But like hundreds of thousands of Egyptians El-Beheiry found himself swept up in the momentum of history and he took to the streets to join the protests that began January 25, 2011 and 18 days later resulted in the downfall of Mubarak. El-Beheiry continued to challenge authority — newly empowered, his family says, by the idea of a better future. On Feb. 25, he was arrested along with dozens of other protesters in front of the building where Egyptian cabinet meets.

El-Beheiry has the unfortunate distinction of being among the very first civilians arrested under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the governing body made up of generals that was given executive authority in Egypt during the transition to a newly elected government.

As a result, he was among the first of some 12,000 civilians to be brought before a military tribunal under the country’s so-called “Emergency Laws.” This process routinely suspends a civilian’s right to a fair trial and human rights activists fear it is an old ploy of the Mubarak regime which is once again being used to crush dissent. 

El-Beheiry has been badly beaten in prison, held incommunicado and sentenced to five years on what his family and lawyers say are trumped-up charges of breaking curfew and assaulting a soldier.

He was sentenced at a court hearing that was never announced to the family and which not even his lawyers were permitted to attend.

Mubarak used the “Emergency Laws” for decades to circumvent the civilian justice system and was criticized by international human rights groups for years for doing so. But in three decades of Mubarak’s autocratic rule, there were only 2,000 cases of civilians being tried by military courts. In just ten months of SCAF taking control of the country, there have been six times that many.

Human Rights Watch released a report this week to mark the anniversary of the “January 25 Revolution” in Egypt that highlighted SCAF’s use of these “Emergency Laws” and to call for the newly elected parliament to make it a legislative priority do away with this web of laws that curb free expression, limit the right to assembly and restrict just about any form of opposition to the ruling government. Egypt’s newly elected lower house of parliament, known as the People’s Assembly, will sit for the first time Monday.

In the 46-page report titled “The Road Ahead: A Human Rights Agenda for Egypt’s New Parliament,” Human Rights Watch sets out nine areas of Egyptian law that most need reform if the law is “to become an instrument that protects Egyptians’ rights rather than represses them.”

Amid the call for a change in Egypt’s laws to end the practice of military trials, El Beheiry’s case has become a cause célèbre, launching a popular, national movement known as “No Military Trials.” Bumper stickers and street graffiti supporting the movement can be seen everywhere.

The movement has begun to affect change: three days before the first anniversary of the revolution, and with rising fears of anti-military protests across the country, SCAF announced that Marshall Mohamed Hussien Tantawi signed a pardon decree for 1959 prisoners who have been sentenced by military tribunals. El-Beheiry is not among them.

The news comes less than two weeks after Marshall Tantawi denied the use of military trials in a meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter, who held extended meetings with top Egyptian officials, heads of political parties and NGOs after the Carter Center participated in what they described as “witnessing the Egyptian parliamentary elections.”

The sudden change in the military’s stance did not surprise the activist community nor did it slow their preparations for wide-scale protests.

*****

This is how El-Beheiry’s ordeal began.

As the soldiers moved in to arrest him, he was severely beaten. Leila Soueif, one of Egypt’s prominent human rights activists, saw this unfold and intervened. She had never met El-Beheiry but Soueif is the grandmother and matriarch of a family with a long history of opposition to the Mubarak regime. She insisted that she would not leave the scene of the protest without this young man whom she saw unfairly arrested and savagely beaten with her own eyes.

He was temporarily released, only to be apprehended again and then taken into a netherworld of military prisons and a military court system which human rights activists here say is systematically denying civilians their basic right to a fair trial.

Soon after his arrest, the movement “No Military Trials” was started by the daughter of the long-time human rights activist who first tried to help El-Beheiry in Tahrir Square when he was originally detained. Mona Seif said that her mother’s actions on behalf of El-Beheiry and the quick succession of others cases like it forced her to realize that “the detention of protesters by military personnel was systematically happening in the back stage of the revolution.”

Seif is a 25-year-old researcher at a breast cancer research center run by Cairo University. Just like El-Beheiry, the January 25 uprising turned her into a hard core female activist who refused to surrender her cause despite security intimidation, detention, brutality and the risk of losing her job.

The Egyptian military, which was originally celebrated as heroic defenders of the revolution, has shown very different colors in recent months, according to Seif and growing chorus of criticism across Egyptian society.

“They (the military) pretended to defend the revolution, and they continued with the same suppressive practices we revolted against,” says Mona Seif.

