In Egypt’s first free elections since before the military coup of 1952, Islamists won the day, unsurprisingly led by the Muslim Brothers. The surprise was rather the strong performance of another Islamist agent new to Egyptian politics, the conservative salafis. With roughly a quarter of the seats in the People’s Assembly the salafis now constitute the second largest force in the parliament. The paper will discuss how to make sense of the seeming paradox of the hitherto apolitical salafis forming parties and joining the competitive political scene. Typical of the salafis has been a strong focus on issues of personal pious behaviour. They have generally shunned political work. A dominant attitude has been that Islam dictates for the ordinary believer absolute obedience to the ruler, even when that ruler is a less-than-pious Muslim and may deviate from the word of God. At the outset of the movement that led to the fall of Mubarak this led salafis to openly criticise the demonstrations as impious rebellion against the wali al-amr. Only gradually many salafis came around to an active engagement on the side of the revolutionaries. Yet as the new political set-up after the revolution took shape large segments of the salafi movement exhibited a newfound belief in the legitimacy of competition for elected political power. The paper will draw on a close reading of salafi statements, actions and political programmes 2010-2012. It will argue that salafism could best be seen as a movement for moral purity and individual piety in a rapidly changing society, much akin to the early Muslim Brothers and to the early beginnings of the Egyptian Islamic student movement of the 1970s. But in its pure apolitical form this movement is notoriously unstable because within its driving impulse is also the wish for social and material progress. Hence the step towards active engagement beyond the narrow circle of personal behaviour is not long. The revolution faced the salafis with a stark choice between keeping its full distance to the popular movement, losing relevance in the process, and engaging politics directly and openly. For those who chose the last option engagement inevitably meant following along the track traversed before them by the Muslim Brothers (the Ikhwan) leading towards a more pragmatic approach to what it means to implement the will of God.