Many Christian leaders believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group banned in Egypt, will grow in political power with Mubarak’s ouster. The brotherhood maintains strong support among some Egyptians. Religious-freedom analysts believe the leaders of the brotherhood, famous for the slogan “Islam is the solution,” could very well usher in repression of all minority religious groups. Christians are Egypt’s largest minority, representing 6 to 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people. About 90 percent of all Christians in Egypt are Orthodox.

But while most Egyptian Muslims are Sunni, like the brotherhood, they are not as fundamentalist as it is. One Coptic Orthodox businessman based in Cairo told CT that he was surprised that Christians’ property was not targeted during the growing protests. “I thought that the first thing to be attacked [by protestors] would be the churches,” he said.

“It wasn’t like that. In the neighborhood of my parents, there are many mosques and churches. No single mosque has announced anything against us Christians. Very soon, a big change will happen. Egypt has been like someone sleeping. Now, wake up! Do something better.”

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What happened in Egypt yesterday will change not only this 80 million-strong nation; it will change politics throughout the Arab world. Not all the dominoes will fall. But many governments will now scramble to avoid the same conditions that engendered revolution. So they should. Democracy is in a lamentable state in the Middle East. Rulers routinely abuse rights, flout the public will and deny their people a future. They must learn that only good government can bring happiness and stability. Egypt has been both a warning and an inspiration.

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The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak marks a historic shift in the Middle East, away from the power structure America has leaned on for the past three decades and toward a new one still being shaped by a demographic and technological wave that the U.S. and its allies haven’t learned to control.

America’s future standing in the region now depends heavily on whether Washington’s other friends, especially those in the Persian Gulf, are more adroit than Mr. Mubarak at getting ahead of that wave.

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One revolution ended Friday. Another may soon begin.

In a moment that may prove as decisive to the Middle East as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, 18 days of protest hurtled Egypt once again to the forefront of politics in the Middle East. In the uprising’s ambition, young protesters, savvy with technology and more organized than their rulers, began to rewrite the formula that has underpinned an American-backed order: the nation in the service of a strongman.

The ecstatic moments of triumph in Tahrir Square seemed to wash away a lifetime of defeats and humiliations, invasions and occupations that, in the weeks before the revolution, had seemed to mark the bitterest time for both Egypt and the Arab world.

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Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt, after weeks of protest in Cairo and other cities

The news was greeted with a huge outburst of joy and celebration by thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the heart of the demonstrations.

Mr Mubarak ruled for 30 years, suppressing dissent and protest, and jailing opponents….

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The three-decade long rule of Hosni Mubarak over Egypt was crumbling last night. The old dictator, confronted by an unprecedented wave of popular protests and strikes, was not prepared to go without a struggle. First he tried to divide the protesters, announcing his intention to step down as president later in the year. When that failed to disperse the crowds, Mr Mubarak is believed to have sent state-sponsored thugs to attack the pro-democracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Mr Mubarak’s allies abroad tried their best to prop up the Egyptian strongman too. Frank Wisner, the veteran diplomat sent by Barack Obama to deal with the Egyptian regime, was arguing a week ago that Mr Mubarak “must stay in office”. We learned yesterday that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pressured the White House to support Mr Mubarak, even threatening to replace any financial aid to Egypt withdrawn by the US. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, praised the Egyptian autocrat as a “wise man”.

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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak handed power to his vice president but retained his title, a half-measure that confused observers, angered opposition leaders and provoked an uproar from hundreds of thousands of protesters massed in the center of the country’s capital.

The move sets up another conflict with the opposition movement, which has called on supporters to gather for a huge protest Friday. Expectations that the president would resign had built through the day, and the immediate reaction to the speech was anger, with protesters chanting “Leave, leave.”

An Army officer using a loudspeaker tried to calm protesters. “Let’s save our energy for tomorrow,” a man screamed to the crowd. “Go home and sleep, because tomorrow will be the day of judgment.”

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Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak said in a national address Thursday evening that he will not step down until a new president is selected in elections scheduled for September. He added that some powers are being transferred to Egypt’s vice president.