Amr El-Beheiry’s family also stepped up to highlight his case. They filed around 300 complaints and requests for a retrial over the past year. And then his family was told that he would finally be permitted to stand retrial. But they say they were never told of the trial date. To date, El-Beheiry remains in El-Wadi El-Gedid prison compound, a maximum security facility located in Egypt’s western desert, around 500 kilometers from the capital Cairo.

El-Beheiry’s brother, Mohammed, told GlobalPost that the family is kept completely in the dark as to any of his legal proceedings. He said they are worried about Amr’s well-being after getting a glimpse at what his brother suffered in military detention.

“When I first visited him he was injured and left untreated, his head injury was infected because of the lack of medical attention in jail,” said Mohammed.

But this was not the only case of brutality at the hands of the military. Hundreds of other physical abuse cases were documented over 11 months of military rule, human rights activists say.

The case of El-Beheiry and around 9000 others since February 2011 has brought the ruling generals of Egypt under fiery criticism and raised questions about their intentions toward the ongoing revolution.

“No Military Trials,” the initiative inspired by El-Beheiry’s detention, has organized dozens of protests against the ongoing violation of human and civil rights, but their efforts seem to have little influence on the policies of the SCAF’s ruling generals.

Ragia Omran, an Egyptian female activist and lawyer specializing in military trials of civilians said that torture has been “consistently used toward those detained by military police.” She says that physical abuse was documented in almost all protests and strikes dispersed by the military “on March 9, April 9, Israeli Embassy protests, May 15, June 28, September 9, the last week of November and mid-December when they dispersed the sit-in beside the cabinet building.”

Most of those detained by the military police were stripped of their legal rights and according to Omran, “The case is usually built on a reports filed by arresting officers, reports that normally don’t include any details or substantial evidence.”

The European Parliament issued a statement on November 17 after the detention of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah.

“The European Parliament calls for the immediate release from prison of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El-Fattah and reiterates its call to stop prosecution of civilians by military courts in Egypt,” said the official statement.

The blogger who was detained on charges of stealing military weapons, attacking government facilities and killing a soldier decided not to answer to military prosecutors. His boycott continued for three consecutive questioning sessions before he reached an unprecedented success and was referred to a civilian criminal court along with over 60 other detainees.

There has been a significant decrease in use of military trials against civilians in recent months, but more than 9000 prisoners continue to serve time.

“Military trials of civilians have not stopped yet; however, there has been a significant decrease in the cases reviewed by the Military Prosecution since the events of Israeli Embassy on September 9,” said the lawyer and human rights activist Ragia Omran.

Omran thinks the decrease in military trials for civilians “was achieved by the combined efforts of local protesters, the media, and international organizations that harshly criticized the practice.”

While the cases are being highlighted, what actually goes on inside the prison walls is largely unknown.

But Abul Maati Ahmed provided a glimpse.

He is one of the few who recently stood retrial and were released, and he was interviewed by GlobalPost.

He was first detained on February 2, 2011 trying to bring food and supplies to a tent in Tahrir Square where his family was gathered in support of the protest movement. This was before the fall of Mubarak and 5 days after Egypt’s army took to the streets, for the first time in decades, to, as the generals put it, “defend the revolution.”

“I was deported to the Military Prison, I was tortured along with other detainees for four continuous days, we were offered no food during that time, some detainees collapsed and were carried away, I believe some of them died,” said Abul Maati.

Once again, Abul Maati confirmed how theatrical those trials were. “I saw a prosecutor for less than 15 minutes, he asked me a few questions after which I was dismissed,” he said.

The confused detainees who all experienced similar brief questioning sessions were deported once more to a different prison. “When we arrived in prison I asked what will happen next, a prison worker told me I was transferred to serve a five years jail term.”

Behind the maximum security walls of El-Wadi El-Gedid prison, Abul Maati and his fellow protesters turned inmates decided to go on hunger strike. On the tenth day they were informed by the prison administration that they were pardoned by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

“We broke the hunger strike and waited to hear the news of our release. We found out that they lied to us. They threatened us not to think of a hunger strike anymore, or else we will be tortured,” said Abul Maati.

Back in his hometown of Shalakan, a small agricultural town north of Cairo, Abul Maati’s father, Ahmed Abu Arab, started his hunger strike to protest the detention of his son, while the brother and other family members continued to file complaints and requests for a retrial. On the tenth day of his hunger strike, the unhealthy old man was rushed to hospital after he collapsed.

