Egypt's hard-line Islamists speak up, creating unease

At 2 a.m. on a tense night just before Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak was toppled, Yehia el Sherif and other members of his ad-hoc neighborhood watch group noticed a car carrying two men with long beards approach their checkpoint in the port city of Alexandria.

The watchmen didn't order the car to stop — the men inside turned off the engine, offered a vehicle search and presented their ID cards without prompting, Sherif, a 21-year-old college student, recalled. After the search, the bearded men passed out pamphlets espousing the rigid ideology of the Salafis, an ultraconservative branch of Islam whose literalist interpretations are anathema to Muslim moderates and liberals.

The car sped off into the night, leaving Sherif and his neighbors slack-jawed as they realized the Salafis had engineered the episode as a chance to proselytize — they were driving the dark and menacing streets to spread the message that Islam was the only way out of Egypt's political crisis.

"They knew they'd be stopped and searched and that would allow them to give out the pamphlets, which were all about strict and stern Sharia law," Sherif said. "That's when we thought, 'Yeah, maybe we should be concerned.'"

Now the possibility that Salafis may enter Egypt's mainstream politics is raising concern that their beliefs could one day become a dominating force in life here — something that U.S. diplomats have been concerned about for at least two years.

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