After decades of condemning parliamentary politics, Salafis have created political parties for the first time in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya, even as Salafis in Morocco and Gaza attempt to do the same. Salafi political parties are not unprecedented in the Arab world -- Bahrain and Kuwait have had Salafi political blocs for many years, and there was a Salafi-dominated party briefly in Algeria in the early 1990s that successfully contested parliamentary elections until the Algerian government cancelled the poll results. But the phenomenon is unusual. Before the Arab Spring, the majority of Salafis, or Sunni Muslim puritans, condemned parliaments as sinful because they usurp God’s role as legislator. Salafis also condemned party politics as divisive, and thus against the Quran’s condemnation of factionalism.

Many Salafis have swallowed their ideological objections to party politics because they want to nudge the new regimes in the post-Arab Spring countries closer to their own vision of an Islamic state -- namely, one that implements their ultraconservative vision of Islamic law. Salafis also want to protect their institutional interests, such as religious endowments, from encroachment by others, whether political stakeholders or competing Islamic currents. In other words, politically active Salafis do not want their Islamist and liberal competitors to achieve political objectives at the expense of the Salafis. In the early 1980s, for instance, Kuwaiti Salafis’ wariness of both liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood was behind their decision to field candidates for parliamentary elections, with the approval of powerful Saudi clerics. Partly for the same reason, Salafis in Egypt recently founded several political parties.

Understanding why Salafis form political parties does not tell us what they will do after electing candidates to office, however. For that, we need to look at historical antecedents as well as the new parties’ size and organization, their popular appeal, their constituencies, the nature of their respective governments, the demographics of their home countries and their competitors.

Broadly speaking, Salafi parties focus on social and cultural issues, as well as a few economic issues, addressed in the Quran. Because the Quran has a lot to say on usury, the status of women, treatment of religious minorities and punishment for crimes such as theft, fornication, drinking alcohol and gambling, Salafis seek to enact legislation that reflects their conservative understandings of the Quran’s teachings on these subjects. Salafi parties also endeavor to amend their countries’ constitutions to broaden the application of Islamic law. The 1992 platform of Kuwait’s main Salafi bloc, the Islamic Association, included eliminating laws contrary to Islamic law and amending the constitution to make Islamic law the sole source of legislation. Though they failed to achieve these objectives, they have successfully legislated against gender mixing in Kuwait’s universities. Egypt’s new Salafi parties have advocated for enshrining Islamic law in the constitution as the sole source of law and have pushed for guarantees that the government will apply conservative interpretations of Islamic law.

Western academic literature on Islamist political behavior holds that Islamists moderate and compromise once they come to power, because they cannot win votes otherwise. While that might be true of Muslim Brotherhood-type parties, which aspire to reach a broad section of society, it is not necessarily true of Salafi political parties. Indeed, there are historical and political reasons to anticipate that the new Salafi parties will not moderate on the social and cultural issues they hold dear.

Politically, Salafis appeal to voters by contrasting themselves to moderate Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. As a consequence, Salafi parties attract a much smaller constituency and elect fewer candidates, but that does not stop them from exercising outsize influence in multiparty parliamentary systems. Moreover, there is little incentive for Salafis to moderate their socially conservative stances for votes because other Islamist parties already occupy that terrain (.pdf).

The historical behavior of Salafi political parties in the Arab world also suggests the new Salafi political parties will not moderate on social and cultural issues. Though Kuwait and Bahrain forbid political parties, both countries have had Salafi political blocs for many years. In neither instance have Salafi parliamentarians moderated their views on social and cultural issues or compromised on related legislation, even though they cater to different social groups in each country.

Although the new Salafi political parties are unlikely to moderate their social views, they will differ greatly in areas where the Quran is vague, in particular international relations, democratic norms and economic policy. On international relations, the largest Salafi party in Egypt, the Nur Party, has not called for a repeal of the Camp David Accords with Israel. By contrast, the smallest Salafi party, Asala, whose base is more radical than Nur’s, has.

When Salafis differ over democratic norms, it is usually a result of their respective countries’ demographics. Bahrain’s Salafi bloc, for instance, has prevented parliamentary reforms that would give the country’s majority Shiite population greater representation, even though the changes would also expand the Salafis’ power. In return, the government supports the Salafis’ religious policies. In Kuwait, on the other hand, where Shiites are in the minority, the Salafis have no objections to working with them, as well as with liberal reformers, to expand the powers of parliament.