Abul Maati was finally granted a retrial in mid October. He stood a second military trial in November that sentenced him to six months in jail for breaking curfew. And he was released based on the nine months he had already served.

He emerged from the prison to find out that he had lost his job at the Egypt Gas Company. Requests to the company to allow him to retain his job were in vain.

The healthy athlete and martial arts champion came out of prison a heavy smoker; he vowed to return to Tahrir Square, where he was first detained.

“I will be protesting in Tahrir Square on the anniversary, prison will never make me surrender what I came out for last year,” said Abul Maati.

He described his experience behind bars as “the reality of the Egyptian military,” which pretended to defend the revolution but “targeted the youth who fueled it.”

“It is the biggest betrayal I have ever experienced.”

The heavy strain that the military imprisonment and tribunals caused Abul Maati and his family, particularly his father who fell ill, is a familiar story among the thousands of detainees still in prison.

*****

This stress has certainly taken a toll on Amr El-Beheiry’s father.

Abdalla El-Beheiry suffered a stroke, his family says, after hearing that his son, Amr, was permanently fired from his job while serving his sentence.

And while thousands of protesters demanded reform and chanted against the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the now bed-ridden father found himself begging officers at the Military Judiciary Department to pardon his jailed son or allow him to stand retrial.

On January 10, El-Beheiry’s appeal for a retrial was accepted. The old man still clings to a hope that his son might be released and return to his job. He waits to see if the retrial will really take place. But the father has been rendered mute by the effect of the stroke and is unable to say how he feels about the slight hope that his son may be released.

“My father just couldn’t tolerate the news,” said Amr’s brother, Mohamed.

“Now, the Americans come to meet us in person because they have estimated that we will be coming to power,” Mohamed Saad Katatny , the secretary-general of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, told the Washington Post, “and therefore they want to know us, but we have not discussed more than the general conditions and made introductions.”

On Wednesday Deputy Secretary of State William Burns met with the head of the Brotherhood’s political party, the highest-level contacts ever.

The Obama administration’s first tentative steps toward the Muslim Brotherhood go back to the president’s Cairo speech in June 2009, which was attended – at the administration’s request – by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated activists. “America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them,” the president told those assembled at Cairo University. “And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.”

Laying down a condition for democratic participation, President Obama continued in Cairo, “government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party.”

The shift has been some time coming. For decades, U.S. policymakers struggled to develop a coherent approach to Islamic political parties in the Middle East, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest. Founded in 1928 by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna as a populist social movement aimed at returning Egyptian society to its Islamic roots, the group originally supported the Egyptian revolution of 1952, but soon fell out with the new government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. An attempt on Nasser’s life in 1954 led to the organization being outlawed and to a prolonged period of repression, some splinter factions turning to violence.

After Brotherhood-affiliated candidates won 88 seats in the national assembly in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, the Bush administration began talking to them, but pulled back as Mubarak launched a renewed crackdown on democracy activists. Bush’s “freedom agenda” was buried under a wave of anti-American radicalism driven by the occupation of Iraq.

Obama’s election on a pledge to change direction and his Cairo speech put him in a decent position to side last year with the Tahrir Square protesters’ demand for political reform and the end of Mubarak’s regime, something for which Obama has continued to be criticized by Republicans who see little difference between the religiously oriented politics of the Brotherhood and the violent nihilism of al-Qaida. Faulting the administration for not supporting Mubarak, presidential candidate Rick Santorum called the Muslim Brotherhood “as dangerous to western civilization and the future of our country” as al-Qaida.

Back in July, as it became even clearer that Islamist parties were preparing to make significant gains in the coming elections, it was reported that the Obama administration was seeking “limited contacts” with Brotherhood activists. Conservatives once again criticized the shift, but it’s unclear what the other options are, aside from doubling down support for Egypt’s current interim government, headed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has become increasingly violent against protesters over the last months. (That is, repeat the same mistakes that we have made for decades in supporting oppressive authoritarian regimes against their own people for the sake of stability.)

“I think the [New York Times] story was a little overstated,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East Scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, whose book “The Struggle for Egypt” was published in September. “For years we’ve been having unofficial contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood. And pretty early on after Mubarak fell, the State Department indicated that there would be contacts.”

