The Awakening

There was a time in Cairo, just a few months ago, when it was considered slightly outré to suggest that Egypt’s religious conservatives might take advantage of Hosni Mubarak’s demise to engineer their way into power. We were told that battalions of tweeting secularists were steering this revolution, and that the people of Egypt did not want sharia, or Islamic law, to govern their lives. They simply wanted freedom. This was Selma on the Nile.

One night in a ragged, badly lit cafe just off the square, one of the revolution’s “Google kids”—not an actual employee but someone who could plausibly be employed by Google —explained to me how the Mubarak regime manipulated Western opinion. “They wanted you to believe that the only thing stopping the Muslim Brothers from taking over the whole country was them,” he said. “This is how they scared you. Then you gave them guns they used to kill us.”