HE'S BEEN HERE BEFORE:

Judgment Days (David Remnick February 14, 2011, The New Yorker)

The historic moments of peaceful popular demonstrations, of oppressed peoples emerging as one from their private realms of silence and fear, are thrilling. And some, like the uprising in Prague, in November, 1989, have thrilling conclusions—a pacific transition from autocracy to liberal democracy. But Tahrir Square is not Wenceslas Square, in Prague, nor is it Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, or Revolution Square, in Moscow. The Egyptians, for all their bravery, do not possess the advantages of the Czechs of a generation ago. Liberated from the Soviet grip, the Czechs could rely on the legacy of not-so-distant freedoms, the moral leadership of Václav Havel, and many other particulars that augured well for them. Circumstances were not as auspicious in Romania, China, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Opening acts can be ecstatic and deceptive. The Russian prospect, in August, 1991, which began with the collapse of a K.G.B.-led coup, soon encountered its own historical legacies, including the lingering hold of the security services and the corruptions of an oil economy. Modern Russia is far better off than it was in the teeth of the Communist era, but it is not the state that so many had hoped for two decades ago.

In the past century, Egypt has been the stage for many ideologies: liberal nationalism, “Arab socialism,” Islamism, Pan-Arabism. Anyone who has spent time in Cairo talking with the political opposition knows how fractured and repressed it has been. The city is thick with human-rights lawyers, political activists, and intellectuals who have been blacklisted, jailed, and tortured—and yet pockets of civil society have persisted.

No one can predict with confidence what might develop after Mubarak—if, in fact, his regime falls. (The new Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, is no democrat, and no less cunning than his patron.) One anxiety, particularly in the United States and in Israel, is that the Muslim Brotherhood, despite its lateness to the revolution, will find a way to power, drop any pretense of coöperation with secular liberal factions, and initiate a range of troubling policies, including an insistence on Islamic law and the abrogation of the long-standing peace treaty with Israel. Last Thursday, Mubarak played on this anxiety, telling ABC that all the disorder was the fault of the Muslim Brothers. Which was utterly false. Leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are quite capable of slipping into conspiracy theories about 9/11, but they are not remotely as aggressive or as theocratic as their brethren abroad. During the Iraq War, I called on the Brotherhood at its small, ramshackle offices in Cairo, and one of its leaders, Essam al-Eryam, sought to reassure Western readers. “There will be democracy here, sooner or later,” he said. “It requires patience, and we are more patient because we are, as an organization, seventy-six years old. You have already seen some countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran—describe themselves as Islamic regimes. There’s a diversity of models, even among the Sunni and the Shia. Egypt can present a model that is more just and tolerant.” And there al-Eryam was right: supporters of political Islam sit peaceably in parliaments from Turkey to Indonesia.