The bottom line, according to Cook, is that the Brotherhood is “an important part of the political landscape and choosing to wall ourselves off from them is unnecessarily handicapping ourselves. They haven’t engaged in any violence for the better part of five decades. So it’s reasonable to be talking to them. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, unless you buy into this idea that the Brotherhood is part of the effort to establish the global caliphate, which is not the case.”

Some analysts take a darker view. “It is tempting to believe that the FJP will moderate once in power,” writes Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but a number of factors make this highly unlikely, including the challenge to the Brotherhood’s right flank from more extreme Salafi parties. Trager also argues that Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel is in danger. “Although the party has said that it will honor Egypt’s international agreements,” Trager writes, “it has carved out an exception for the Camp David Accords, which it intends to put to a national referendum, thereby shielding itself from direct responsibility for the treaty’s demise.”

But Olivier Roy, a French scholar who has covered trends in political Islam for some time, asserts that the parties like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, which won recent elections there, should be considered “post-Islamist.” While they continue to espouse many ideas at odds with modern liberalism (just as do some Western conservative religious political movements), in Roy’s analysis they have  adopted in principle the necessity of working within a pluralistic political space.

“The paradox of Islamization is that it has largely depoliticized Islam,” Roy wrote. “Social and cultural re-Islamization – the wearing of the hijab and niqab, an increase in the number of mosques, the proliferation of preachers and Muslim television channels – has happened without the intervention of militant Islamists and has in fact opened up a ‘religious market’, over which no one enjoys a monopoly. In short, the Islamists have lost the stranglehold on religious expression in the public sphere that they enjoyed in the 1980s.”

By reaching out to parties and Islamic movements that have been vilified for the past decade, the Obama administration is taking a risk, especially in an election year. Brotherhood members continue to make contradictory statements in regard to their plans and goals for a new Egypt, and the group’s most prominent affiliated cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, regularly issues the grossest anti-American and anti-Semitic slanders on his Al Jazeera show. There is clearly reason for concern. But, if the U.S. is to be serious about democracy promotion, it is unclear what other options exist.

“We’re going to have to get used to the fact that there’s a strong Muslim Brotherhood presence in Egyptian politics,” Cook concludes. “It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak out then we disagree with their policies, but this is the reality. The question is: Do we adjust? Or do we forever fight against the political will of the people in the region?”

Al Aswany’s office is in a fairly rundown building on Diwan Street. There is a sign with mismatched lettering hanging from the building over the sidewalk. It reads:

Dr. Alaa EL Aswany

Dentist

D.D.S (Cairo University)

M.S. University of ILLINOIS

4th FlOOR

Al Aswany’s tiny waiting area leads into a slightly larger examining room. The floor was covered in a pinkish Formica, reflecting lines of fluorescent light. In a darkened alcove stood his dentists’ chair. An over-sized ashtray was arranged in the middle of a glass coffee table. After a few minutes he walked in, dressed in gray trousers and a striped shirt.

“So the Islamists had their day,” he said by way of a greeting. We moved to his small desk made of the same pinkish Formica in a corner of the room.

Alaa Al Aswany is one of Egypt’s best living writers. He’s probably the most known Arab novelist in the West since the 2002 publication of “The Yacoubian Building,” which was made into Egypt’s most expensive film. It tells the story of the thoroughly corrupt Mubarak-era through debased characters who are tortured, sexually harassed and crushed by poverty. It is the story of an aging playboy, a wealthy protagonist longing for the cosmopolitan splendor of pre-Nasser Downtown. The characters live in the Yacoubian — a once grand apartment block on Talaat Harb Street.

Despite the fame it brought him, Al Aswany continues to fix ordinary Egyptians’ teeth. He’s caring for patients as he listens to their desperate stories. His latest book, “The State of Egypt,” a collection of his newspaper columns, describes in painful detail the coming social explosion against Mubarak and his cronies, whom he eviscerates on every page. The only plausible explanation for why the authorities never arrested Al Aswany is that his international notoriety would have caused Mubarak more trouble than it was worth.

The book disproves a widely held belief in the West that no one saw the uprising coming. In February 2010, 11 months before the January 25th Revolution began, Al Aswany wrote: “We have to move to the confrontation stage. It is no longer any use begging for our rights by appealing to the regime, because it will not listen. But if a million Egyptians went out to the streets in protest or announced a general strike, if that happened, even once, the regime would immediately heed the people’s demands. Change … is possible and imminent, but there is a price we have to pay for it.”

