The dominant storyline to emerge in the weeks after the Maspero Massacre is that it marks the beginning of the end of Tahrir Square. The military has shed its inhibitions about using violence against the people, according to this pessimistic view, while a great number of Egyptians has proved ready to believe official propaganda and willing to organize flash sectarian lynch mobs at the beck and call of state television.

There's another way of reading these events though, and it's the one favored by Nadia Faltas and by the many friends of Mina Daniel.

"The government engineered this to divide us," Nadia Faltas said even in the freshest hours of her mourning. With no self-consciousness, she has embraced the galvanizing role of the martyr's mother.

Khaled and Mina's mother / Cambanis

She has appeared in Tahrir Square and at other demonstrations with the mother of Khaled Said, the young man beaten to death by police in the summer of 2010, apparently in retribution for his efforts to publicize police brutality. The regime laughed off the weekly 2010 protests over Khaled Said's killing, but within six months those small protests, and the Facebook pages connected to them, sparked the Tahrir Square uprising.

That is the model that Mina Daniel's friends invoke as they contemplate his death and the sheer unmediated brutality with which it was meted out. In front of Maspero, 27 civilians were killed and according to the military some number of soldiers that it is keeping secret "in order to protect the feelings of the nation."

"Mina's death has now put a burden on us. His blood is on our necks," his friend Kareem Mohammed, 20, said a week after the massacre, at a strategy meeting of the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, the grassroots group of which Mina was a member. "We have to achieve what he dreamed of, a united nation free of military rule."

Religious Copts sometimes come across as parochial and chauvinistic, concerned primarily with the oppression of their church. But Mina transcended that narrow categorization. He fought against military trials for civilians, and took part in all the major stages of the uprising against Mubarak's regime. During the initial uprising, he was shot in Tahrir Square and struck in the head with rocks. He contested the institutionalized discrimination that prevents Copts from freely building churches, but he exhorted members of his sect to engage in the broader political struggle against authoritarian rule.

Many of Mina's close friends were Muslims. After he was shot but before he died, he said he wanted his funeral to pass through Tahrir. Late on Monday night, after his autopsy and a rousing mass at the Abbasiya Cathedral, several hundred of Mina's friends marched several miles back to Tahrir Square with his coffin. They ignored a few toughs who pelted them with rocks along the way.

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That Sunday night has seared visceral, unforgettable images on the minds of Egyptians of a certain conscience. Slowly, indefatigably, it is steeling them for another revolution. Regardless of whether they succeed, the October 9 Maspero Massacre will mark a turning point in Egypt's uprising.