Saying a peaceful transfer of power is underway, Mr. Mubarak refused to give in to demands of tens of thousands of anti-government protesters who took to the streets for a 17th straight day to demand his immediate resignation.

Demonstrators in Cairo’s main Tahrir Square jeered and chanted “get out” during the speech. They had earlier danced in expectation that Mubarak would resign.

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The Tahrir Square uprising “has nothing to do with left or right,” said Dina Shehata, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “It is about young people rebelling against a regime that has stifled all channels for their upward mobility. They want to shape their own destiny, and they want social justice” from a system in which a few people have gotten fantastically rich, in giant villas, and everyone else has stagnated. Any ideological group that tries to hijack these young people today will lose.

One of the best insights into what is happening here is provided by a 2009 book called “Generation in Waiting,” edited by Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, which examined how young people are coming of age in eight Arab countries. It contends that the great game that is unfolding in the Arab world today is not related to political Islam but is a “generational game” in which more than 100 million young Arabs are pressing against stifling economic and political structures that have stripped all their freedoms and given them in return one of the poorest education systems in the world, highest unemployment rates and biggest income gaps. China deprives its people of political rights, but at least it gives them a rising standard of living. Egypt deprived its people of political rights and gave them a declining standard of living.

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CHARLIE ROSE: I want to turn to one thing that I thought you wrote about really well, which is the sense of dignity that pervades the people that you have met. I’m quoting now from a man who said “Why would we trust him now to play it right? That’s the question the west hasn’t answered.”

Then you say “The deeper problem is more cultural than political. To accept the Mubarak or chaos argument is a form of disrespect to the civility and capacity of Tahrir Square. It’s an expression of western failure before the exploding Arab thirst for dignity and representative government. It reflects the old conditioning which sees in an Egyptian culture that was after all deep enough and realistic enough to accept peace with Israel no more than a disaster waiting to happen if the iron fist is removed.

Western leaders say events in the Arab world should spur Israelis and Palestinians to peace because they know how unstable the region is. Wrong,” you say. “These events are themselves the spur to the only
sustainable peace, one based on Arab self-respect and self-expression.”

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The US has called on the Egyptian government to immediately lift the country’s emergency laws, which have been in place for 30 years.

Vice-President Joe Biden made the call during a telephone conversation with his Egyptian counterpart Omar Suleiman.

It came after a day of renewed anti-government protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

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The Tunisian uprising changed everything. We have reached a turning point: it is clear now that dictators can be peacefully overthrown! To do so takes courage, a mass movement, determination and hope, faith in God and/or in the future. Crushed by repression, the people have stood up to claim full human dignity. Their irrepressible right to be free.

The Tunisians blazed the trail. In Algeria and Mauritania, then in Yemen and Egypt women, men and young people of all backgrounds have taken to the streets to express their anger and frustration, their intense desire to see their respective regimes fall. Sparks are flashing everywhere; demands being drafted; protests have even occurred in Syria where the government has announced a series of reforms should the people begin to consider mass action.

In Egypt, tensions have been growing over the last two weeks. After thirty years of unshared power – having imposed a state of emergency after the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 – Mubarak and his regime now face the people’s defiance of his authoritarianism and bloody repression. The police and paramilitary force have beaten, arrested, tortured and fired on the crowd; hundreds are dead, thousands injured.

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The morning bells of All Saints Church beckon worshipers a little later these days, and Mass is celebrated more frequently.

The schedule shift for the early service has come in response to the government-imposed overnight curfew. The extra services? Coptic Christians in Egypt’s second-largest city say they have a lot of reasons to pray amid the nation’s ongoing turmoil.

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…the [Muslim] Brotherhood, like everyone else, is evolving. It would be a serious error to believe that it has not sincerely wrestled with the seductive challenge of democracy, with the fact that the Egyptian faithful like the idea of voting for their leaders.