Then in April 2010, nine months before Tahrir Square was occupied, he wrote: “I don’t know how President Mubarak thinks, though I imagine, based on the theory of ‘dictator solitude,’ that his conceptions are completely detached from the reality of what is happening in Egypt. The reality is liable to produce an explosion at any moment.”

As it turned out, Al Aswany was in the Square during the crucial — and most violent days — of that explosion. “We participated in this revolution from the very first moment, and I faced myself death, three times,” he told me in his examining room. “Once early in the morning of the 26th, and twice on the 28th. I was about to suffocate because on the 26th they became crazy. They were bombing us with [tear] gas bombs.”

“I ran with the people, but I was really about to suffocate,” he said. “I could stand some gas, but not too much. I smoke and have problems already with my lungs. We were running in Tahrir Square, but they were putting soldiers in our way just to put us again in the field of bombs.”

Al Aswany’s intimate knowledge of every warden of Downtown, the setting of the Yacoubian Building, may have saved his life. “I was lucky, because I know downtown very well,” he told me. “I went through a very little street. And I said to myself, ‘They don’t know the area very well, so probably they did not block this street.’ They didn’t block it, and that’s why I escaped.”

Two days later they brought in the snipers. The killing had already begun around the country, in Alexandria and Suez, but it was the first time live ammunition was used in the capital.

“In Cairo they were shocked at the numbers, and they tried to control it without killing and it didn’t work,” he told me. “For the first time I saw soldiers from the Central Security running away because there were 20,000 people coming from Darb Ibn al-Baba — a very popular neighborhood. When they absorbed the shock of what was happening, they began to act at 12:30 a.m. on the 26th.”

As Al Aswany stood in the crowded Square at that moment, a man approached him. “He said, ‘You must write about this revolution.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Promise?’ And I said, ‘Promise.’” The man then stepped away and his head exploded in front of Al Aswany. “I mean it’s one bullet,” he said. “They were very professional snipers.”

* * *

Al Aswany was born in Cairo in 1957, the son of Abbas Al Aswany, himself a celebrated novelist and lawyer. He gave his son a cosmopolitan upbringing. He also advised him to get another job to support his writing habit. Al Aswany chose dentistry, which he studied in Chicago. It became the setting of his second novel. “Chicago” is a story of American race relations and Egyptian conservatism colliding with American liberalism. When Al Aswany returned to Egypt after 17 years practicing in America, he set up his dental clinic in the same building where his father had his law office: the Yacoubian.

“You cannot be a novelist if you are not a storyteller,” Al Aswany said. And the story he was now telling me was about the perilous future of Egypt’s ongoing revolution.

In “The State of Egypt,” he takes aim at the religious hypocrisy of Egyptians who supported Mubarak’s murderous regime. “The doctors and nurses who mistreat poor patients in public hospitals, the civil servants who rig election results in the government’s favor, and the students who cheat en masse, most of them are devout about performing their ritual obligations,” he writes.

“It is even more amazing to see what happens on security premises where detainees are tortured to extract the required confessions,” Al Aswany goes on. “In these human slaughterhouses, which belong to the darkness of the Middle Ages, there is always a prayer room where the torturers can perform their prayers at the appointed times.”

He sees the opposite of empty ritual as the bigger threat to the revolution: religious fanaticism. Al Aswany does not put all Islamists in the same basket, making distinctions that may try Western perceptions. For instance, he excludes the largest Islamist group — the Muslim Brotherhood — as a threat because it renounced violence in the 1970s. After it did, two violent groups rejected the renunciation and broke away: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. These were the groups that assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 for making peace with Israel. They also took part in killing 58 Western tourists in Luxor in 1997.

Today nominally nonviolent, these Salafists nevertheless threaten the revolution with their intolerance, he says. They are influenced by the ultra-conservative Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia — the one country Al Aswany is convinced is most responsible for trying to kill the Egyptian revolution.

Egypt was the most advanced Arab country in the early 20^th century, while the Saudis were an undeveloped Bedouin tribe in the wasteland of the Arabian Peninsula, he said.

“The difference between us and Saudis is we had a very early democratic experience,” Al Aswany told me. “Our first Parliament was during the 19^th century and [among Arabs] we had the first of everything: the first elections, the first constitution, the first Parliament, the first elected government in 1924,” he says animatedly. “As far as the women are concerned, we had very, very early movements to liberate women. And [the Saudis] are fighting now to give the women the right to drive cars. We had the first race of automobiles in Egypt for females in 1927.”

