Egypt's Radical Salafis Approach Secular Rivals Egypt's ultraconservative Islamist party has reached out to rival secular and liberal political factions in an unusual, behind-the-scenes attempt to unify their ranks and counter the Muslim Brotherhood's power in the country's new parliament. An alliance between the Salafis and nonreligious parties would be very difficult to reach and even harder to maintain, given the large differences in their ideologies. But the talks highlight the growing worries that the Brotherhood, fresh off its election victory, is starting to throw its weight around to dominate Egypt's politics and sideline others. The talks, which took place over the past week, also show the strange bedfellows that can be brought together with Egypt's politics deeply in flux ahead of the convening later this month of the first parliament since the Feb. 11 fall of ousted President Hosni Mubarak. As a consequence, parliament may not be controlled by a unified Islamist front, but a divided one making choices on political considerations not purely religious ones. The Brotherhood and the Salafis are both Islamist movements, but there have been frequent frictions between them during the election campaign. The Salafi talks with liberals are startling because the movement is considerably more conservative than the Brotherhood and more aggressive in its vilification of secularism. Salafis call for a strict, literalist implementation of Islamic Shariah law in Egypt and practice a Saudi-style segregation of the sexes. During the election campaign, some Salafi sheikhs railed against secular parties, telling Egyptians that voting for them would be un-Islamic. With Egypt's multistage parliament elections almost finished, the Brotherhood is on track to win just under 50 percent of the legislature's seats. The alliance led by the main Salafi party, Al-Nour, holds about 20 percent, while multiple liberal, leftist, secular parties along with independents and remnants of Mubarak's regime make up most of the rest. Talks between the Al-Nour Party and the two main liberal groups, the Free Egyptians and the Wafd Party, came in response to fears the Brotherhood is moving to monopolize key legislative positions including the parliament president, deputies and heads of its 19 committees, said Essam Sultan, a leading member of the Al-Wasat Party, which hosted the talks. Parliament is also supposed to also create a 100-member panel to write Egypt's new constitution. In an interview with the Al-Ahram daily, senior Brotherhood official Ahmed Abu Baraka laid out what he called the group's vision for the panel's makeup - raising alarm that the Brotherhood was seeking to run the process. The group's leadership quickly distanced itself, saying Abu Baraka was expressing his personal viewpoint. Such unilateral moves by the Brotherhood, ahead of the scheduled convening of parliament on Jan. 23, put other parties "under heavy pressure," said Sultan. The minute I proposed these meetings, everybody agreed to come. The head of the Salafi Al-Nour, Emad Abdel-Ghafour, confirmed the meetings but declined to comment on the possibility of striking alliances. "We look for wide national reconciliation because its not possible anymore to isolate any political faction or to run parliament through 50+1 majority," he said.