In 2007, members of the Brotherhood released, withdrew and unofficially re-released a political platform ”” the first ever for the organization ”” in which an outsider can see the Brothers’ philosophical struggle with the idea of parliamentary supremacy and the certainty that faithful Muslims may legislatively transgress Holy Law. The Brothers themselves didn’t know how much free rein to give to their compatriots ”” they, like everyone else, are moving in uncharted waters.
The Brotherhood is trying to come to terms with the idea of hurriya, “freedom.” In the past, for the Muslim devout, hurriya had denoted the freedom of a believer to worship God; for the Arab nationalist, the word was the battle cry against European imperialism. Today, in Egypt and elsewhere, hurriya cannot be understood without reference to free men and women voting. The Brothers are trying to figure out how to integrate two civilizations and thereby revive their own. This evolution isn’t pretty. But it is real.

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Dear Ones: I can’t adequately describe the struggle Anne and I have been involved in over the past week. We have been torn between a feeling of helplessness that urges us to leave, and a sense that our weakness opens the door to God’s power, and that promise calls us to stay. We have come to the conclusion that the Lord has not released us from a ministry in Egypt yet….

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More African than Arab, Southern Sudan might not provide much assistance to minorities in the Middle East. But its existence teaches the lesson that commitment from the United States actually works. In the 1980s and 1990s, a broad political coalition forced the Bush and Clinton administrations to treat Sudan as a rogue state for its oppression of minorities. The 2011 independence of Southern Sudan is a fruit of that effort ”” proof that, though it might take decades, international pressure can succeed.

Unfortunately, in the years since, America foreign policy has been little concerned with religious persecution. George W. Bush, for example, refused to insist on a non-Islamic constitution for Iraq. And Barack Obama has systematically watered down U.S. diplomacy: Where we once demanded “freedom of religion,” a public liberty, we now speak only of “freedom of worship,” a lesser and private right.

This American abdication has produced only more oppression ”” and it’s accelerating at a horrifying rate. Nearly every day since Christmas, Christians have been murderously attacked for the simple fact of being Christians….

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You can find the audio link here. The interview starts about one minute into the programme and focuses in particular on the Muslim Brotherhood (it last about five minutes).

Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.

But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long ”” oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change ”” have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.

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[PAUL} ABERNETHY: In the demonstrations in the streets there wasn’t much evidence of a religious influence. It seemed pretty secular, but lots of people expect that in a new government there will be strong religious representation. Is that fair to say?

[QAMAR-UL] HUDA: That’s a fair assessment. We know that the mass protest in Egypt is a mass public crossing all ideologies. This is a national issue for Egypt, and it’s not contained to any one group. The new government or the transitional government that will be formed in the near future””I think the religious voices or the religious parties will be at the table but will not dominate the party.

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[STEVE] INSKEEP: OK. Is that a fair comparison, Tarek Masoud? Are they just a conservative party or are they something more now?

Dr. [TAREK] MASOUD: Well, there’s two kinds of extremism. OK, there’s an extremism of ends and an extremism of means. OK. Extremism of means is if they’re willing if they want to use violence to get what they want. I certainly think they are not that. Extremism of ends, do they want things that we think are really, you know, out of the norm? I think a lot of them do, but again, you know, you let them participate in the political process and you hopefully beat them. I think and there’s evidence that the brothers, as Dr. ElBaradei said, would not necessarily capture a majority of votes in Egypt, although they are a very strong and organized party. But, you know, there’s other ideological trends and we’re seeing them being played out right now on the Egyptian street.

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Representatives of the Egyptian democracy movement vowed Sunday to escalate their pressure for the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, even as his government sought to portray itself as well on the way to successfully negotiating an end to the uprising now in its 13th day.

In a historic first, Vice President Omar Suleiman met with representatives of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood as part of a group of about 50 opposition members that included prominent politicians and youth organizers.

The encounter itself was remarkable for bringing together members of the brotherhood ”” Egypt’s biggest opposition movement ”” and the autocratic government that has for decades repressed it as an Islamist threat.

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After maintaining a low profile in protests led largely by secular young Egyptians, the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition force, appeared to be taking a more assertive role Thursday, issuing a statement asking for President Hosni Mubarak to step aside for a transitional government.

“We demand that this regime is overthrown, and we demand the formation of a national unity government for all the factions,” the Brotherhood said in a statement broadcast by Al Jazeera.

