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Today on the website of al-Masry al-Youm newspaper was a light-hearted story poking fun at the Salafis, the fundamentalist Muslims who have become increasingly visible since the fall of former President Hosni Mubarak.
“Salafis cover ‘revealing’ statue in Alexandria”, read the headline, which topped a piece about how at a rally of al-Nour, the most prominent Salafi political party, activists had covered the modesty of an artwork depicting the Greek god Zeus surrounded by four muses.
Organisers of the rally had apparently placed a sign over the statue saying that “Egyptian women are dedicated to their husbands and their homeland”.
The sniggering tone of the piece was hard to suppress, and encapsulates the attitude of many liberal and secular Egyptians towards the more hardline Islamist elements involved in this month’s upcoming elections.
It can perhaps best be described thus: they do not know whether to laugh or cry.
For some liberals the Salafis are a fringe amusement spending too much time worrying about the decorum of public artworks. But for others they are a regressive force for harm who could still sway a sizeable proportion of the vote later this month.
Naturally there are many Egyptians who see them as neither. Salafi ideas have permeated deep into Egyptian society over the past 20 years, with the rising numbers of veiled women and increasing prominence of Salafi TV preachers mirroring a general slide towards religious conservatism.
Speaking to The Majalla this week, Dr Yousry Hammad, a leading member of al-Nour, touched on one the topics which so outrages many liberals, particularly in the West – the question of sharia law.
He said that under Islamic law it is permissible to cut a thief’s hand off if he has committed a crime, and that sharia was necessary to ensure the safety of society.
“In Western society you punish people by putting them in prison for many years,” he said. “In Islam we cut off their hands.”
Dr Hammad explained his groups thinking in the context of other policy areas. He said that under Islam, from which al-Nour takes its primary influences, it is necessary to provide citizens with a number of rights including that of shelter, work, marriage and security.
If a criminal threatens these rights then he should be punished, he said.
Although some commentators believe that the Salafi political parties are unlikely to win big at the parliamentary elections, nobody is really sure how much support they will pick up. Despite the more lurid-sounding policies of the party on issues of crime and punishment, their views on Islam’s role in society are not so divergent from the population at large.
Though not as mighty as the Muslim Brotherhood – whose political wing could pick up close to 40 per cent of the vote – the Salafis in general, and al-Nour in particular, could yet be hiding a sting in the tail for Egypt’s liberals.
