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in that polarisation, Islam was avoiding the main questions. The nature of the state is one thing, but there are other major challenges - what it will take to tackle the issues of social corruption, for example, social justice, and the economic system – and what are the future challenges when it comes to equality between the citizens, in particular in the field of the job market and equal opportunity for men and for women? This is at the centre of the question that is the Arab Awakening

Since the beginning of the 1920’s, Islamism was very close in positioning in some respects to ‘liberation theology’. But that is no longer the case. Now the most important example of the last fifteen years is the move from Erbakan to Erdoğan, creating the Turkish model that has been highly successful in economic terms, but only in fact by buying into and succeeding in being integrated into the global economic system. 

Don’t they talk about the need for redistribution? One gets the impressions that the Salafi argument is often more concerned about looking after the poor? TR: Yes, but within the system.  You can be a very charitable capitalist.  Like Sarkozy was saying, we have to ‘moralise capitalism’, which for me is a contradiction in terms.

In the political upheaval that followed the revolt of 2011 and the army takeover two years later, as investors fled and currency reserves plunged, Egypt turned to the GCC. First Qatar and later Saudi Arabia and the UAE obliged, with more than $40bn in grants, loans and investment to prop up sympathetic governments. Meanwhile, repeated talks with the IMF broke off short of a loan accord.

Mr El Sisi is already enacting some policies the IMF typically requires as conditions for loans. Egypt slashed fuel subsidies last year and aims to cut its budget deficit by at least 1.5 percentage points to 10.5 per cent of economic output this year.The fund would be likely to require faster action on that and other issues, and that would be a good thing, according to Lutz Roehmeyer, the director of fund management at Landesbank Berlin Investment.“Investors so far have the impression that politics and reforms are moving too slowly in Egypt,” he said. “An IMF programme would increase certainty that there will be a reform agenda.”

Many economists, though, believe that the squeeze on Egypt’s finances will force the government to overcome any such scruples.“Sooner or later, we will have to resort to the IMF,” said Omar El Shenety, the managing director at the Cairo-based investment bank Multiples Group. “For credibility first, before its money.”

The government may need to clear other hurdles. Egypt turned down a similar loan arrangement with the IMF in June when the ruling generals said they didn’t want to burden future generations with debt. The erosion of reserves since then has made Egypt’s financial needs more acute. Another change, though, is the election of the first post-Mubarak parliament, which will need to approve an IMF loan agreement.

While notable exceptions exist, the overall tendency of most accounts has been to compartmentalize and classify. Middle-Eastern resistance to dictatorship, Northern Mediterranean unrest against externally enforced austerity measures, and an Anglo-American revolt against the tyranny of the financial sector, have been analyzed as discrete cases each with their own structural and contingent dynamics. The results of this compartmentalization are all too predictable. Two years on, instead of a single image of global rebellion, we are left with fractured portraits of localized discontent.

Rather than view these uprisings within the recently sanitized history of revolution and an increasingly ineffectual grammar of social movements, it is high time to call the global occupations of public space what they are: social arrests.

The uprisings against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt were uniformly proclaimed as “expressing the will of the people”, while the strikingly similar manifestations of their Spanish, Greek, and American counterparts were all but ignored. This bifurcation in Western responses, one equally evident in governments and the mainstream media, is indicative of how we have come to perceive the role of mass political protest in the first decade of the 21st century. In the tradition of the French Revolution, uprisings against authoritarian rule are signified as acts of popular sovereignty — legitimate manifestations of a people unable to express their will through alternate channels — whereas similar protests within liberal representative democracies are marginalized as the acts of a raucous minority.

it's hard to tell how widespread and successful the crackdown has been. There was at least one report of BlackBerry users finding a way around the blocks. One Internet service provider reportedly held out for days before shutting down by Monday. And while cell service had supposedly resumed after the weekend, CNN reports the government has shut it again temporarily.