Saudi influence reaches into Egyptian homes via 10 Saudi cable television stations preaching Wahhabism. “They are giving a very fine line of interpretation of religion and preaching against democracy and women,” he said.

Al Aswany repeated what is widely believed here — that Saudi Arabia, with Kuwait and the Emirates, have poured billions of Egyptian pounds into the operations of these seven newly formed Salafist parties, which may represent as many as 10 percent of Egyptians. The Saudis, says Al Aswany, want to suffocate democracy in Egypt lest it spread to the Arabian Peninsula.

“We have evidence that they are absolutely supported by these three countries,” he told me. A local paper, al Wafd, reported that these Gulf countries sent the groups 2 billion Egyptian pounds. “These new parties bought 33 apartments in Alexandria in two months,” Al Aswany said. “For today’s demonstration … they used 3,000 buses from all over Egypt. So you are talking about an open budget.”

The Salafists have also shown extreme intolerance to Egypt’s sizable community of 8 million Coptic Christians, resulting in several violent clashes and church burnings since Mubarak’s downfall. In the bloodiest, on Oct. 9, military vehicles mowed down and soldiers shot dead 27 Copts at the state television building in Cairo during a protest of a church burning in Aswan. A military probe cleared all soldiers of wrongdoing. A result is that the Christian-Muslim unity forged in the early days of the revolution is now threatened by what appeared on that day to be a Salafist-military alliance. Al Aswany fears that if the Salafists were allowed to reach power, the international community would intervene, as it did in Sudan, to give Christian separatists their own state, dividing Egypt. Some Copts have sought an independent state since the early 1900s.

By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood, expected to win the most seats in Parliament short of a majority, “is much more moderate,” and does not pose the same threat, Al Aswany says. Founded in Egypt in 1928 as a reaction against the Western cosmopolitanism of Downtown Cairo under King Farouk, the Brotherhood was suppressed by the Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak military regimes. Though the Brotherhood renounced violence 40 years ago, Mubarak played the Islamophobia card, exaggerating the threat of the Brotherhood (in addition to smaller, violent groups) to squeeze the U.S. for military aid that has reached $1.3 billion a year, Al Aswany says.

It was this exaggerated Islamic threat coupled with keeping Egypt on board with the Camp David peace treaty with Israel, he says, that allowed Washington to violate its proclaimed goal of exporting democracy to instead support an insidious dictator. “The American foreign policy was catastrophic for Egypt,” Al Aswany said. “You have been talking all the time very beautiful words about democracy, and you have been supporting the most terrible dictators on earth.” This dual policy of supporting democratization while underwriting a strongman to his bitter end, came to an excruciating head in Tahrir Square as it had with Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and the Shah of Iran in 1979. Washington lifted its support for Mubarak at the last second, when it became clear he could not survive the wrath of his people.

* * *

Al Aswany reserves his deepest suspicion however for the military council, which has run the country since Mubarak was deposed on Feb. 11. It did not take long for him to attack it with the same vehemence as he did the Mubarak regime.

Al Aswany condemns the military for arresting bloggers, using violence on protestors, for not having yet lifted the old regime’s state of emergency and for manipulating the electoral law and the constitutional process to favor the continuance of its own dominance and the survivors of Mubarak’s clique. He finds it ironic that Mubarak, a military man, is on trial in a civilian court, while civilians stand before the military. Since Jan. 28, 12,000 civilians have been tried in military courts and 8,000 have been sentenced, including 18 to death. Most of these are activists, journalists and demonstrators protesting military rule.

“The revolution is at risk because of the military council,” Al Aswany said. Instead of protecting the revolution, they have continued the repression and instituted only piecemeal reforms that he says are designed to preserve the existing regime — minus Mubarak.

“When you reform in a time of revolution, you put the revolution in very high risk. Why? Because a revolution is the final battle for the old regime. The remnants, the counter-revolution, know very well that they must fight once more desperately. Either they win and they abort the revolution, or they fail and they will be in jail.”

* * *

During their first months in power, the military called in intellectuals to gauge the mood of post-Mubarak society. “They invited me once to listen to me,” Al Aswany said. “I explained to them for three hours the difference between a revolution and reform. How it is very dangerous to not protect the revolution with revolutionary decisions. I gave them examples in every domain of Egypt: with the police, with the judges, the economy. And they did nothing. We had a wonderful dinner.”

