Bassem Sabry writes, in long piece on NSF travails, that Salafi-NSF made increasingly likely by shared hostility to MB:

Moreover, expanding the common ground with Al-Nour, the largest Salafi party, is a surprisingly possible undertaking at the moment, and the ground is fertile for that matter on nearly everything except the most profound: the amendment of the constitution. The opposition also needs to experiment with new strategies for exercising legitimate political pressure, with the target of bringing Morsi and the Brotherhood as realistically as possible back into a more inclusive democratic process. 

As I'm clearing old tabs I didn't get around to reading/posting in December when I was traveling, this Jadaliyya piece on Salafi Sheikh Yasser Borhami's take on the constitution — and his explanation of why the text of Article 219 in particular is a triumph for hardliners — is worth reading. They've also translated a video that made the rounds last month and earned a rebuke from al-Azhar itself. Worth watching to catch up on this issue, and read this and this for context on al-Azhar.

The most dangerous 18 minutes that Borhami said about the Eg from nahdaproject1 on Vimeo.

Note also that Borhami uses the word "Nasareen" — "Nazarinthians" — to refer to Christians, which in Egypt is considered quite rude.

Last week, before the war in Gaza broke out, I wrote an op-ed on Tunisia's Salafis for The National. It looks at how the Islamist perception of the legacy of Habib Bourguiba's authoritarian secularism fuels much of the rage of the Salafi movement, and explains why they attract so much attention in the media. 

In conversations with Tunisian Islamists over the last two years, I came to understand their view of the history of their country. Their problem was not just with the former Ben Ali regime, but with the legacy of Bourguiba: not just the repression, torture and prohibition from political life, but a disdain for religion in public life.

For Bourguiba, this went beyond bans of veiled women on state television and other measures to curtail visible appearances of religiosity. It was also state intimidation of religious people, the domestication of traditional religious authorities, and sometimes gratuitous insults on religious sentiment. Bourguiba, for instance, was in the habit of appearing on state television during Ramadan drinking during daytime, and urged others to do the same.

The capital crime of the Bourguiba regime in the Islamists' eyes was to estrange people from their religion, drive them away from their traditions and usurp their identity for something borrowed from Europe.

A lot of this, in other words, is about a sentiment that Bourguiba and his successor uprooted Tunisian society from its roots, as well as all the other causes: the spread of fundamentalism, foreign funding, etc. I think that this is a special aspect of Tunisian Salafism, and more generally Islamism, that is worth taking note of in understanding Tunisia's culture wars. Read the rest here.

Also, here are a few links on this subject to stories from the past month or so.

• Tunisia's young Salafis claim they are being persecuted - The National
• Tunisia's revolution and the Salafi effect - The National
• Second man dies after clashes between Tunisian Salafis, police | Reuters
• Who are Tunisia’s Salafis? - By Monica Marks | The Middle East Channel
• Tunisian Salafis attack alcohol sellers in capital - Yahoo! News
• The Emergence of Salafism in Tunisia
• PressTV - Salafi leader declares war on Tunisia's ruling party
• Exclusive: Tunisia licenses first Islamist Salafi party | Reuters
• Salafism in Tunisia: A brief history Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English)
• Who Is Jabhat al-Islah? - The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

✚ Don't celebrate the fall of the Caliphate!

Says Yasser Burhami to Emad Abdel Ghaffour, reviving the very recently buried split between the spiritual and secular leader of the Salafi Nour party:

The deputy head of the Salafi Dawah movement strongly criticized the chairman of the Salafi Nour Party, Emad Abdel Ghafour, for attending the Turkish Embassy’s celebration of the 89th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish republic Wednesday.

“We are not pleased with that participation and were not informed about it in advance,” said Sheikh Yasser Borhamy, the Salafi Dawah leader, answering questions from visitors of his website, salafvoice.com.

“A Muslim should not partake in a celebration marking the end of the Islamic Caliphate, which was the symbol of the nation’s unity and was brought down by enemies of Islam,” the sheikh said.

Because things were going so great for Muslim countries under the Caliphate...

✚ "Everywhere the Salafis are pushing"

Good comments by Tarek Ramadan on the struggle for who's going to be the biggest defender of Islam:

And the second thing that we have to say—and this is important because you were talking about Mohamed Morsi and people, the Islamists in Muslim-majority countries—there is something which is going to be one of the main challenges in the Muslim world today, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Arab world, is the religious credibility. How are you going to react to what is said about Islam? So, by touching the prophet of Islam, the reaction should be, who is going to be the guardian? And you can see today that the Muslim Brotherhood are in a situation where the Salafis, then the literalists, are pushing. And they were in Libya, they were in Egypt, they are now in Yemen. So, everywhere the Salafi are pushing by saying, "We are the guardian, and we are resisting any kind of relationship to the West or provocation coming from the West."