Egyptian demonstrators perform the Friday prayers at Cairo’s Tahrir Square on April 1, 2011 as tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered, issuing calls to “save the revolution” that ousted president Hosni Mubarak and to rid of the country of the old regime. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read —/AFP/Getty Images)

Add in the Muslim Brotherhood announcing they’re forming an electoral coalition with a bunch of Salafi groups under the banner of seeking a pure Islamic state and you have a recipe for disaster.

(JPost) — As Egyptians debate the role of Islam in the post-Mubarak era and the West looks on nervously, a new poll shows that the vast majority of Egyptians support a limited role for clerics and believe that their say in writing legislation should be restricted.

Conducted by the Abu-Dhabi Gallup Center, a research hub of the US polling organization based in the United Arab Emirates, the poll found that 69% of Egyptians favored an advisory role for religious leaders in writing national legislation. Only 14% said that clerics should have full authority to draft legislation while 9% said they should have no authority whatsoever in the legislative process.

“I’m certain that if you were to ask Egyptians if they would like to see clerics more involved in public life, such as the media and the education system, they would be much more favorable,” Sobhy Essaila, a researcher at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told The Media Line. But he stressed that Egyptians were suspicious of clerics’ involvement in politics.

Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years before he was ousted in the face of mass protests in February, suppressed Islamic political activity. But since then, the Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as the single most powerful political force in Egypt, stoking fears it may seek to change the face of Egyptian society and reorient the country’s pro-West foreign policy.

In fact, the Gallup results also illustrate the depth to which religion plays a central role for Egyptians. Some 96% of the respondents said that religion was important for them and 92% said they had confidence in religious institutions. The survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 1,000 Egyptians aged 15 and older during in late March and early April 2011.

Even in politics, other surveys have detected a more favorable stance for Islamic political figures among Egyptians. A Pew Research Center survey taken in April, for instance, found that 62% of Egyptians believed laws should “strictly follow the teachings of the Quran”.