Internal feuds are threatening to unravel the political party of Egypt’s ultraconservative Islamist Salafis, as pragmatists try to shake off the control of hardline clerics who reject any compromise in their puritanical version of Islam, the Associated Press reported Thursday, October 4. The fight for leadership could paralyze the Al-Nour Party, which rocketed out of nowhere to become Egypt’s second most powerful political force, behind the Muslim Brotherhood. The bitter feud is being waged between one camp led by the party’s founder and chief Emad Abdel-Ghafour, who advocates separating between the party and the main Salafi institution of clerics, and a second camp that opposes separation and is tightly connected to a heavyweight Salafi cleric, Yasser Borhami. The public display of divisions and bitter exchanges in the press hurt a movement that presents itself as having clear-cut, divinely dictated answers to Egypt’s problems.