SMUGGLERS complain that Egypt hampers three things imported through the blockade-busting tunnels that supply Gaza: weapons, dishwashers (their timers can double as detonators), and books. Of the three, the last may be the most regulated. One smuggler complained that the Egyptian authorities confiscated a delivery of 10,000 books, the bulk of them a classical commentary on the Koran. In the eyes of the impounders, the people of Gaza, who are governed by the Islamists of Hamas, are quite Islamic enough already.

Tunnel trouble is only one of the woes afflicting the book trade. The Hamas police are another. Gaza, a slither of land sandwiched between Egypt and Israel, has only three bookshops for its 1.5m people. Even these have empty shelves. In its drive for a monopoly over religious discourse, Hamas is forcing Islamists from other schools of thought to retreat to the web to publish their samizdat literature.

Of these the most prolific are the Salafists. Salafi literally means “disciple of the forebears” (the Prophet’s companions) but has come to refer to Muslim protestants who seek to slough off the corpus of Islamic tradition and return to the original purity of Islam’s early years. They particularly dislike the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist group, for making such 20th-century compromises as entering politics and campaigning in elections, a process they think usurps authority from God to man. They castigate Hamas, the Brothers’ Palestinian branch, for taking part in the territory’s 2006 elections (which they won), for failing to apply the sharia, or Islamic law, and most recently for suspending the armed fight against Israel.

Salafists arrived in Gaza when Palestinian exiles returned from Saudi Arabia dressed in their garb of ankle-length tunics. Most preach absolute subservience to a legitimate leader, deemed to be the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, whose forces Hamas kicked out of Gaza in June 2007. Most of Gaza’s Salafist leaders are university professors, doctors and graduates, who see themselves as an elite, a cut above those they view as the unprincipled populists of Hamas. But they have attracted broader interest among Gazans opposed to Hamas, not least Mr Abbas’s Fatah faction, which once ruled the strip but has been hamstrung by Hamas. Fatah’s fans flock to Salafist mosques on Fridays in part to spare them from having to recite a weekly prayer for Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

A few seek to revive the Salafist order by force. They declare the legitimate ruler to be not Mr Abbas but the global jihadist leadership. They dub Osama bin Laden their “righteous shepherd”. Some name their offspring after him. Many of them are barely literate, sprinkling their statements on the web with grammatical errors.

Their results have been patchy. Their most dramatic effort, a charge of three white horses with strap-on explosives last summer, ended when the cavalcade blew up before reaching its target, Israel’s border barricade. And though they profess to limit their jihad to the enemy outside, their most violent acts have been against other Gazans. To impose their Koranic writ they have bombed coffee shops, internet cafés and salons for women that employ male hairdressers. A spokesman for Jaish al-Umma (Army of the Muslim Community), the largest of the four armed Salafist groups, calls such acts “aberrations”.

The Palestinian authorities, Hamas and Fatah alike, have thumped them. Last August a Salafist leader publicly declared an emirate. In no time Hamas forces charged into his mosque in Rafah, a town on the border with Egypt, and killed him and 27 followers. Hundreds more were jailed. “In a democracy they would have been put on trial,” says Imad Falluji, a former leader of Hamas who abandoned it in the mid-1990s. “Under Hamas military rule they were simply tortured and executed.”

Most have since been freed, but only after renouncing their creed. A few hundred strong at most, they no longer strut the streets with their guns or blow up cafés but are lying low. After Hamas recently put up taxes, it was secular left-wingers, not Salafists, who protested most loudly. Salafists for now have lost the battle. But they have tarnished Hamas’s Islamist halo by daring to query it. Dissent in Gaza is rising.

The Salafists’ one source of succour could lie among malcontents within Hamas who were raised on a diet of ideological militancy but fear that their movement is selling out. Their most prominent member was Nizar Rayan, a university professor who taught the Prophet Muhammad’s life and times while doubling as head of Hamas’s military wing. But he was killed during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in January last year.

His followers, however, remain. Sometimes they help Salafist prisoners of Hamas to get out of jail. They criticise Hamas for taxing such evils as cigarettes rather than banning them outright, as they do alcohol. And they wonder glumly what other ideological compromises the Hamas government may make in pursuit of power. If Hamas is booted out, Islamists could yet look to the Salafists as Gaza’s next force for renewal—and rejection of Israel.