Of all the major Arab states, Egypt had once appeared the most "liberal" because of:  the ameliorating influence of the Coptic Church, a relative cultural modernity, the pride associated with their Non-Islamic Golden Age, and an earnest desire to interact with the West. One, therefore, shudders in alarm at this ancient people's suicidal flirtation with imbibing a full draught of Islam's theocratic poison- since such folly can only result in: untold suffering, civil war, economic penury, religious repression and moral diminution-- effectively extending the great chain of man-made human tragedy throughout the entirety of the Middle Eastern arc.

Tragically, in the tinder box of the Middle East, only authoritarian strongmen have been able to quell the cultural belligerence and ancient animosities rooted in tribal cleavages, and then solely through the iron mailed fist of third world justice. As their dominant power was eclipsed, the ancient worms of time-stained vengeance and grievance once again retrenched themselves, only to spontaneously ignite those blackened prides in the oxygen of Muhammad's recurring imperialistic quest to subdue and convert. The ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood under Morsi, rather than serving to open wide the floodgates of a new dawn of prosperity, would appear to have reinvigorated the dream of a united Ummah: the ancient delusion of a rebirthed caliphate dictating Allah's law to a reprobate world. Consequently, the problem has then arisen: under whose Islamic incarnation of power will the caliphate emanate from: Turkey, Iran, the wealthy Gulf States, the Taliban, or from Egypt herself?

Suffice to say, the lion's share of Arabic Muslims, who have never agreed upon anything but their sanguine loathing of the Jews, will not be deterred from pursuing their own vector of Islam; and the Brotherhood, the  fiery patriarch of re-emergent Islam, has already given the nod to a de facto incremental dhimmitization of its religious minorities while casting a blind eye to the regional murders and persecutions of Coptic Christians as an affirmation that new modes and orders are in place- "a new Sharif is in town." 

Given the chilling effect of Islamicization on the influx of capital into Egypt's already moribund economic straits, the global smart money is leaving, or has left, and the word  to those who have grown accustomed to Western sensibilities is: " get out while you still can."  Moreover, the climate between Israel and Egypt has turned arctic and this rattling of scimitars spells certain doom for their thirty year peace pact as the Sinai has become a bloody staging area for Salafists and mercenary Bedouins-another troublesome front for Israel to concern herself with now that the bloom is off the rose.  Having achieved the role as arbitrator in the Gaza-Israeli ceasefire, the world will soon see if the Brotherhood has the ability to act in a spirit of neutral engagement. 

The land of the Pharaohs, having endured Nasser's secular Pan-Arabist debacle and the shame it brought to Egypt and the Arabian crescent itself, must now wrestle with a much more formidable demon: the re-occurring totalistic nightmare of a resurgent fundamentalist Islam. The Egyptian Street, having suffered for so long from its humiliation and despair at being paradoxically the most blessed and wretched of the earth's peoples, have recklessly thrown in their lots with the Brotherhood, and in sowing to the desert wind, shall indeed now reap the ideological whirlwind.

I can only speculate that the Muslim Brotherhood are praying that religious ardor and the holy righteousness of their temporal and eternal visions will fill their coffers and food stores with enough blood, revenge, and political grandiosity to sate the empty bellies of its teeming millions wallowing in poverty, but this time there is no Joseph and no dream of seven fat oxen.  There is only the proverbial desert mirage that accompanies a nation that has passed from the cauldron into the open flame.

Egypt's demons have ever been associated with the Funeral House of Islam, a system that fundamentally binds the mind to anxiety and paranoia, making a mental fetish of pride and elevating conquest, oppression, revenge and cultural vindication among the highest of its psychic goods.  This psychological projection of a civilization's domestic phantoms, superimposed upon the face of Israel and the West, is an axiomatic defense mechanism rising within those whose unconscious terrors have been brutally repressed by the closed circle of Islam's presumptive and opaque consciousness.  Reality ultimately and terrifyingly imposes a severe worldly and divine judgment for those who refuse to acknowledge that the beautiful light at the far end of the tunnel is indeed a screaming locomotive.