Just as Kuwaiti Salafis have cooperated with their rivals when their interests overlap, so, too, have Bahrain’s Salafi parliamentarians. Thus, being generally hostile to the Shiites, they have cooperated with them to pass conservative religious legislation. The same is true in Egypt, where Salafis have worked with -- and against -- both moderate Islamists and liberals when it suited the Salafis’ interests.

Whereas differences over democratic norms arise from different countrywide demographics, differences over economic policy arise from the different constituencies of the various Salafi blocs. The constituency of the Salafi bloc in Bahrain is middle class, so its economic policies are more populist than the Salafi bloc in Kuwait, which represents the wealthier business class. Even within a party there can be splits over economic issues, as demonstrated by a recent split in Egypt’s Nur party where one faction felt the party leadership paid insufficient attention to economic issues.

As the latter example suggests, Salafi politicians have to watch for splits among their religious fellow travelers that could lead to new rival parties or derail their efforts to engage in peaceful politics. Kuwaiti Salafis who were unhappy with their members participating in what they considered to be a corrupted political system formed the Umma Party, which advocates for a more democratic system. Salafi vigilantes and militias in Tunisia and Libya have attacked symbols of Western cultural and political influence in an effort to pull their governments and their Salafi leaders in a more hardline direction.

Although we can derive some insights into the future political behavior of the new Salafi parties by analyzing their predecessors, the context in which the new Salafi political parties have appeared is unique in four respects. First, several of the new Salafi parties have emerged in republics with democratically elected heads of state. There is no precedent for this: Bahrain and Kuwait are both monarchies that aggressively push back against any effort to curtail the royal house’s power.

Second, no Salafi party has ever been anywhere near as large as Egypt’s Nur Party, which controls nearly a quarter of the parliament and whose constituents number in the millions. Other countries have no more than a handful of Salafi members of parliament, and supporters number only in the tens of thousands at most. Nur, however, does not have the party discipline of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which means that its policies are less coherent and that it is constantly at risk of losing members.

Third, no previous Salafi party has had an opportunity to draft a new constitution. Indeed, the chance to participate in drafting constitutions in post-Arab Spring countries propelled many skeptical Salafis to support political engagement, at least in Egypt. It is unclear if these Salafis will remain in politics once the formative years of the new regimes are over.

Fourth, until recently Islamists did not run any governments in the Arab world, with the exception of Sudan. As a result, moderate Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood spoke for the opposition among religious conservatives. Now that Brotherhood-inspired parties are coming to power in places like Tunisia and Egypt, it is the Salafis who represent the dissenting religious opposition. Their new position gives them leverage over the moderate Islamists, but it also requires an adjustment of their political critique. Criticizing liberals as impious is easy compared to the nuance required to level the same criticism at the Brotherhood.

In what is a reverse image of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi parties across the region are dogmatically united and institutionally fragmented. No single Salafi organization speaks for the region’s Salafis or directs local Salafi political parties. Nevertheless, prominent political activists, money and media coverage of Salafi politics foster a shared political outlook.

Abd al-Rahman bin Abd al-Khaliq can be considered the pied piper of Salafi political activism. Born in Egypt in 1939, Abd al-Rahman left the country when he was 16 after his Muslim Brotherhood family members fled to Medina in 1954 to escape Nasser’s repression. Abd al-Rahman remained a member of the Brotherhood throughout his religious studies in Medina but left the organization in 1974, nine years after arriving in Kuwait, because he felt the group was too lax on religious issues. In the mid-1970s, Abd al-Rahman began writing books and articles advocating for Salafis to involve themselves in politics regardless of whether their local regimes were authoritarian or democratic. Having received the blessing of some powerful clerics in Saudi Arabia, Abd al-Rahman provided religious sanction for Salafi political participation on the eve of Kuwait’s elections in 1981, in which two Salafis were subsequently elected to parliament. Since that time, Abd al-Rahman has successfully lobbied Salafis in the Arab world and even in Pakistan to establish political parties, and he played a prominent role in the recent establishment of political parties in Yemen and Egypt.

