The members of the group, which includes an urbane young doctor, a vain and verbose prosecutor, a Gogol-esque clerk with a laptop computer, and apunctilious military officer standing guard, grow increasingly irritable as they slog through lonely and uninviting terrain.
Many Arab governments, including Egypt's, had come to regard Salafism, with its focus on Sunni orthodoxy and punctilious personal piety, as a useful foil to the more politically engaged pan-Islamism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.