Cairo, Egypt—Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate, once observed that revolutions are “plotted by the clever, fought by the brave, and profited from by cowards.” It’s a wise line that only gains further credence from the current turmoil in Egypt, where the groups best-positioned to benefit from the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak are the ones that had long tolerated his rule in silence. Indeed, the broad battle for Egypt’s future has inexorably transformed into a narrow struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military—a fight in which the vast majority of the Egyptian public, those who poured into the street to win their political freedom, has largely been reduced to observer status.

Following the first round of voting for parliament here in which Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservative Salafi Muslims won a combined 60 percent of contested seats, the struggle between the Brotherhood, the stronger of the two Islamist parties, and the military has entered an explicitly antagonistic phase. The Brotherhood “can now lay claim to one center of significant authority within the government, which gives them more leverage with the military” says Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt expert at the Century Foundation.

Brotherhood spokesman Essam El-Erian apparently was reading the same tea leaves. Almost immediately following the release of preliminary election results, he went to the press to demand that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the military junta that seized control on Feb. 11, hand over authority to the elected parliament. “[T]he military council must now announce the handover of legislative powers to parliament, and the caretaker government must present any new legislation to the parliament for approval,” El-Erian wrote in the Guardian.

The military was not long in striking back. On December 7, Maj. Gen. Mukhtar El-Mullah, a member of the military council currently governing Egypt, told a small group of foreign journalists that the council planned to form a separate advisory body to oversee the constitution-writing process. (Until then, the parliament had been expected to appoint a constitutional assembly tasked with drafting a replacement for the 1971 constitution.)

“The next parliament will not represent all Egyptian people, and the constitution will affect all citizens,” said SCAF member Maj. Gen. Mukhtar El-Mullah, strongly implying that the Islamist victory did not reflect a national consensus. “We’re not saying that the SCAF will draft the constitution, we’re saying that all Egyptian people should participate in such drafting.” The Muslim Brotherhood predictably responded by announcing its refusal to participate in the military’s proposed advisory council, further pushing the country into an implacable political stalemate. In a conversation with me, El-Erian dismissed the military proposal as “interference” intended to “change the job description of parliament.”