It helps that Abd al-Rahman has money to back up his agenda. The charitable organization he helped found, the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, funds Salafi institutions around the world. Although these institutions -- mosques, schools and clinics, among others -- are not overly political, they serve people who can be mobilized to support Salafi bids for office. In Egypt, for example, the Nur Party drew support from institutions the society helped finance. News reports of one society donation of $19 million led to a controversy about outside campaign financing during the parliamentary elections.

Traditional media and social media have also raised the political consciousness of Salafis throughout the Arab world by spreading information about the platforms and political tactics of the new Salafi political parties. The success of Egypt’s Salafi parties has led Salafis in other countries to reconsider their opposition to democratic institutions. Some have even sent delegations to Egypt to seek the advice of the Nur Party on how to form political parties.

The formation of Salafi parties in Arab Spring countries and their show of strength in Egypt have led many Arabs and the international community to worry about the threat they may pose to law and order and democratic norms. It also remains to be seen if Salafi engagement in politics will lessen the appeal of violence among Salafi constituencies in their respective countries. Salafi engagement in violent protests and vigilante violence against religious minorities and symbols of Western culture in some of the Arab Spring countries suggests Salafi engagement in politics does not dampen enthusiasm for such violence. But domestic Salafi violence is as much a result of general insecurity under the new regimes as it is about violent Salafi activism. Presumably the more that Salafis in the Arab Spring countries feel they are making gains by engaging in the political process, and the more that the state can credibly enforce red lines for violence, the more domestic violence will diminish. The experience of the Salafi blocs in Kuwait and Bahrain indicates that political engagement lessens the appeal of violence against the state, with the caveat that the Gulf monarchies are different in many ways from the Arab republics undergoing political transitions.

That said, the political engagement of Salafis in Kuwait and Bahrain does not seem to have lessened either the rate at which Salafis in those countries go abroad to fight for Salafi causes or the number of Salafis sending money to finance Salafi violence in other countries. Indeed, Abd al-Rahman’s Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, which supports Kuwait’s main Salafi party, was accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of funding al-Qaida. One could argue that the number of funds and foreign fighters going abroad has decreased due to democratic engagement, but that awaits further study.

The spread of Salafi political parties in the Arab world has mixed implications for the United States. With regard to U.S. national security, none of the platforms of the Salafi political parties I have read exhibit pronounced anti-Americanism, nor do they overtly threaten Israel’s security or seek to diminish the flow of oil to the West. Salafi participation in party politics may also lessen the appeal of revolutionary violence, which can also be in the United States’ interests. Even on the hot-button issue of Israel, Salafi parties have not overly criticized the pragmatic steps taken by their governments to calm tensions during the recent flare-up of violence in Gaza. On the negative side of the ledger, Salafis obsess over cultural purity and alleged slights to Islam, which can lead some of them to attack symbols of Western influence. Many politically engaged Salafis also support Salafi militias fighting abroad -- militias that can set their sights on the United States.

By far, the United States’ greatest area of concern vis-a-vis the Salafi political parties should be democratic norms and humans rights. But here, too, the record of Salafi political participation is mixed. Salafi parties generally work to curtail individual freedoms to bring them in line with their conservative interpretation of Islamic law. But Salafi political parties can work with non-Salafis to expand the powers of parliaments if that aligns with their own interests.

It is difficult to predict the behavior of the new Salafi political parties because there are so few antecedents, and those that exist arose in very different political contexts. Salafi political blocs in two small Gulf countries with long-lasting monarchies cannot tell us much about Salafi parties in the Arab republics with new political regimes. The problem is compounded by the fact that the academic literature on political Islam in the Arab world focuses almost exclusively on the Muslim Brotherhood and Brotherhood-inspired political parties. As Steve Monroe observed in an article written before the Arab Spring on Salafi politics in Kuwait and Bahrain, models of Islamist political participation built on the pragmatic and relatively moderate Brotherhood are a poor fit for ultraconservative Salafi parties. This is even truer today as Salafis form political parties not just to shape old Arab regimes, as they do in Bahrain and Kuwait, but to help build them anew.

Will McCants is a Middle East security analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam.”

Photo: Egyptian Salafist Leader Abdel Moneim El Shahat, Cairo, Egypt, Nov. 18, 2011 (photo by Flickr user lilianwagdy licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).