It's also unclear whether the Egyptian government had a legal basis for its actions, as Vodafone claimed. But Wong said that if even if there were some law that allowed the crackdown, it would run counter to international human-rights principles. "There are a set of human-rights norms around when governments can restrict free flow of information," she said. "I would say this is pretty close to a violation."

Did they have any choice? "We don't know," said Cynthia Wong, of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Certainly it shows how much leverage governments have over mobile phone companies in particular."

On the plus side, Egypt not only has the largest population in the Middle East, but is one of the Arab world's most diversified economies with oil and natural gas reserves, world-class tourist attractions and a strategic trading location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which explains why no major investors have left Egypt since Mubarak’s ouster. The new administration could improve Egypt's economic prospects should it prove to be less corrupt than Mubarak’s.

ENI, which has been operating in Egypt since 1954 through its subsidiary International Egyptian Oil Company (IEOC), owns a 56 per cent working interest in the Meleiha Concession, with Russia's Lukoil holding a 24 percent stake and Japan's Mitsui owning 20 percent. In Egypt's Western Desert ENI already produces about 36,000 bpd in five different development licenses.And, unlike Egypt’s eastern neighbour Saudi Arabia, which has been nervous about the implications of the Egyptian revolution, Qatar, which was always more enthusiastic about Egypt's political changes, is focusing more on private-sector investment there, most notably when earlier his month, Qatar Petroleum engaged in “serious” talks about investing in an Egyptian oil-refinery project.

Despite radically different attitudes and levels of experience, deputies from all factions took their task overwhelmingly seriously and debated in an open and fruitful atmosphere. The time factor was decisive here. Though criticised by some as “lengthy” and “not efficient”, the fact that the NCA took two and a half years (instead of one as planned) contributed to the creation of cross-party trust – which became one of the “secrets” behind NCA’s success.

The enduring contribution of external players constituted a third factor that contributed to the NCA’s success. Particularly the influential UGTT trade union, not least with the inclusion of the Employers’ Association UTICA, the League of Human Rights LTDH, and the Bar Association of Lawyers in the “National Dialogue” roundtable meetings, who pushed for keeping talks about the 149 constitutional articles ongoing.

This result, surprising as it was, led to two consequences. The secularists understood that they could not exclude the Islamists from the political process, but that they had to take up the struggle, try to include them into the discourse and bring them down politically. Second, the Islamists understood that they do not have a majority that permits them to rule the country alone; in a painful internal process, Ennahda developed its ability to compromise and to join alliances with non-Islamist parties.

However, only specialists could have guessed the influence figures like Essam Sultan, El’Awa, Ayman Nour, Hesham Kandil, Emad Abdel Ghafour, Amro Elleithy and Samir Morcos would exert in Morsi’s state. Theoretically, such figures are referred to as ‘the regime’s periphery’. Yet in practice, the so-called periphery might exert more pressure on the leadership than the core.

As was obvious in his ‘ousting speech’ on July 3, El Sisi is not a typical military man wedded to unilateral decision-making. On the contrary, he acted then as a typical diplomat might, talking to all the possible major stakeholders before making his decision, and surrounding himself with a variety of public representatives who include religious figures, revolutionary figures, youth figures, old regime figures, and even representatives of political Islam.

Very similar to Nasser, El Sisi has been forced into a position he did not really expect. His personal charisma has exposed him to leadership, yet he has had no in depth preparation for rising popularity or how to maintain it.

Now it is the Egyptian mass movement – which in conjunction with that country’s military that is fanning the flames of opposition in Tunisia. Is Tunisia on the verge of imploding along ‘Egyptian-like’ lines?

He took up politics full-time in 2011, founding his political movement based on a social democratic platform and aligning himself with workers groups during the country’s first post-revolution election last year.

I would venture to predict, admittedly rather gingerly, that Ennahda will weather the storm and emerge from the current crisis bruised, but still holding the reins of power in Tunisia. If Ennahda does survive the current power struggle, it will be, in large measure, more as a result of continued Obama Administration support than because of the Islamic movement’s support base domestically.