Ahead of parliamentary elections, Egyptian political Islam is in a state of flux. As the strongest alliance between President Mohammed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party and its ultraconservative enabler, the Nour Party, wears thin, new parties headed by a firebrand cleric and a politically-savvy Salafist have entered the fray. Meanwhile, the brand of political Islam has lost its allure in the eyes of many Egyptians, but they are left with little alternative as secular parties have decided to sit out the elections.

At a news conference last month, the Environmental Affairs Minister gave a tearful goodbye as he resigned from the government. “Now I’m very happy,” Khaled Alam Eddin said, “not with these words, but because I’ve left this situation.”

As Alam Eddin resigned alongside his colleague Bassam al-Zarqa, one of the president’s advisors, it laid bare the disagreements that many long suspected existed between Morsi’s presidency and Nour, the ultraconservative party of Islamists to which Alam Eddin and Zarqa belong.

While many experts are not surprised by the breakdown in relations between the two groups, it was nonetheless shocking given that the Nour party had facilitated the Brotherhood to push through a constitution in the absence of consensus from other pillars of Egyptian society at the end of last year.