The Political Thrill of Having an Enemy

I didn’t have a cause to die for. If I was at a sit-in protesting government repression, and the military threatened to come in and “clear” the square, I’d probably run for the hills. The one time I was citizen-arrested by a cab driver and quite literally dragged into a Cairo police station, I felt a sense of dread that I haven’t felt since. As someone who studies Islamists who are often willing to die, this inability on my part presented a conundrum. I felt that I understood most things about them, but not this, whatever this was.

I remember a conversation I had with a Muslim Brotherhood member who had been arrested after the and imprisoned for several months, before fleeing Egypt. In one of our conversations, he told me: “I want to break the international order. No matter how hard it is, this is the goal I want. That’s what I’m living for, even if I die in the process of fighting for it.” I asked him if