AS THE authorities rounded up another bunch of Muslim Brothers in Alexandria on November 23rd, Bassam el-Zarqa, a prominent Salafist from the city, was in an interview criticising the “deep state”, as Egypt’s security establishment is known—even though his part of the Islamist movement is allied to the military-backed government that overthrew Muhammad Morsi, the country’s Brotherly president, five months ago. In Alexandria, the country’s second city and home of Egypt’s Salafist movement, the Islamists are in an awkward spot.

Since ousting Mr Morsi, the government has hounded the Brotherhood, referring to its loyalists as “terrorists”, to the point of removing them from above-board politics altogether. But other Islamists roam freely, including the Salafists, a devout lot who hark back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad for how to live.

Alexandria is a good place to see how the Islamists in general are faring. The Nour party, the biggest of the Salafist outfits, backed the coup against Mr Morsi. It grew out of the Salafist Call, a religious movement founded in Alexandria by university students. While the Muslim Brothers embraced political activity, its members shunned it until 2011. It looked to Saudi Arabia as a source of inspiration.

Officials from the Nour party say they have good relations with the military-backed government. None of its members has been arrested for being Islamist. “The struggle today is about benefits rather than ideology,” says Mr Zarqa, a vice-president of the party. Indeed, the resurgent deep state has gone after secular dissidents as well. On November 27th it arrested a group of young men and women in Cairo who were protesting against the military trials of civilians, among other things.

The government wants the Nour party to take on the official mantle of the Islamists in the enforced absence of the Muslim Brothers. It has a smoother veneer. Its publicists are well-spoken. Especially when talking to Western journalists, it avoids contentious issues such as the imposition of sharia law and its harsher punishments, such as stoning for adultery. But among Salafists the decision of the Nour party’s leaders to embrace politics and then to ally themselves with a military government that has chased down fellow Islamists is controversial. Party members admit they have lost support.

Many people are thus unclear what the Salafists hope to achieve. The Nour party says it does not plan to field a candidate for presidential elections expected to be held early next year. Some ascribe the party’s backing for the government to its warm relations with Saudi Arabia, which backed Egypt’s coup because it detests the Muslim Brothers. Others say that the Nour party reckoned it could ensure that the new constitution retains an Islamist flavour by shielding its followers from arrest.

That may be naïve. The latest draft of the constitution is devoid of the Islamist references that filled the version hurriedly adopted during Mr Morsi’s tenure as president. Some of Alexandria’s Islamists fear that once the police have rounded up all the Brothers, they may go after other Islamists. Others reckon that the state benefits from having a few bearded men around, so that the generals can keep alive the fear of an Islamist menace.

Alexandrians in general are less vitriolic towards Islamists than other city people, but there is no love lost between them. The once-cosmopolitan port city is particularly wary of Islamists’ conservative view of personal rights. Though human-rights folk criticise the security forces’ crackdown on the Brothers, they tend not to protest too loudly, knowing that the Islamists were hardly friendly to them during the Brotherhood’s brief spell in power. Few in Alexandria paid attention to the sentences of 11 years each, handed down on November 27th, to 14 women known as the “7am girls” for “incitement to violence”, but in reality for protesting on behalf of Mr Morsi in Alexandria after he was overthrown. “We fear being lumped in one group,” says Mahienour el-Massry, a rights activist.