There were variations in the application of this tradition. The difference between the Ottoman massacre of the 800 Christians at Otranto and, let us say, the Crusader massacre of thousands of Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, is that women and children were enslaved at Otranto instead of being put to the sword, as was the case in Jerusalem. The men of Otranto were offered the customary opportunity - according to the Muslim rules of warfare - to save themselves by converting to Islam.

Since Egypt's January 25 Revolution, the condition of Islamists has dramatically changed. This requires rethinking the phenomenon, understanding its complexities and the challenges it poses, which promise to greatly influence decisions on the future of the country.

I was recently invited to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to lecture about the experience of Islamist parties. During the question-and-answer section, a member of the audience asked me to stop criticising the Muslim Brotherhood and the president, because the whole Islamic project has become threatened.

Samer Soliman would have turned 45 on 2 May 2013 if he had not been snatched away by death on 23 December 2012 after a short battle with a vicious illness. The death of Samer was a personal loss to me, not only because he was a colleague at the American University in Cairo, but also because he was like a cousin to me, since his father, Mahrous Soliman, and my mother, Wedad Metry (may God bless them both) were tied together by a close, lifetime friendship that started when they worked side by side in the field of education.

The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist El-Nour Party that dominated almost three-quarters of the seats in the People's Assembly (the since dissolved lower house of parliament) and more than 80 percent of the Shura Council (the upper house of parliament now invested with full legislative powers pending the election — expected in October — of a new lower house) have been locked in a power struggle that is increasingly defining a fractious political scene.

The settlement project in the West Bank is not just a collection of rickety caravans installed on Palestinian farmland that can be dismantled upon the signing of a peace agreement.

The mufti is a Muslim legal expert who is empowered to give rulings on religious matters. Every country that defines itself as Muslim has a grand mufti and an Iftaa institution that includes hundreds of muftis. These muftis have a specific education and must study an array of Islamic subjects, based on which sect of Islam each country follows. The role of this institution is to determine whether our laws and our practices as a people abide by our chosen sect and interpretation of Islamic laws. We Egyptians have one of the biggest Iftaa institutions for Sunni Muslims, and it has always been a progressive interpretation that takes into account the reality of our world.

Away from the current controversy between the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and other political forces, there is a dire need to seriously and realistically rethink the MB. Not only because it is the major power ruling Egypt right now, but also to understand the group’s dynamics as a formidable organisation and complicated social and political phenomenon.

The writings and statements of key “Islamist” figures about “the Islamic project” are endless. But the project remains ambiguous and mysterious in terms of its main ideas, which denotes disparities between their intentions.

The Egyptian economy is unlikely to collapse suddenly. However, in the absence of a serious macroeconomic stabilization program it will continue to deteriorate gradually, with low growth and increasing unemployment and inflation. Even corruption appears to be on the rise. The Egyptian people are also feeling the pinch in terms of higher prices and shortages of some imported necessities. If this continues, the transition to democracy could be jeopardized. On the other hand, politics in Egypt is so polarized that it is difficult to see how serious economic reforms could be implemented without first reaching compromises on some thorny political issues. Perhaps the recent agreement on a coalition government in Italy could serve as a model for Egyptian politicians.

It should be clear, as pointed out in several of my previous articles, that Egypt’s political circuit consists of three primary forces. The first of these is the country’s Islamist movement, made up primarily of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the second is those forces that seek to revive Egypt’s “old” hegemonic state, with the army, police, bureaucracy and state security forces at its core. Lastly, the third group consists of the country’s democracy movement,

This is what a group of friends and I debated in a heated discussion last week. One of them was a British friend who teaches history and politics at a major US university, and who reminded us that a key feature of European fascism of the 1930s was a strong alliance between industrialists and the state, whereby the latter was willing to pass draconian anti-labour laws for the benefit of the former.

Many demands for institutional reform lose their meaning if they are triggered by partisanship, are delayed despite an urgent public need for them or are revived only when a specific party needs them. Sometimes they are detached from their contexts that give them meaning and are limited to one choice, whereby rejecting them appears as rejection of reform in general and acceptance of the status quo. This is what happened in the ongoing debate about reforming Egypt's judiciary.

Car bombs detonated by Muslim radicals have killed dozens in Somalia and Nigeria this year alone. Just last month, Muslim suicide bombers in Pakistan and Syria killed well over 100 people. Whether it's bombing, burning, beheading, hacking, poisoning, or shooting, the list of Muslim violence is long and obscene.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article right here on sectarianism in Egypt. The feedback I got was a wave of phone calls and emails all acknowledging the existence of sectarianism. In fact, there are some who called me and expressed their relief that finally we are talking about our sectarian problems without the usual social and political half truths and allusions.

A zombie (the living dead as we see them in hundreds of Hollywood films) is a moving corpse driven by the dark powers. According to voodoo beliefs in West Africa, a dead person could be kept alive by the bokor (magician) and be under the bokor’s control and have no independent will.

Religious sectarianism has a particularly bitter taste, and Egypt is presently witnessing one of its darkest chapters amid a spread of religious bigotry. But this is not new; a chronicle of brutality against religious minorities stains Egyptian history. What is new, however, is the hope for a better future brought about by the January 25 revolution.

In an interesting story called “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Danish author Hans Christian Andersen tells the story of an emperor who wanted to know which of his officers were not worthy of their positions.

Three weeks ago, I briefly reviewed here “Nostalgia for the Light,” Patricio Guzmán’s wonderful documentary about mass murders and forced disappearances in Chile under Pinochet. I was deeply touched by Guzmán’s sensitivity in showcasing the suffering of victims’ families and their relentless efforts to find out what had happened to their loved ones.

Copts are being persecuted in Egypt. So, what’s new about that? This has been the norm in our “beloved homeland” since at least the 1970s.

Deplorable sectarian clashes that took place on 7 April at St. Mark's Cathedral in Cairo following the violence, two days earlier, between Muslims and Christians in the underprivileged area of Al-Khosous in Qalioubiya (north of Cairo), shows once again the rise of sectarianism in Egypt since the popular uprising of January 25, which toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak.