A Salafist surprise

There’s nothing like free and fair elections for finding out what people really think, and the big surprise of the Egyptian elections, the first since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak last February, has been the strong level of public support for the Muslim Salafist movement, the conservatives whose overwhelming priority is to emulate the behavior of the Prophet Muhammad and his seventh century companions.  Ironically, most of the outsiders who predicted the Salafist gains were Islamophobic Americans and Europeans who based their expectations on visceral disdain for the judgment of Egyptian voters, rather than on any knowledge of the country. Those closer to the electoral battlefield, on the other hand, including Egyptian political scientists and pundits, expected the Salafists to win only about 10 percent of the vote.  After the first of three rounds of voting, the Nour Party alone, the most successful of the Salafist groups, had taken