SHABRAMANT, Egypt — Voters attending a political rally by ultraconservative Islamist sheiks might expect a pious call for strict religious rule — banning alcohol, restricting women’s dress, cutting off the hands of thieves.

But when a few hundred men gathered last week in a narrow, trash-strewn lot between the low cinderblock buildings of this village near Cairo, what they heard from the sheiks, known as Salafis, was a blistering populist attack on the condescension of the liberal Egyptian elite that resonated against other Islamists as well.

“They think that it is them, and only them, who represent and speak for us,” Sheik Shaaban Darwish said through scratchy speakers. “They didn’t come to our streets, didn’t live in our villages, didn’t walk in our hamlets, didn’t wear our clothes, didn’t eat our bread, didn’t drink our polluted water, didn’t live in the sewage we live in and didn’t experience the life of misery and hardship of the people.”

“Brothers,” he continued, “we, the Salafis, the founders of Al Nour Party, were part of the silent majority.”

Ten months after a broad popular uprising overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, the Salafis’ new brand of religious populism has propelled Al Nour and its allies to claim more than a quarter of the vote in the first round of parliamentary elections, surprising even the most seasoned Egyptian analysts and Western diplomats. The Salafis have outpaced the liberals to emerge as the principal rival — or potential partner — of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mainstream Islamist group whose party won 40 percent of the vote and is positioned to lead Parliament.

In the aftermath of the vote, Egyptian liberals, Israelis and some Western officials have raised alarms that the revolution may unfold as a slow-motion version of the 1979 overthrow of the shah of Iran: a popular uprising that ushered in a conservative theocracy. With two rounds of voting to go, Egypt’s military rulers have already sought to use the specter of a Salafi takeover to justify extending their power over the drafting of a new constitution. And at least a few liberals say they might prefer military rule to a hard-line Islamist government. “I would take the side of the military council,” said Badri Farghali, a leftist who last week won a runoff against a Salafi in Port Said, northeast of Cairo.

A closer examination of the Salafi campaigns, however, suggests their appeal may have as much to do with anger at the Egyptian elite as with a specific religious agenda. The Salafis are a loose coalition of sheiks, not an organized party with a coherent platform, and Salafi candidates all campaign to apply Islamic law as the Prophet Muhammad did, but they also differ considerably over what that means. Some seek within a few years to carry out punishments like cutting off the hands of thieves, while others say that step should wait for the day when they have redistributed the nation’s wealth so that no Egyptian lacks food or housing.

But alone among the major parties here, the Salafi candidates have embraced the powerful strain of populism that helped rally the public against the crony capitalism of the Mubarak era and seems at times to echo — like the phrase “silent majority” — right-wing movements in the United States and Europe.

“We are talking about the politics of resentment, and it is something that right-wing parties do everywhere,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. They have thrived, he said, off the gap between most Egyptians and the elite — including the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood — both in lifestyle and outlook.

“They feel like they represent a significant part of Egypt,” Mr. Hamid said, “and that no one gives them any respect.”

Many voters, including some who do not share the Salafis’ puritanical morals, say they trust the sheiks to understand their perspectives for tangible reasons. The sheiks, like the Muslim Brotherhood, have worked for years to provide social services, including free food and medicine, to Egypt’s needy. “They served the people, so it only makes sense that if they were in Parliament they would do more,” said Yehia el-Sayed, 41, a school employee smoking outside a cafe in Port Said, a city known for its liberalism but where Salafis outpaced the liberals with a surprisingly strong 20 percent of the vote.

Their rivals in the Muslim Brotherhood — as surprised as anyone by the upstart Salafis — say the sheiks benefited from a paradoxical edge in grass-roots organizing. And until the uprising against Mr. Mubarak’s rule, the Salafis shunned politics, arguing that the law should come only from God. (Now there is a chance to implement God’s law, some say.) So the Mubarak government allowed them broad latitude to operate out of mosques as an alternative to the more political Brotherhood, which it banned. Many Salafis were considered to be aligned with the Mubarak government and urged their followers not to join the protests that ended it.

“Most of us were put in prison,” recalled Akram El Shaer, a Brotherhood member. Mr. Shaer, a physician and former member of Parliament, won a seat in Port Said with the Brotherhood’s new Freedom and Justice Party.

But the Salafis’ appeals are also strikingly different from the Brotherhood’s. Dominated by middle-class professionals like Mr. Shaer, the Brotherhood’s representatives often remind voters of what they have done for poor communities. But they seldom speak as part of those communities and can sound condescending.

“Other parties look from high up,” said Alaa El Bahaei, another physician and the first name on the Salafi candidate list in Port Said. “But we are right there in the bottom of the community.”

At the rally here in rural Shabramant, only men sat before the speakers. In deference to the prohibitions of some Salafis on the mixing of the sexes, the women who attended listened through the windows of an adjacent building. Some speakers talked of banning women from wearing shorts as a goal to achieve within a few years.

At times, Sheik Darwish, the main speaker, seemed to argue that a constitution, elections and representation were Islamic ideas derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s leadership. “The West took it from us,” he said. “They wrapped it and canned it and re-exported it to us.” Islam, he said, demanded equality and religious freedom for all, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish.

He railed against the liberal Egyptian news media’s alarms about Islamists: “Unworthy of being called Egyptian media.” And he charged that residents of Cairo’s affluent neighborhoods believed that each of their votes should be worth a hundred of those in Shabramant. “Is the vote of a person with a Ph.D. equal to the vote of a person with a secondary school certificate?” Sheik Darwish asked.

“You, Egyptian people, do you accept that? Do any of you accept this insult?” he asked. “Those people don’t live with us; they don’t express our pain or our hopes. And they will seek to once again clone a new regime with new figures other than Hosni and his men but with the same philosophy, the same democracy with its errors, the same capitalism with its errors, the same liberalism with its errors. And after the revolution, we accept nothing but real change.”