Who Are These People?

Steven Cook on liberal Egypt’s shock at the success of Salafists:

given the world in which many Egyptian liberals exist, they can’t seem to fathom where the Salafis come from so they complain about Saudi money and the manipulations of Habeeb al Adly’s Interior Ministry in the late Mubarak era, but I have news for them, they come from Egypt. It’s the same dynamic as when New Yorkers, for example, woke up on November 3, 2004 to learn that George W. Bush had been re-elected. Like everyone on the 6 train that morning who was feeling alienated from the rest of the United States, the denizens of La Bodega and the Marriott garden are collectively asking, “Who are these people?”

My own such moment of waking up to the other’s existence was on March 8 2005, when Hezbollah rallied hundreds of thousands of its supporters to thank Syria. I remember thinking precisely: “Who are these people?”

Back to Egypt. I think one of the best things that came out of the Egyptian elections is the surfacing of the Salafists from their underground. The choice was not between Salafists or no Salafists. It was between Salafists who are working in public and Salafists that are in public view and that are subject to the scrutiny of the rest of Egyptians.