Military crackdown in Cairo; is Mohamed ElBaradei the way forward?

Egypt’s interim military rulers battled a reinvigorated protest movement calling for its ouster Sunday, as thousands of demonstrators forced troops to retreat from Tahrir Square for a second night in a row.

Many compared the breadth and intensity of the new battles for the square — the iconic heart of the Egyptian revolt and the Arab Spring — to the early days of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak, only this time the target of the protesters’ ire was the ruling military council and its leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.

The military-led government’s attempts to beat back or squash the protests appeared to only redouble their strength. After using tear gas, rubber bullets and bird shot to beat back a day of continuous attacks on the headquarters of the interior ministry, hundreds of soldiers and security police in riot gear stormed the square from several directions at once at about 5 p.m., raining down rocks and tear gas as they drove thousands of demonstrators out before them.


But after less than half an hour they had retreated, having succeeded only in burning down a few tents planed in the middle of the square. And after another half an hour the crowd of protestors had more than doubled, packing the square as ever more demonstrators marched in from all directions chanting for the end of military rule.


The protests against military rule spread to at least seven other cities, including Alexandria and Suez. The health ministry said at least three were killed Sunday, after one died Saturday, and the number of seriously injured grew to over 900. A makeshift field hospital the protestors had set up in a mosque near the square treated a steady stream of hundreds bloodied by birdshot and rubber bullets and recorded at least one of the fatalities.

Activists in Arab World Vie to Define Islamic State

CAIRO — By force of this year’s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect of achieving decisive power across the region has unleashed an unprecedented debate over the character of the emerging political orders they are helping to build.

Few question the coming electoral success of religious activists, but as they emerge from the shadows of a long, sometimes bloody struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments, they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs.

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name “Islamist” to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

A backlash has ensued, as well, as traditionalists have flirted with timeworn Islamist ideas like imposing interest-free banking and obligatory religious taxes and censoring irreligious discourse.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.