So it is not true that, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood speaks for society as a whole. Nor does Islamist ideology, with its invocations of superstition and its exaltations of obedience, express the Egyptian “street.” Nor does the Brotherhood possess the canny ability to bend history to its will. The crisis in Egypt over the Brotherhood’s proposed new constitution broke out in December, and, three months later, the riots and demonstrations and killings have still not come to an end. Even the police have been demonstrating.

Nor is it true that, in Tunisia, the reputedly more moderate version of the Brotherhood, Rachid Ghannouchi’s Ennahda party, has offered a sounder alternative. On the contrary, the moderates have presided over what appears to be a steady patter of violence by the radical Islamists, in token of the fact that, in Tunisia and everywhere else, moderates and radicals tend to be quietly allied, if only because the moderate leaders have to pacify their own radically-inclined rank-and-file. A great many Tunisians have evidently had their fill. The assassination of a popular leftist in early February brought about, at the funeral in Tunis, a public demonstration on a scale dwarfing even the Egyptian protests. And, just as in Egypt, the political crisis in Tunisia turns out to be less than easily resolved.

Nor is it true that radical Islamists, given the chance to rule on their own, can succeed in spreading their beliefs to the rest of society. On the contrary. Not in Mali, anyway. The French army invaded northern Mali in January in order to prevent the jihadis from spreading their mad emirate across the whole of the Sahel, and, although France is the former colonial overlord, and the French in Africa have a lot to answer for—even so, when François Hollande made his way to Timbuktu to gloat over the military victories, crowds of Malians appeared to be delighted. Their cry of “Vive la France!,” which is not “Allahu Akbar!,” can only signify the deepest of Malian detestation for the hand-chopping fanatics.

What is true, then? It appears to be the case that, in one zone after another, the vast regional revolution that used to be known as the Arab Spring (except that springtime has lasted two years now, and not everyone is Arab, and Mali testifies to the fact that revolutions do spread) has entered its Phase Three. The liberal origins back in 2011—the beautiful cries, “Peaceful! Peaceful!”, the days of Facebook glory—amounted to Phase One, the utopian heyday. Then came the Islamist triumphs, which marked Phase Two. Phase Two had a look of permanence, or so we were told, if only because, in the estimation of a certain school of Western thinking, Islamism, which may not be to our taste, is nonetheless authentic, which signifies: inevitable.

Even President Obama appeared to dabble in this kind of thinking, to judge by, at least, his Cairo speech in 2009, with some of the Muslim Brothers in attendance. Obama orated about the relationship of “Islam and the West,” as if this were the crux of the matter, and he felt it necessary to criticize implicitly the French for their headscarf law, and generally he seemed to accept as givens the geopolitical categories of the Islamist worldview: the notion of Islam in conflict with its Western enemies, the notion of Western persecution of Muslims as central to the conflict, and so forth.

