CAIRO: Controversy has surrounded the police report that was filed against Egypt's conservative Salafist parliamentarian Ali Wanees, after morality police in Tokh, in the governorate of Qalioubiya in the Nile Delta region north of Cairo, accused him of “indecency” in public. Wanees, an MP of the al-Nour ultra-conservative Salafist party, was arrested this week after police raided his parked car and accused him of “violating public decency with a female companion,” local reports said. Wanees issued a statement on his website urging people not to believe rumors and to seek confirmation of any news they hear. Police said they suspected the parked car on the highway and approached it, finding a man and a woman in an “indecent engagement.” The two were escorted to a local police station where a report was filed against them. “It is not odd nor new the attempts to defame me,” the MP said in a statement shared online. “I was previously the target of such attacks on my reputation during the Parliamentary elections, and today I find myself a target to rumors I am innocent of,” Wanees added. Public intimacy in Egypt is punishable by law and the police department of public morality was established to combat it. Under the previous emergency law that was forced upon Egyptians for nearly 30 years, morality police had the right to arrest couples in public and sometimes in private and accuse them of adultery. Waness however told al-Youm al-Saba'a news website that the woman in the car was in fact his niece, who felt sick so he rushed to a nearby beverage stall and bought her water and juice. He added that when the police came he was “splashing her face with water.” He denied any wrongdoing and said that the police report was “false” and was a result of an argument with police officers. Salafists, or Islamist puritans, believe in the principle of abstinence and the prohibition of any sort of pre-marital sexual relations as adultery is considered one of Islam's major sins. The al-Nour party of which Wanees is a deputy, is one of Egypt's most conservative groups and earned second place in the first post-revolution lower house elections in the country. They promote themselves as guardians of Sharia, or Islamic law, and take pride in their moral path. The police report is expected to bring a face-off between liberals and the ultra religious crowd, as the first would see it as evidence of the faux religious facade many politicians maintain in order to win the votes of the Egyptian people, while the second would view it as another attack against them that aims to tarnish their reputation.
