Watching the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Egypt, the most interesting question for me is this: Will we one day look back at this moment as the beginning of the rollback of political Islam?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’ve been reading the newspapers – and I have visited both Turkey and Egypt in the past few weeks – and here is what I’ve seen: I’ve seen a rebellion of the non-Islamist center and army in Egypt against the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. I’ve seen a rebellion of the secular, urbanized youth in Turkey against the Islamist Justice and Development Party there. I’ve seen an Iranian election where Iranian voters – who were only allowed to choose between six candidates pre-approved by Iran’s clerical leadership – quickly identified which of the six was the most moderate, Hassan Rowhani, and overwhelmingly voted for him. And I’ve seen the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia forced by voters there to compromise with two secular center-left parties in writing a constitution that is broad based and not overly tilted toward Shariah law. And just a year ago in Libya, I saw a coalition led by a Western-educated political scientist beat its Islamist rivals in Libya’s first free and fair election.

Again, it would be premature to say that this era of political Islam is over, but it is definitely time to say that the more moderate, non-Islamist, political center has started to push back on these Islamist parties and that citizens all across this region are feeling both more empowered and impatient. The fact that this pushback in Egypt involved the overthrow of an elected government by the Egyptian army has to give you pause; it puts a huge burden on that army – and those who encouraged it – to act in a more democratic fashion than those they replaced. But this was a truly unusual situation. Why did it come about and where might Egypt go from here?

To understand the massive outpouring of grassroots opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, which spurred the Egyptian army to evict President Mohamed Morsi from office on his first anniversary of taking power, it is best to avoid the language of politics – Was it an army coup? Was it a popular revolt? – and focus instead on the language of law and order. In talking to Egyptians in recent weeks there is one word that best captures the mood of that country and that word is “theft.”