"puritan" is correct and usable in written English.
It is usually used to refer to someone who is morally strict in their beliefs, or someone who follows the beliefs of Puritans from the 16th and 17th centuries. For example, "He had a puritan attitude towards gambling."
With the Savile-Newsnight story intensifying every day, it may seem a bit puritan to ask for a sense of perspective.
Yet provincial opinion, supposedly so puritan, has proved remarkably tolerant.
Perhaps this hostility is lodged in the founders' puritan soul.
Two of the country's main Salafist parties, which represent puritan religious tendencies but lack the Brothers' cult-like structure, now openly advise the Brothers to apologise for their past mistakes and to call off a campaign of civil disobedience that does more to annoy the public than to attract sympathy.
Moreover, the Saudis' Wahhabist strain of Islam is nearly as puritan as the Taliban's.
But whether it can still bring about an agreement is unclearReligion: Prudent but not puritan If devout folk take their religion seriously, you would expect it to change their spending habits.
Would you rather be a cautious puritan or a happy cretin?
Hitchens found Tunisia to be a "mild" place and, although he expressed disquiet at the 20 years that Ben Ali had been in power, the ubiquity of his image and the general reluctance of people to discuss politics, he was comforted by the availability of contraception, young people holding hands, and other clearly visible signs of "western values" and indifference to the puritan values of Islamism.
Such moves have been backed by al-Azhar, the state-run university that is Egypt's seat of Islamic orthodoxy, and have so far raised only muted protest from Islamist rivals of the Brotherhood, such as the powerful, arch-puritan Salafist movement.
With its mixed population, 1m-strong, mainly of Sunni Arabs and Kurds, it hosts a large slice of Saddam Hussein's officer class and has, besides, a network of ultra-puritan Salafi mosques.
Many of the other fish, moreover, are likely to be rival Islamists.Salafist groups in Egypt, who represent the ultra-puritan part of a very broad Islamist spectrum, and include groups that once espoused armed jihad, have formed at least four separate parties.