Fears that the military will not relinquish power even with an elected civilian government are reflected in the process for writing a new constitution that the council has proposed. Instead of the elected parliament picking a 100-member council to write the constitution, the military proposes that it pick 80 of the members, and the Parliament only 20.

In an atmosphere of this political intrigue, it’s little surprise that theories about impending conspiracies are rife. Al Aswany is not immune from such speculation. “I believe that behind closed doors there are some deals or some games going on,” he said.

A rumor hatched over the summer and still current is that the military council, working with the corrupt judges who fixed Mubarak’s elections, would allow the Islamists to win a majority, after which the Americans, Saudis and Israelis would tell the military council they must ignore the results and stay in power to prevent an Islamist takeover.

That’s exactly what took place in Algeria in 1992. It led to seven years of civil war that killed 150,000 people. There’s no indication that would happen in Egypt, but Al Aswany, in an understatement, said, “That is a very bad scenario.”

U.S. and Israeli officials have relied for 30 years on the Egyptian military, more interested in business than war, to uphold the Camp David accord. An Islamist government, even with the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood at the helm, would create uncertainty on the Egyptian-Israeli border. For Washington and Tel Aviv, military rule might in that case be preferable to democracy.

* * *

Being a realist doesn’t stop Al Aswany from dreaming about the Egypt he wants to see. In a country of 80 million people with 17 percent living below the national poverty line and 26 percent illiterate, it is fanciful to imagine a Swedish-style social democracy. So Al Aswany looks back for a starting point to Downtown Cairo’s golden age, the one his protagonist in “The Yacoubian Building” also yearned for.

Started from a boom in Egyptian cotton prices caused by the embargo on the American Civil War South, Downtown Cairo, with its wrought-iron balconies, elaborate pilasters and grand marble staircases was mostly completed by 1919, the year a popular revolution established a constitutional monarchy. The next 30 years brought a functioning parliament, independent judiciary, highly acclaimed, critical newspapers and tolerance of foreigners. But there was also mass poverty, illiteracy and corruption. And legendary Egyptian pride built on centuries was still pierced by British political interference.

A strong measure of that dignity returned with the ouster of Mubarak. “This is an irreversible phenomenon,” Al Aswany said. “This is part of what the old regime can’t understand.”

“Our heritage is huge, over 6,000 years, so we have a stratified identity,” he said.

“And this is part of our problem with the Islamists. You cannot subsume our identity in Islam, which is a mere component. We have been Muslims for 1,500 years, but for 4,500 years before that we were part of the Roman, Greek and Persian empires, and before that we were ruled by the Pharaohs.

“You have everything in the Egyptian identity,” he said. “But most importantly we have a very early — and this is the difference between us and Saudis — democratic experience,” one Al Aswany and millions of other Egyptians are risking their lives to recapture and build on.

“My country will never be fanatic,” Al Aswany said — “will never be ruled by the Saudis. Egypt, the Egyptian formula, has been for centuries, and that means everybody is accepted: Jews, Armenians, Italians, Muslims, Copts. This is the Egyptian consciousness. The real Egypt.”

Many attribute this bump to the Brotherhood’s impressive ground-game.  “Each Muslim Brotherhood member signs on to a rigorous educational curriculum and is part of something called an usra, or family, which meets weekly,”  explains Shadi Hamid  Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Center, “If a Brother chooses to stay home on election day, other Brothers will know.”

But the FJP’s initial success cannot be explained by logistics alone.  The 90-year old organization has deep roots in Egyptian society and its vaguely centrist ideology–a mix of free-market liberalism and moderate social conservatism–appeals to a wide swath of the Egyptian public.  In an election where many party lists include former members of Mubarak regime, the FJP boasts strong anti-regime bona fides. Many of its leaders have spent significant time in prison and are widely respected across the Egyptian political spectrum.

Although there has been an explosion of new political parties since the fall of Mubarak last spring, elections returns suggest these new parties still lag far behind the FJP in name recognition and organizational strength.

With results still coming in, I asked Dr. Amr Derrag, who sits on the FJP’s Supreme Committee, if he were pleased with his party’s performance: “We don’t pay attention to how many seats we score, as much as we pay attention to the success of the process itself,” he replied coyly.  “We need to wait till the final round, to make any assessment.”

