GOING NOWHERE.(the Muslim Brotherhood against the Mubarak regime in Egypt)

Last November, President Bush delivered a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, spelling out the loftiest of his rationales for the war in Iraq--a determination to remake the political world from North Africa to the Arabian peninsula. It was a radical conservative's most radical address. The end of the twentieth century, Bush said, had marked "the swiftest advance of freedom in the twenty-five-hundred-year story of democracy," an advance that began with Portugal, Spain, and Greece more than thirty years ago, spread to South Korea and Taiwan, and then, finally, to South Africa and the entire Soviet imperium. By the President's accounting, there were forty democracies in the world in the early nineteen-seventies and a hundred and twenty by 2000. Never mind the reassertion of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and elsewhere. For Bush, one region in particular remained stubbornly unfree. "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?" he asked. The United States, he declared, had "adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East" that would depend on American "persistence and energy and idealism" but also on the Arab countries--not least, the most populous, powerful, and influential country in the region. "The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East," Bush said, "and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East."

The logic of that rhetorical instruction was not lost on the Egyptians: just as Anwar Sadat, a quarter-century earlier, had flown to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel, Hosni Mubarak, an unchallenged four-term President, a modern pharaoh, should take the equally bold step of creating a constitutional democracy, even at the risk of surrendering power. Egypt is historically central, a civilization of more than seven thousand years' standing, and, unlike the sectarian societies of Syria and Iraq or the arriviste dynastic oil depots of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it is a true nation-state, the center of nearly all currents, intellectual and ideological, in the Arab world. In Bush's own mind, at least, he was encouraging a revolution from above, an Arabian perestroika. And the revolution, he made plain, ought to begin in Cairo.

There has, of course, been no such revolution in Cairo, and no sign of one. Part of the collateral damage of the Bush Administration's prosecution of the war in Iraq is the erosion of American prestige and influence all over the world. Rather than take the democratizing cue from Bush, Mubarak's regime has offered itself as an example to the United States: Spare us the pretense of an open society, its leaders imply. Your greatest fear, like ours, is terrorism, and the only way to defeat such an enemy is by crushing it. Not long after September 11th, Atef Ebeid, the Egyptian Prime Minister, seemed to give sympathetic counsel to an ally still stunned by its encounter with the capacities of jihad. "The U.S. and U.K., including human-rights groups, have, in the past, been calling on us to give these terrorists their 'human rights,' " he said. "You can give them all the human rights they deserve until they kill you. After these horrible crimes committed in New York and Virginia, maybe Western countries should begin to think of Egypt's own fight against terror as their new model."

Ebeid was referring to a long history. Modern Islamic radicalism was born in the twenties in the villages of the upper Nile and the streets and mosques of Cairo. In communiques over the years, Osama bin Laden has often referred to that period as one of calamity and humiliation--an allusion, clear to anyone in the Islamic world, to the collapse of Islam's imperial seat, the Ottoman caliphate, based in Constantinople. In the nineteen-twenties, Kemal Ataturk, a secular revolutionary, banned the caliphate and established the Republic of Turkey. Islamic Constantinople became cosmopolitan Istanbul. At the same time, much of the Arab world was being parcelled out by the strongest powers in Europe, and nationalism came to displace the idea of a greater unified Islam.

In reaction, in 1928 Hassan al-Banna, a religiously educated teacher living near the Suez Canal, established the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna believed in Islam as a complete system, which provides divine instruction on everything from daily rituals, law, and politics to matters of the spirit, and to which all other forms of thought and social organization--secularism, nationalism, socialism, liberalism--are alien. In his essay "Between Yesterday and Today," Banna wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with "their murderous germs":

They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants.

The Brotherhood's slogan was, and remains, "God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations." The Brotherhood, like many groups that bear its imprint decades later--Hamas, Hezbollah--established charitable organizations, clinics, schools, and underground paramilitary groups to further the cause of an Islamic polity. Initially, the spectacularly corrupt Egyptian king, Farouk, used the Brotherhood as a stabilizing force against a stronger opposition, the Communists and the secular nationalists. And, as the Brotherhood grew in membership, it was able to act with a degree of freedom. But when terrorist challenges to the monarchy began, the government came to see the Brotherhood as a real threat. At the end of 1948, a member of the Brotherhood assassinated Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi; in 1949, the secret police retaliated, shooting Hassan al-Banna dead as he was getting into a taxi in Cairo.