CAIRO – Leaders of Egypt's largest ultraconservative Islamist party have put aside their differences, settling – at least temporarily – a leadership dispute that threatened to break up the country's second-largest political bloc, spokesmen said Saturday.

The Al-Nour Party emerged from nowhere following Egypt's 2011 uprising to take 25 percent of the seats in last year's parliamentary elections, trailing only the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's best-organized political force. But a schism erupted last month after some of Al-Nour's political leaders tried to shake off the control of clerics.

At the heart of the feud is who should control the party, a dispute that is symptomatic of Islamist politics as the ultraconservative movement struggles to reconcile democratic maneuvering with religious ideology.