a vehicle for change per se—at least not before society was religiously ready; as the Da‘wa had argued many times, reform would only come through preaching Salafi Islam to society, and protecting the body that did this was the only worthy goal.

Despite the huge differences between the Salafi Da‘wa and the Muslim Brotherhood, this quarrel somehow mirrored the debate that had existed since the mid-1990s between the Brotherhood’s “reformists”—who were willing to engage fully in politics and make the necessary compromises, including the separation between the gama‘a (the religious organization) and its political activities—and the “conservatives,” otherwise referred to as tanzimiyyun (organizationists), who believed that real change could only come through the gama‘a.²⁴ Like in Hizb al-Nour, this was both an intellectual and organizational debate. From 2009, the organizationists, led by Khayrat al-Shater, had taken control of the Brotherhood, leading to a new wave of reformist criticism in the wake of the revolution. Alluding to that comparison, Yusri Hammad, a former spokesman and dissident of Hizb al-Nour, declared, “Burhami wanted us to make the same mistakes the Brotherhood leadership was criticized for!”²⁵

To challenge Abd al-Ghaffour and question his independence, Burhami targeted the party’s excessive pragmatism by reminding his audience of the religious red lines Salafis are not allowed to cross. This was done through a series of fatwas published on Burhami’s website from January 2012. In one of those fatwas, he criticized Abd al-Ghaffour for saying on a talk show that Hizb al-Nour is open to people of all religious backgrounds and that he wishes Christians would run on Hizb al-Nour’s lists in the future;²⁶ this, Burhami argued, is forbidden because Christians should not be allowed in the parliament since this would give them wilaya (authority) over Muslims. Burhami also targeted Abd al-Ghaffour’s statement that Hizb al-Nour is open to alliances with all political parties, not just Islamist ones, including the Free Egyptians Party founded by Christian businessman Naguib Sawiris; Burhami responded by proclaiming that “any alliance with groups that oppose God’s Law is absolutely forbidden.”²⁷ Later, in 2012, one of Abd al-Ghaffour’s aides, party spokesman Mohammed Nour, was temporarily suspended from the party after Da‘wa sheikhs publicly criticized his attendance at an event at the Iranian embassy.²⁸ Burhami also attacked Abd al-Ghaffour for attending the national day celebrations at the Turkish embassy, arguing that those are nothing more than a “celebration of the end of the Ottoman caliphate.”²⁹ According to an associate of Burhami, Abd al-Ghaffour’s pragmatic behavior meant that he was trying to implement the “Turkish paradigm” of political Islam within Hizb al-Nour, and that was unacceptable.³⁰

The last time the two factions in Hizb al-Nour found common ground was during the presidential elections, when they jointly decided not to present a candidate and to back Abd al-Mun’im Abu al-Futuh, a reformist dissident of the Muslim Brotherhood who portrayed himself as a liberal Islamist and was trying to form a large coalition uniting parties and individuals from both sides of the political spectrum. Yet, each faction had a different rationale. The supporters of Abd al-Ghaffour saw Abu al-Futuh as an acceptable choice because he was a consensual Islamist and his election would be the most likely to guarantee the continuation of the political process and prevent the return of the security state. Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi was also quite popular among this group.³¹

Burhami believed the party’s gains should benefit the Da‘wa and maslahat al-da‘wa (the interest of the Da‘wa) should be the party’s main consideration in determining its positions.

Burhami and his allies saw things quite differently. Their main objective was to prevent the election of Morsi—because of both the longtime rivalry between the two organizations and the belief that giving the Brotherhood such power would harm the Da‘wa. In their view, the political hegemony of the Muslim Brotherhood was eventually going to result in the movement’s religious hegemony. To protect their religious presence, keeping Morsi out of power was thus a necessity. However, Burhami and his allies still believed they needed to back an Islamist candidate (especially after Burhami’s fatwa criticizing Abd al-Ghaffour’s openness to liberals), so this left three possible choices: Hazim Salah Abu Isma‘il, a proclaimed revolutionary Salafi who had no ties to the Da‘wa and was seen as much too politically uncontrollable;³² Mohammed Salim al-‘Awwa, who had barely any chance of winning and was known (and denounced by Salafis) for having good relations with Iran;³³ and Abu al-Futuh, whom Burhami and his allies disliked on a religious account but was seen as the lesser evil.³⁴

Since Abu al-Futuh lost in the first round (partly because grassroots Salafis were not enthusiastic about supporting such a liberal candidate), Hizb al-Nour leaders were faced with another dilemma for the second round: Mohammed Morsi or Ahmad Shafiq, Mubarak’s last prime minister. Here, they reluctantly decided to back the “Islamic candidate” Morsi, although they did not really support his campaign. Just before the announcement of the results, Burhami paid a cordial visit to Shafiq to negotiate favorable conditions if he were to prevail.³⁵

