CAIRO — As the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies vowed to broaden their protests against the president’s ouster and their opponents held enormous counterdemonstrations, American diplomats sought to persuade the Islamist group to accept his overthrow, its officials said.
Continuing a push for accommodation that began before the removal of President Mohamed Morsilast week, the American diplomats contacted Brotherhood leaders to try to persuade them to re-enter the political process, an Islamist briefed on one of the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
“They are asking us to legitimize the coup,” the Islamist said, arguing that accepting the removal of an elected president would be the death of Egyptian democracy. The United States Embassy in Cairo declined to comment.
Even as both sides continued their street demonstrations on Sunday, Egypt’s new leaders continued their effort to form an interim government. Squabbles about a choice for prime minister spilled out into the open on Saturday, exposing splits among the country’s newly ascendant political forces.
State news media quoted a spokesman for Adli Mansour, the interim president, on Sunday as saying there was a “tendency” to name Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Prize-winning diplomat, as vice president, and a former chair of Egypt’s investment authority, Ziad Bahaa el-Din, as interim prime minister.
On Saturday, state news media said Mr. ElBaradei had been chosen as prime minister, but the presidency later backed away from the report after ultraconservatives known as Salafis, who fault Mr. ElBaradei for being too secular, apparently rejected the appointment. It was not clear on Sunday that the Salafi party, Al Nour, was any more inclined to accept Mr. ElBaradei as vice president.
Mr. Bahaa el-Din, a lawyer who served in the investment authority and on the board of the Central Bank under former President Hosni Mubarak, was abroad and was considering the request, according to a spokesman for his political party, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party.
The lack of agreement means that Egypt has been without a fully functioning government since Wednesday, when the defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, announced that Mr. Morsi had been deposed.
The power vacuum has left confusion about who is responsible for making decisions in the interim, and in particular for law enforcement. Over the past few days, the authorities have arrested Muslim Brotherhood officials andshut down television stations, including Islamist channels, though it is not clear on whose orders the security services were acting.
On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported that prosecutors had interrogated its Cairo bureau chief, Abdel Fattah Fayed, for hours before releasing him on bail.
Al Jazeera’s Web site said Mr. Fayed, who had turned himself in, was charged with running an unlicensed satellite channel and “transmitting news that could compromise Egypt’s national security.” On Wednesday, as part of what appeared to be a coordinated sweep against news media outlets seen as sympathetic to Mr. Morsi, security officials raided the offices of Al Jazeera’s local Cairo station and several other channels.
Since then, thousands of Islamists have held a vigil for Mr. Morsi at their new base in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, and in recent days outside the officers’ club of the Republican Guard, where some believed Mr. Morsi was being held.
Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that nominated Mr. Morsi for president, have sought to convince the world that his removal was both illegal and untenable. They now say they intend to escalate their demonstrations across Egypt.
In the square, Brotherhood officials pledged that their growing protests would force the military to release Mr. Morsi, insisting that no one else would negotiate on their behalf. “I think the military has to yield; they won’t have any choice,” said Gehad el-Haddad, a Brotherhood spokesman.
“We are stepping it up every few days, with protests around the country,” Mr. Haddad said. “We are logistically capable of carrying this on for months.”
He said the protests themselves would turn into gathering places for the observation of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when it begins this week.
To bolster its claims to legitimacy, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, the Freedom and Justice Party, sent out an e-mail to reporters with mathematical calculations that it said indicated about five million supporters had gathered in the area.
At the same time, supporters of the military takeover redoubled their efforts to gain international support for Mr. Morsi’s ouster. Several current and former Egyptian officials appeared on American talk shows on Sunday to argue that the military seizure of power did not constitute a military coup d’état, which under United States law would require an automatic cutoff of $1.5 billion in annual aid.
“The military had the choice between intervention and chaos, and they had to respond to that,” Nabil Fahmy, a former Egyptian ambassador to the United States, said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.”
In Cairo, hundreds of thousands of Mr. Morsi’s opponents gathered in Tahrir Square and outside the presidential palace, in what protesters said was an effort to counter claims to legitimacy made by the deposed president’s supporters.
In a mirror image of the pro-Morsi protests, many at the gathering seemed far less interested in swaying the Islamists than proving, to both Egyptians and the world, that their numbers were greater.
And several protesters said they were there to thank the army for its role in removing Mr. Morsi. Many in the crowd held portraits of General Sisi or banners praising the military. Jets and helicopters that flew overhead gave the demonstration the feel of a ticker-tape, postwar rally.
But in an alley near the square, a group of young protesters talked about the toll of Egypt’s conflict, still far from over. They were longtime activists, and all had friends who had died in protests during Egypt’s transition. Now, their conversations with friends in the Muslim Brotherhood had become arguments.
Mai Mandour, a 23-year-old law student, said her brother had told her that Islamist neighbors had started shaving their beards. “Everyone’s worried about a civil war,” she said.
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