But when pressed, he admitted that the strong performance might motivate the FJP to seek a parliamentary majority in the next round of elections. For now, the Secretary General of the FJP, Mohamed Saad El-Katatn,  has pledged that it will only seek a plurality of seats in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak legislature.

Confounding High Expectations

Despite, Derrag’s blasé attitude, the FJP is doing so well that they appear competitive in some places secular-liberal parties had counted on winning. In Cairo’s 6^th district, which includes the liberal upper-class island of Zamalek and much of the heart of downtown, the FJP’s candidates are making a strong showing.  The district hosted one of the most watched races in town between the well known former television reporter and activist Gameela Ismail, Amr Khaled of the FJP and Mohamed Abu-Hamed of the Egyptian Bloc, a centrist coalition of secular liberal parties.

Despite widespread name recognition, and an unparalleled advertising campaign, Ismail was knocked out of the race.  Khaled will face Abu-Hamed in a runoff in the coming weeks.

On Nubar St., near the edge of the 6^th district, the neighborhood is abuzz with election talk, and many of the locals are surprised at the Brothers’ strong showing in their neighborhood.

“I voted for the Egyptian Block,” Ahmed, a 20-year-old university student tells me.   “I would vote for Ismail as well, but I don’t approve of how the Brothers mix religion and politics, ” he adds.

The majority of this week’s voters, however, do not share Ahmed’s aversion to political Islam. The Salafi Nour Party, a fundamentalist Islamic party, is coming in a strong second to the FJP.   The Nour Party has done especially well outside of Cairo and quite a few of its candidates are headed towards runoff elections.

Between the Nour and the FJP, Islamic parties won a clear majority of seats in Egypt’s first round of elections.  Based on this trend up to 65 percent of  Egypt’s incoming parliament could be controlled by Islamists, according to  Diaa Rashwan, the head of the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies here in Cairo.

But the Brotherhood has made it clear that it will not enter into a religiously based alliance. “We will be part of a democratic coalition including all currents,” Dr. Derrag explained to me.

Saad El Katatny,the  FJP’s Secretary General,  reiterated this point in a statement released Thursday, which denies rumors that  the Brothers were considering an alliance with the Nour Party to form an “Islamist government.”

From Opposition Group to Political Party

 As elections continue over the coming months, it is unclear how smoothly the Brotherhood can transition from an opposition movement to a political party with a (growing) popular mandate. This dilemma is only exacerbated by Egypt’s uncertain political climate and the continued political dominance of the ruling military junta, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

During the election season, the Muslim Brotherhood had struck a conciliatory posture in dealing with the SCAF. Though FJP and Brotherhood leaders criticized the military’s authoritarian ruling style, they refused to join protests last week calling for the immediate removal of the military government.

Over the last months, the Brothers have criticized the proliferation of military trials, condemned police brutality, and publically demonstrated against the SCAF’s attempts to influence the constitutional drafting process.  But they have not adopted the rhetoric of those activists occupying Tahrir Square who declare the military completely illegitimate.

As the Brother’s build momentum, they may be headed on a collision course with the increasingly authoritarian SCAF.  In the few days following the election, the Brothers are already struggling to balance their popular mandate with the political realities of military rule.

On Thursday, the FJP rescinded a statement made by party leader Mohammad Morsi that the party had earned the right to form a new government and interim cabinet. Party leaders later called the announcement, “premature.” The SCAF currently claims the right to name and dismiss the civilian cabinet. The Generals have signaled their intent to retain this power even after the new parliament is seated. Unless the FJP is prepared to serve as the SCAF’s rubber stamp, a showdown is inevitable.

For now, though, FJP officials are focusing on elections.

“Lets not get ahead of ourselves, we have two more rounds of elections to compete in, ” Dr. Derrag tols me.  He refused to comment on potential friction with the military, but he did promise that the FJP would guarantee that the democratic process unfolds properly:   “What we can assure everyone, at the end of the process the will of the people must be respected.”

On “The Daily Show” last night, Jon Stewart and correspondent Aasif Mandvi examined the aversion of many Americans to Egypt’s elections. And, as Mandvi pointed out:

Look! You can’t control everything that happens in other countries. Lots of countries have policies that aren’t in our interest. France wants to buy oil from Iran. China wants to sell us toys made of lead. Russia wants to extinguish the sun. Why should Egypt be any different?