In Egypt, secular groups and Islamists stage their protests separately But their groups do not work together. "I am absolutely against any alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, because they're traitors," said the journalist, Ahmed Abdo, 23. Their hands are stained with blood. Nearly six months after Morsi was forced from office, his Islamist supporters continue to demonstrate against the military-backed government. More than a thousand Morsi loyalists have been killed, and many times that number arrested. Although secular opposition groups supported the coup, a new law that effectively bans protests and a draft constitution that maintains the military's right to try civilians have galvanized small groups of secular youth activists to oppose the military-backed government as well. But while the non-Islamist youth see their fight as a struggle for rights against a repressive military and police force, they still consider Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood their political enemies. As a result, the two streams of activist youth on the busy streets and university campuses of cities across Egypt have taken on the police state as parallel forces, instead of as one. Their protests frequently erupt into bitter disputes, and even clashes, over who owns the movement, or to which group a student "martyr" belonged. In recent days, non-Islamist youth activists have accused the Brotherhood of "hijacking" the campus protests. "Seems like #MB are adamant about ruining everything, even the student movement," an anti-Islamist blogger who uses the screen name "Egyptocracy" tweeted last week, as police fired tear gas at Cairo University students. Hussein Gohar, a spokesman for Egypt's leftist Social Democratic Party, said Egyptians are so deeply polarized between those who backed Morsi's ouster and those who opposed it that non-Islamist youth would "lose ground in the streets" if they were to publicly ally themselves with the Islamists. Liberal activists and political parties, including Gohar's, have held news conferences and issued statements simply to clarify that their cause is separate from the Muslim Brotherhood's. Government agencies, media institutions and popular rhetoric are skewed aggressively against the Islamist group. "We know their tendency toward hypocrisy, and their disgraceful positions," the student wing of the Social Democratic Party wrote this month after clashes between student protesters and police. "As usually happens, the Muslim Brotherhood students violated what the student powers agreed upon . . . raising signs with their political slogans and disrupting the students" goals with the goals of their own political stream." More martyrs Perhaps, in part, because of the divide, the protests have remained relatively small and have had little impact on the course of Egyptian politics, now under the control of a military-implanted government. The country plans to hold a referendum on the new constitution in January - with or without the activists" approval. The general public, whom Gohar dismisses as "willing to trade freedom for security" - is largely disinterested in the activists" cause. And the arrests and convictions continue. Daily protests and clashes between Islamist students and riot police have rattled university campuses across the country, and three of the country's most prominent secular activists recently have been put on trial. Frustrated by the impasse, some, like shoemaker and activist Mohamed Atta, are considering a new path. Atta, 31, has spent two years searching for justice after his brother, Essam, was tried before a secret military court and then tortured to death inside a maximum-security prison. In a final phone conversation with his brother, as he lay hemorrhaging from rape and poisoning on the prison floor, Essam revealed the name of the prison guard he said had tortured him. But the guard has never been charged. Atta has lobbied in the media and before the attorney general for an arrest and a trial. But even after Morsi came to power in Egypt's first-ever democratic elections, the nation's security forces remained just as abusive. So last summer, Atta joined hundreds of thousands of other Egyptians in the streets, calling on Morsi to resign. The coup, and the crackdown that followed, filled him with regret. It "has added more martyrs," Atta said. As the government's dragnet has widened in recent weeks to include liberal activists, Atta has become become a rare voice among the non-Islamist opposition - convinced that it's time for Egypt's Islamists and non-Islamists to join hands for a common cause. The entrenched military and police are too strong to battle separately, Atta said. I'm one of the people who is saying that we have to unite. Some non-Islamists were outraged by the arrest in Alexandria of 21 women and girls loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood. Of several dozen protesters who gathered early on the morning of Oct. 31 with signs denouncing the coup, the police took only women and girls into long-term custody, lawyers said. "It was meant purely to intimidate and terrify the Muslim Brotherhood, and keep them off the street," said Ahmed Mamdouh, a lawyer for the Nadeem Center for Human Rights, who is helping to represent the group. After a one-day trial that was labeled "political" by Human Rights Watch, the women and girls were ordered to spend 11 years behind bars. The sentence shocked members of Egypt's non-Islamist intellectual class, who had largely dismissed earlier Islamist arrests and killings as justified. "Leftists and liberals" were suddenly interested in joining the defense team, said Mahmoud Gaber, another lawyer for the group. The mother of 18-year-old defendant Aya Tarek said her daughter found supportive messages posted on her Facebook wall from girls she had never even met. An appeals court shortened their punishments to a one-year suspended sentence for the adults, and probation for the seven minors. The group walked out of jail last weekend - emboldened, their movement stronger. "Those who weren't Muslim Brotherhood before have now become Muslim Brotherhood," Esraa Gamal Shaaban, a 19-year-old artist who was among those arrested. The case, she added, "has had the opposite effect" of what the military-backed government expected. To Atta, the arrest of the female protesters, and the lack of judicial action on other, more serious crimes, only illustrate further the need for united protest movement in the face of a powerful enemy. This is the judiciary that we have in Egypt. Putting people on trial for silly things, while murderers go free," Atta said. It was the acknowledgement of the Islamists" suffering since the coup that gave him empathy, he said. It's the shared suffering that might ultimately bridge the divide. Lara El Gibaly and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo contributed to this report.