NEW YORK -- Khaled Hamza Salam and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. He is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition movement, which wants to turn Egypt into an Islamic state. I am a secular, liberal Egyptian woman for whom nothing would be worse than a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt.

At a conference on radicalization in The Hague in October, a former Pakistani foreign minister told a small group of us that he had recently warned Benazir Bhutto in a phone conversation that her return to Pakistan after eight years of self-imposed exile could be greeted by someone wearing a suicide belt. "Do you doubt my popularity?" she asked him from Dubai, where she had been living.

In fact, the general consensus is that the attacks will overtake the Club, whose board is, until today, dominated by the reformist current. Didn’t the government succeed on Nov. 17 to take over the Press Syndicate with the victory of the state-backed candidate, who snagged the chairman’s seat as well as other government loyalists forming a majority on the board of directors, hitherto made up of a motley crew of reformists and opposition figures?

A major shift is taking place in the way decision-makers in the US and major European countries view the political role of Islamic movements in the Arab world and also in the way they regard the perils such movements pose for Western interests.

The platform's detailed treatment of political, social, and economic issues marks a significant departure from previously less developed positions, articulated inter alia in a 2004 reform initiative and the 2005 electoral platform for Brotherhood parliamentary candidates. This shift addresses one of the most important criticisms of the Brotherhood, namely its championing of vague ideological and religious slogans and inability to come up with specific policy prescriptions.

The Arab world is living on the edge of a volcano as a result of the current volatile interaction of a number of elements: the increasing influence and spread of terrorist groups; escalating Sunni / Shiite sectarian violence; the phenomenon of private non-political militias; the growing influence of religious extremism within both the political and social relms; increased political authoritarianism; the continuing entrenchment of the police state; the increasing targeting of human rights defenders and democracy advocates within the larger regional context of a qualitative deterioration in the conditions of human rights in general

The ruling system received assistance from the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood did not stand up to this historical moment, as they failed to infer the logical conclusions from it, after they had let the trance of the parliamentary victory to sway their heads.

"In its latest statement to the public opinion, the Syndicate of Journalists considered the sentences of imprisonment passed collectively against four editors in chief as a "declaration of war against freedom of expression", which is an eloquent expression describing the gravity of the sense of peril.

The failure of the Middle East democratisation project is not something to celebrate, even if outside forces championed it; it prefaces the disintegration of the Arab world

It has been unsurprising that since Abdullah Gul became president of Turkey on 27 August that much misguided analyses has been wasted on how "Islamists" can pass the democracy test.