It was mostly coincidence that drew Khaled Fahmy into the fight over the Ministry of Culture. It was early June, less than a month before a mass protest movement, and then a military coup, would force the Muslim Brotherhood and its President, Mohamed Morsi, out of power in Egypt. Over the previous week, the Brotherhood had undertaken what would be its final project of “Brotherhoodization”—the process of stacking major government posts with friendly or Brotherhood-aligned officials. This time, the target had been the Ministry of Culture and several of its constituent bodies: the opera, the ballet, the national archives and library. Ahmed Megahed, the director of Egypt’s government publishing agency, found out that he’d lost his job when he read a form letter that had been left on his desk on a Sunday. Iman Ezzeldin, who runs the National Library, learned the news when she received a phone call at her home, at 11 P.M., from a secretarial assistant. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” the nervous voice on the other line said, “but you are no longer the director of the library.” The next day, there was a wax seal on the door to her office.

“I started getting all of these phone calls,” Fahmy said the other day from his home in New York, where he is teaching a course at New York University. Fahmy is a professor of history at the American University in Cairo, and in June he was conducting research at the National Archives on the historical use of Islamic law. By chance, the man that the Brotherhood chose to take over the administration of the archives and library was also named Khaled Fahmy. “Some of them were calling to congratulate me, some of them were confused and calling to ask did I really accept this job?” he recalled. “But those who understood what was going on started to phone me in alarm: ‘We have to do something about this. They appointed a Brotherhood person who will try to destroy the cultural heritage of Egypt.’”

Fahmy wasn’t quite so sure, but he watched over the ensuing days as a protest movement swiftly gathered momentum, especially among the class of Egyptians generally classified as intellectuals. Several artists and novelists penned a letter to the armed forces and the public, urging them to protect the Archives from the Brotherhood’s “systematic plot.” Dozens more lay siege to the Ministry of Culture, on the island of Zamalek, barring the Brotherhood-appointed minister from taking up his post. They hosted street performances of popular Egyptian ballets and operas. It was an exciting time. The new culture minister never made it into his office; after the coup, he stepped down.

The episode at the Ministry of Culture was in many ways a synopsis of a year of convoluted political struggle that led to the end of the Brotherhood’s rule, and the fall of Egypt’s first democratically elected government. It captured the overreach of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the clumsy, authoritarian nature of its year in power. But it also captured something else: the fear that entranced many Egyptians, who saw in the Brotherhood a threat not just to constitutional freedoms but to the very identity of Egypt. It was this fear— sometimes well-founded, sometimes bordering on hysteria—that helped drive Egyptians back into the reassuring embrace of the military, and to the familiar confines of security and bureaucracy that, in places like the National Library and Archives, had never really gone away.

The National Library of Egypt is housed in an ornate nineteenth-century building that is attached to the back of the Museum of Islamic Art, in central Cairo. When I visited the other week, Iman Ezzeldin had just returned from a week-long conference in Singapore, and seemed energized. After the coup, Ezzeldin, like most of the other administrators, had gotten her job back. But the feeling of embattlement had not quite faded.

“The Brotherhood has a grudge against culture,” said Ezzeldin, who in addition to her role at the Library is also a professor of drama at Ain Shams University. She wore a green blouse and pearl earrings that dangled from her ears like elongated teardrops. A secular Muslim, she proclaims her right to keep her hair uncovered if she wants, and have a drink every now and then should she choose to; she saw the Brotherhood as a threat to her very way of life. “The whole country was suffocating under them.”

“Some people said the Brotherhood was going to protect the archives, but ‘protection’ is not in the vocabulary of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Ezzeldin said. In fact, as she saw it—in a view shared by many of her peers—the Brotherhood wanted to control the Library and Archives in order to gain access to sensitive national-security documents, and to censor or alter records and artifacts. “In the Archives, you have some very important material, if you believe the rumors, and I do,” she said. “There’s information about land ownership disputed by Turkey, and the border with Sudan, and other things. They also wanted all of the archives about the Brotherhood itself.”

Ezzeldin wanted to show me some of the rare manuscripts that she had worried the Brotherhood might have sought to destroy. “Most of our manuscripts are Persian, and many have depictions of the Prophet or of women or of histories from before Islam,” she said. We passed through a set of sliding glass doors and entered a cool room where the rare manuscripts were on display in specially designed cases, with carefully controlled lighting and levels of humidity—the result of a 2007 renovation and funds from a United Nations national-heritage project.

“This is one of the ones I was most worried about,” she said, as we approached a colorful Persian astrology book. It was open to a page depicting the Zodiac goddess Virgo, dressed in a bright, purple flowing robe. “They don’t believe in this, so who knows what they would do.” We moved on to some hand-drawn history books with knights riding on gold-painted horses, and a book of early fables that had been translated from Sanskrit. One told the story of a group of white rabbits who teamed up to “seek revenge on a herd of elephants who had thoughtlessly trampled upon them.” In another room, there was a giant, Mamluk-era edition of the Koran, from the fourteenth century. “I wasn’t really worried about this one,” Ezzeldin said with a wink. Then she added, “Although, I didn’t want them to give it away to their friends in Qatar.”