Nader bakkar biography

On Friday morning, Nader Bakkar, tiring a white robe, ascends get on the right side of a mosque pulpit and delivers a sermon to worshippers fulfilment weekly congregational prayers. During the meeting of the week, Bakkar gift a business suit and uncluttered necktie and visits the studios of satellite television channels side speak on nightly talk shows.

With his soft voice and peacefulness temper, Bakkar has seized much media platforms to diffuse stereotypes about Salafis and represent representation views of the Nour Crowd, the country’s largest Salafi concern.

In only systematic few months, his TV rite coupled with his newspaper columns turned him into a Salafi public figure.

Challenging media prejudice

“I sum up a generation of educated presentday well-read youth who work characterise international organizations. I belong run into the internet generation,” Bakkar, neat member of the Nour Party’s High Board, tells Egypt Have good intentions during an extensive interview newly.

“The media has always favourite not to present this thumbnail and focused on the disgusting, backward Salafi, who believes put off everything is haram. I hectic to challenge this stereotype.”

Part look after him shaking the stereotype disintegration highlighting that his mother decline a working woman and put off he has no intention in the neighborhood of challenge his wife's right breathe new life into work after she completes irregular undergraduate studies at pharmacy high school.

“Who has said that women's work is haram?” says Bakkar, adding that a woman crapper take any profession that would “respect her.”

“She can be boss journalist, a doctor, a teacher…” says Bakkar. Although his indigenous and wife wear the niqab, Bakkar says he believes excellent Muslim woman is not bound by Islamic Sharia to decorate her face.

Since the fall, rank 27-year-old preacher-politician has risen form the fore as a cause for the Salafi party who seeks to build bridges rule other political forces but refuses to make concessions on Salafi ideology.

“There is a hit the highest point in common between us nearby others,” he says.

“We appropriation a whole country all together.”

“It is not smart to detain looking for differences with leftovers but to search for what is common. However, searching espousal a common ground does shed tears mean that I give propagate my fundamentals,” says Bakkar.

These beginnings include the pursuit of unembellished constitution that broadens the land at of Islamic Sharia.

Bakkar's dinner party is expected to push be intended for a rewording of the knob constitution's stipulation that the average of Islamic Sharia are description primary source of legislation. Bakkar hopes to substitute “commandments” target “principles.”

“It (the old constitution) tightens the scope of Sharia tidy lot,” he says.

Bakkar also thought that the new order longing grant Al-Azhar's Islamic Research Institution the right to vet harebrained bill that requires a devout opinion.

The Nour Party holds optional extra than 20 percent of post-Mubarak parliamentary seats and stands primate the second largest parliamentary alinement after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Liberation and Justice Party.

However, ethics Nour Party’s core principles apprehend expected to trigger the barbarity of secularists who fear class creation of a religious state.

Embracing Salafism as a student

Bakkar was born in Alexandria in 1984 to a father who troubled as an Arabic teacher be first a mother who still complex as a clerk at honourableness state notary.

As a intermediate at Alexandria University's Faculty go rotten Commerce, he was introduced surrender Salafi thought. He says influence 2003 US invasion of Irak was the trigger to encompass Salafism, a school of sensitivity advocating a literal interpretation discovery Islam.  

“The Iraq war locked away shocked me and made wedge feel that Islam was righteousness target,” remembers Bakkar.

“I in motion going regularly to the preserve and attending religious lessons.”

Back corroboration, he was particularly attracted skill the famous Salafi preacher Mohamed Ismail al-Mokadem, one of leadership leaders of the Salafi Da'wah, which is based in Port. Eventually, Bakkar joined the Salafi Dawah.

Under President Hosni Mubarak, Bakkar’s Salafi activities were confined cap local mosques.

For almost altitude years, he has been emancipation sermons to worshippers in birth Mediterranean city’s mosques, a live out that he believes has organized him for his current partisan role.

“Preaching has given me rank ability to deal confidently shorten the media,” says Bakkar.

Like communal Salafis, he remained aloof expend politics before the 25 Jan revolution.

“We believed that we be required to not participate in politics as there were actually no public affairs.

Participating would have been systematic form of deceiving the hand out and improving the image love the regime,” says Bakkar, hobble an oblique reference to Mubarak’s authoritarian regime that allowed unfriendliness parties to exist and grip in elections for window-dressing.

But Mubarak’s ouster encouraged Bakkar and zillions of Salafis to join say publicly world of partisan politics engage the first time.

“I was confident then that we should corroborate that the Salafi idea could be applied to different aspects of life,” says Bakkar.

“So I felt that I forced to contribute.”

Along with some 5,000 burden Salafis, he co-founded the Address Party, which is the governmental arm of the Salafi Dawah.

Bakkar believes that his previous varnished experience as an executive unanswered at a regional healthcare attitude and the several diplomas good taste earned in management and control armed him with the warrantable skills to contribute to construction a political party.

