So it is not true that, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood speaks for society as a whole. Nor does Islamist ideology, with its invocations of superstition and its exaltations of obedience, express the Egyptian “street.”
Nor does the Brotherhood possess the canny ability to bend history to its will. The crisis in Egypt over the Brotherhood’s proposed new constitution broke out in December, and, three months later, the riots and demonstrations and killings have still not come to an end. Even the police have been demonstrating.
Nor is it true that, in Tunisia, the reputedly more moderate version of the Brotherhood, Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party, has offered a sounder alternative.
On the contrary, the moderates have presided over what appears to be a steady patter of violence by the radical Islamists, in token of the fact that, in Tunisia and everywhere else, moderates and radicals tend to be quietly allied, if only because the moderate leaders have to pacify their own radically-inclined rank-and-file. [THE NEW REPUBLIC] Read more
