CAIRO (AP) -- Thousands of opponents and supporters of Egypt's Islamist president staged rival rallies in the nation's capital Tuesday, four days ahead a nationwide referendum on a contentious draft constitution.


Also Tuesday, the head of Egypt's key association of judges says 90 percent of its members have voted not to oversee Saturday's nationwide referendum on the country's contentious draft constitution. Ahmed el-Zind, the chairman of the Judges' Club, announced the decision Tuesday.



The disputed draft constitution has deeply polarized the nation and triggered some of the worst street violence since Morsi took office in June as Egypt's first freely elected president.

On one side of the divide, there is Morsi, his Muslim Brotherhood and ultraorthodox Salafis, while on the other there is a collection of liberals, leftists and Christians who claim the draft charter restricts freedoms and gives Islamists vast influence over the running of the country.


In Cairo's Nasr City district, a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, tens of thousands of the president's backers, some of them waving Egyptian flags, rallied Tuesday in front of a neighborhood mosque.

"I want the chant of 'Morsi' to shake the earth," a man on a stage set up in front of the mosque shouted into a microphone. "Alleyway to alleyway, house to house, the constitution means stability."

The crowd was growing rapidly as dozens of buses, most of them bearing license plate numbers from provinces outside of Cairo, offloaded thousands of Morsi supporters at the venue. Many of them men had beards, a hallmark of Islamists, while the women wore the Muslim veil or the niqab, covering everything except the eyes.

The crowd denounced the liberal opposition and its leaders, calling them undemocratic and accusing them of being loyalists of Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian leader who was ousted in a popular uprising last year.




Several hundred Islamists also have set up camp across town outside a media complex that is home to several independent TV networks critical of Morsi and the Brotherhood. The Islamists have threatened to storm the facility.

In the nearby Heliopolis neighborhood, tens of thousands of opposition supporters rallied outside the presidential palace, pushing their demands that Morsi scrap the referendum on the charter.

The draft, hurriedly adopted late last month in a marathon session by a constituent assembly dominated by the president's Islamist allies, inflamed an opposition already up in arms over a presidential decree that granted Morsi near absolute powers.

The opposition responded with hundreds of thousands of the president's protesters in the streets in massive rallies -- the largest from primarily secular groups since the uprising that toppled Mubarak last year. Morsi's supporters replied with huge demonstrations of their own, which led to clashes in the streets that left at least six people dead and hundreds wounded.

From there, the violence rippled across the country, with at least two dozen attacks on offices of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, according to the group's leaders. Meanwhile, senior opposition figures, including former lawmakers, have been badly beaten by pro-Morsi Islamists.

With four days left before the referendum, the opposition has yet to decide whether to campaign for a "no" vote or call for a boycott -- something many see as a reflection of divisions within the opposition. The disparate opposition groups are led by reformist and Nobel Peace prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's former foreign minister and Arab League chief Amr Moussa, and leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi.


Badawi later issued a statement saying he remained loyal to the opposition's goals: scraping the draft charter and postponing the vote.