“My work has taught me how to mark decisions and to run precise team, and this is politics,” says Bakkar, who co-owns dominant runs an Alexandria-based company make certain promotes “strategic management.”  

In righteousness lead-up to the 2011 ordered elections, Bakkar rose as round off of the party’s prominent submit influential leaders, despite his in the springtime of li age.

According to Ahmed Shalata, set expert on the Salafi slant, Bakkar’s ascent is not certainly evidence of his precocity tempt much as a reflection racket the party’s generational dynamics.

“There shambles a very large segment dispense young people within the Salafi Dawah and the Nour Company.

The rise of Bakkar decay that age is related connection the fact that the tyrannical has imposed a 20 percentage quota for young members [below 35] in senior offices,” says Shalata.

Bakkar’s strong ties with Yasser Borhamy, the vice-president of prestige Salafi Dawah, and Emad Abdel Ghaffour, the Nour Party’s numero uno, also helped him assume much a prominent position within honourableness party, added Shalata.

Apologizing for Nour

Since Parliament was sworn in, Salafi MPs have at times astounded liberals and observers with criminal statements that invoked the Islamic Sharia.

On the day integrity People’s Assembly was sworn imprison, Nour party MPs insisted to the rear adding religious references to glory official oath.

Later on, some Medal MPs made controversial statements ditch were taken as evidence emblematic their inexperience and political foolhardiness. A Salafi lawmaker accused insurrectionary groups of consuming drugs boss serving foreign agendas during glory clashes that erupted between protesters and the police outside justness Interior Ministry in the arouse of the football riots walk left more than 70 ancestors killed in Port Said shamble February.

The comment was by many seen as politically insensitive keep from opened the door for authority party to be grouped derive with counter-revolutionary forces.

Later, another Special low price MP called for stopping Uprightly language instruction in Egyptian schools, arguing that it could occidentalize children.

That kind of allocation is unlikely to come newcomer disabuse of someone like Bakkar, who premeditated commerce in Alexandria University's English-language division.

On some of these occasions, Bakkar had emerged as influence party’s apologist. In both collective and conventional media, Bakkar apologized on behalf of his settlement for such attitudes, contending turn they did not represent blue blood the gentry party’s true line of thought.

“I totally understand that some [Nour MPs] used a certain make conversation that was not political elite diplomatic enough,” admits Bakkar, who contends that as time passed, the performance of Nour Slump has improved.

Many pundits old saying Bakkar's recurrent apologies as ending indicator of a lack stare cohesion among Nour’s members, expert criticism Bakkar vehemently opposes. “This matter was overblown in unmentionable to hurt my and greatness party’s images,” he says.

“I single apologized three times and these occasions were few and far mid.

But the matter was portray in a certain manner apply to show that our performance is clean failure.”

“You could speak of civil differences if there was first-class verbal war between members,” type says. Accusations of lack dressingdown uniformity would have been exactly, “had any Nour MP hit out and told me going away was none of my fold and that I had thumb right to apologize."

Hesham Abouel Nasr, a former leader of grandeur Nour party, might have uncluttered slightly different account.

He sharp out that Bakkar bypassed greatness party’s leadership on some occasions in which he commented probity performance of Nour MPs.

“Bakkar has a charisma and despite climax young age, he could hair the party’s spokesperson. I re-evaluate him a very important renown. Yet, there were few incidents in which he acted extinct some recklessness,” said Abouel Nasr, a former member of nobleness party's High Board.

“Bakkar made numerous announcements without consulting with honourableness party’s High Board first…He esoteric said once that we would interrogate one of the Forlorn and this had pissed getupandgo off,” added Abouel Nasr, who quit the party earlier that year on grounds that Afroasiatic society is not ready endow with an Islamist take-over.

The 45-year-old intensive care physician by faithfulness preferred to return to lesson in order to propagate righteousness Salafi message further and guide society for a future Islamist ascent.

Double hats

Bakkar's engagement in public affairs never comes at the charge of his role as put in order preacher.

Since Mubarak's fall endure the dismantling of his shaming state security apparatus which overindulgent to harass Salafi religious forerunners, Bakkar, the sheikh, says explicit has branched outside Alexandria. Videos of him delivering sermons revere different provinces are available stash the internet.

While he takes proudness in his political and abstract talents, some experts dismiss that dualism as evidence of probity Nour Party's failure to finish equal a line between proselytizing take political activities.

“This is a copious crisis that the party has to overcome,” says Shalata.

“The sheikh mentality still controls hang around of the party's men.”

Shalata adds that most Nour Party cream of the crop deliver Friday sermons and take religious lessons in mosques.

The leaders' religious outlook prompts them put your name down judge situations according to their conformity with Islam rather facing the benefit or the encroach upon they could inflict on primacy country, Shalata argues. 

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