During the second half of 2012, Hizb al-Nour’s divisions became more visible. Proponents of Abd al-Ghaffour started accusing Burhami of meddling with the party’s affairs by pushing for the appointment of Da‘wa loyalists to key administrative positions. Since Hizb al-Nour had internal elections scheduled for the fall, the purpose was allegedly to assure the dismissal of Abd al-Ghaffour and his team and their replacement by pro-Da‘wa figures.³⁶ To voice their protest, Abd al-Ghaffour’s proponents established a “reform front” within the party, calling for the Da‘wa and party to fully separate—something they had been insisting on, but not publicly, for a year.³⁷ Tensions continued to escalate, with an attempt by pro-Burhami figures to pronounce Abd al-Ghaffour’s dismissal in September 2012. In December 2012, Abd al-Ghaffour and his allies announced that they were leaving Hizb al-Nour to establish their own political party, Hizb al-Watan (the party of the homeland), whose main slogans would be “the separation of politics and preaching (da’wa)” and “the preference for competence over loyalty to the sheikhs.”³⁸

This meant that the Da‘wa, and Burhami, had finally won. On January 9, 2013, a close associate of Burhami, Yunis Makhyoun, was elected unchallenged as president of the party. Abd al-Ghaffour’s line had been defeated and, after almost two years of ambiguity, Hizb al-Nour had finally become the political arm of the Salafi Da‘wa.

A Different Kind of Salafi Pragmatism

Hizb al-Nour’s takeover by Burhami and the Salafi Da‘wa did not put an end to the party’s pragmatism, however. Its pragmatism just changed in nature, driven by different considerations.

Hizb al-Nour’s half-hearted support for Morsi during the second round of the presidential election had not done much to fix the relationship between the Da‘wa and the Brotherhood. Hizb al-Nour had apparently hoped that Morsi would make it part of the national unity government he had promised his backers between the two rounds. But, just like most other political factions that had bet on Morsi, Hizb al-Nour was deeply disappointed. Despite being the country’s second biggest political force and a fellow Islamic party, all it was granted were three appointments within Morsi’s presidential team. Two Hizb al-Nour officials, Khaled ‘Alam al-Din and Bassam al-Zarqa, were appointed to a large and merely symbolic presidential advisory body, while then Hizb al-Nour president Abd al-Ghaffour was offered the position of presidential aide for social dialogue.³⁹ Giving the most senior position of the three to Abd al-Ghaffour made matters worse with the Da‘wa, who saw this as a Brotherhood move to play on Hizb al-Nour’s divisions.

Hizb al-Nour’s takeover by Burhami and the Salafi Da‘wa did not put an end to the party’s pragmatism.

Despite this view, Hizb al-Nour initially tried to adapt to the new political reality and avoided criticizing Morsi. An issue that brought the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Nour together was the constitution. A constitutional assembly was appointed by the parliament in early June 2012, a couple of weeks before the latter’s dissolution by the constitutional court. That assembly included Brotherhood and Salafi sympathizers in more or less the same proportion as in the parliament (about two-thirds). The two factions shared an interest in reinforcing the influence of Islam in the constitution, which was strongly opposed by the remaining members of the assembly (especially the liberals and Christians). Their objective alliance eventually produced the December 2012 constitution, which kept article two of the 1980 constitution (“The principles of shari‘a are the main source of legislation”) unchanged but added article 219 (“The principles of shari‘a include its general proofs, its fundamental and legal rules, and its recognized sources within the Sunni schools”) to ensure article two would now be legally binding.

In January 2013, Hizb al-Nour’s public position on Morsi markedly shifted, with increasingly critical statements emanating from the party’s spokesmen. There were three reasons for this change. First, now that the constitution had been adopted (both by the constitutional assembly and by a referendum where it received 63 percent of the votes), Salafis and the Brotherhood had lost the last shared interest they had. Second, the political tide was shifting against Morsi in the wake of the constitutional declaration he had issued in late November 2012 granting judicial immunity to the decisions of the presidency, which had resulted in demonstrations and bloody clashes in front of the presidential palace. Though Hizb al-Nour had opposed the initial protests in the name of “stability and order,” it now started voicing criticisms. Third, and maybe most importantly, the changes and appointments Morsi was making in the ministries were starting to worry the Da‘wa, which by then had taken over Hizb al-Nour. As Patrick Haenni has shown, the Brotherhood adopted different attitudes toward state institutions depending on whether they were seen as strong or weak.⁴⁰ In strong institutions, like the army or the interior ministry, Morsi never appointed Brotherhood or explicitly pro-Brotherhood figures and only tried to promote second-rank officials, after having made a deal with them to ensure their loyalty (ironically, this is how then general Abd Fattah al-Sisi was chosen to become the new minister of defense). In weak institutions, the Brotherhood’s involvement reached much further. One o