The Obama administration has spoken cautiously about the future role of the Brotherhood, which has long been banned by Mr. Mubarak’s government, saying only that all parties must renounce violence and accept democracy. But one of the few near-certainties of a post-Mubarak Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood will emerge as a powerful political force.

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Tahrir Square filled again with vast crowds of anti-government demonstrators Friday morning, ahead of a massive protest planned to demand the immediate ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

A day after authorities launched an aggressive clampdown on foreign journalists and human rights activists observing the demonstrations, Friday’s gathering was calm and orderly, without the beatings and bloodshed that had horrified the world the day before.

After standing in long lines to pass through security checkpoints, thousands upon thousands of Egyptians entered the vast, open square and performed the weekly Friday prayers, kneeling and prostrating themselves in accordance with the muezzin’s call. Nearby, soldiers on duty kept watch.

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Egypt’s old guard has long presented the world with a potent choice: Accept our police state or extremists will take over. Rooted in the old politics of colonialism, this dichotomy effectively deterred democracy in the Arab world. What the ongoing uprising shows is that this dichotomy is no longer valid. Real change is now possible, and the old analysis that it can come only through empowering Islamists has been shattered.

The new Egypt””led by but not restricted to the youth””has little time for the octogenarians of old, who include not only Hosni Mubarak but also Mohamed Badie, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and my former cellmate. Within the Brotherhood, Mr. Badie has recently been challenged by a reformist faction now led by the younger Abdul Monim Aboul Fatouh (another former cellmate of mine).

The leaderless nature of Egypt’s street uprising raises the question of who will fill the vacuum after victory. Concerns about an Islamist takeover are valid. But that scenario is unlikely.

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Update: “New Service Lets Voices From Egypt Be Heard”:

There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone.

The result is a story of a revolution unfolding in short bursts. Sometimes speaking for just several seconds, other times for more than a minute, the disembodied voices convey highly charged moments of excitement or calm declarations of what life is like in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, as it seeks to remove its leader.

The messages rolled out as Egyptians seemed to be approaching a crucial point, with hundreds of thousands of people crammed into central Cairo on Tuesday, as protests continued to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

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Israelis are watching anxiously as anti-government protests continue in Egypt – one of the country’s only friends in the Arab world.

“Judgement Day” for President Hosni Mubarak was the full-page headline jumping from the Hebrew-language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in Israel on Tuesday.

The implications of regime change in Egypt would be enormous here.

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President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not run for another term in elections scheduled for the fall, appearing on state television to promise an orderly transition but saying he would serve out his term. In comments translated by CNN, he swore that he would never leave Egypt but would “die on its soil.”

Television cameras showed the vast crowds gathered in Tahrir Square in central Cairo roaring, but not necessarily in approval. The protesters have made the president’s immediate and unconditional resignation a bedrock demand of their movement, and it did not appear that the concession mollified them. Reports said that thousands of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square chanted “Leave! Leave!” after the speech.

Mr. Mubarak’s announcement came after President Obama urged him not to run, effectively withdrawing America’s support for its closest Arab ally, according to American diplomats in Cairo and Washington.

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Any government in which the Brotherhood has a greater role would be less supportive of U.S. interests, says David Schenker, a Middle East adviser in the Defense Department under President George W. Bush. Senior leaders of the Brotherhood have pledged to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, he says.

The organization has been a revolutionary opposition group in Egypt since its founding in the 1920s, opposing corruption and advocating a conservative form of Islam in government. It inspired al-Qaeda and the Iran-backed Palestinian group Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist group.

Over the years, radical elements of the Brotherhood have tried to initiate armed rebellion in Egypt. President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a Brotherhood cell, leading to Mubarak’s rise and a crackdown on the group

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It is now time for Mr. Mubarak, 82, to go, and President Barack Obama should say so clearly. In order to preserve an American reputation for not being just a fair-weather friend and to maintain relations with other such leaders, the United States should offer Mr. Mubarak refuge, making it clear that it is a means of helping Egyptians find a felicitous, non-violent solution.

The Egyptian army can then preserve order, as it has traditionally, until early, free and democratic elections can be held to choose Mr. Mubarak’s successor.

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Check out the slideshow here.