Cairo is on tenterhooks today as the Egyptian capital once again faces the prospect of deadly clashes between supporters and opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood and its imprisoned president Mohamed Morsi.
This time the threat to the 85-year-old organization seems almost existential thanks to the surprise call to arms this week by the military's leader General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has summoned a massive public display of opposition to the Brothers who have planned a number of marches of their own today.
"All honourable Egyptians must take to the street to give me a mandate and command to end terrorism and violence," the general said in a televised address at a military graduation ceremony near Alexandria.
That was followed by an announcement from Tamarod, the youth movement that organized the mass anti-Morsi rallies and petitions last month. It threw down its own gauntlet.
"We call on the great Egyptian people to rally on Friday across Egypt to demand ... Morsi's trial and to support the military in its upcoming war on terrorism." Yikes.
If the two sides do meet in the streets, the military-appointed interim government has said that whichever side is perceived to threaten the peace will be crushed. It's not hard to guess which side that is likely to be.
It's a trap: The Brotherhood will be damned if they march in the street and damned by defeat if they don't.
The powers that be in Egypt – i.e. the military leaders – hope to shut down the Brotherhood's protest camps around the country one way or the other. And, in the process, they'd like to deal the organization a blow from which it may never recover.
But the Society of Muslim Brothers has been down this road before. Founded in 1928 in the city of Ismailia on the banks of the British-run Suez Canal, the Society was the inspiration of a 21-year-old teacher named Hasan al-Banna. He told his first group of six underpaid canal workers that banding together as brothers in the name of Islam was the best way to overcome the humiliation and indignities they were forced to endure.
His message spread and Mr. al-Banna's little band grew to as many as 500,000 by 1948 – it even dispatched a battalion of volunteers to battle Israelis in Palestine that year – which is when the Society first became a serious threat to more established powers, such as the British, the monarch King Farouk, and the governments of the day.
Following a spate of bombings and assassinations that year – many carried out by members of the Brotherhood's so-called "Secret Apparatus" – the Egyptian government issued a decree dissolving the Society. It even dispatched troops to arrest the Brotherhood fighters in Palestine.
Two weeks after the decree, it was the prime minister himself who was assassinated (by a Brother from the Secret Apparatus). Most of the Society's leaders were arrested – all except for Mr. al-Banna. Six weeks later, he too was assassinated.
It was thought to be the end of the movement, but it survived underground, and in prison, and surfaced as an ally of the officers who overthrew the King in 1952. One of the officers, future president Anwar Sadat, was especially close to the group.
The attempted assassination of then-prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954 brought on another decree, the hanging of six Brothers, imprisonment of hundreds of others and a crackdown on what was sure to be the last days of the Brotherhood.
Six decades later the Brotherhood still is in business.
The group's tenacity has consistently been underestimated. Nasser thought he could dispose of them (he tried again in 1966); Israel thought it could manage them in Gaza and the West Bank (they morphed into Hamas); The Assads in Syria thought they could crush them (they're still fighting), and academics and commentators kept concluding that secularism would end the appeal of the Islamic movement.
The Brothers bounced back after each crackdown, usually stronger and more determined. Sometimes the group would split as some of the members formed more violent movements such as Islamic Jihad and Gamaa Islamiya.
The Brotherhood behaved very badly in office when it came to power in Egypt. President Morsi's decree that purported to put his decision-making beyond the reach of the constitutional courts was beyond the pale. His organization's efforts to intimidate the country's judges and the media were unacceptable in a democratic country.
And he should not have rejected entreaties from people such as Amr Mousa, the elder Egyptian statesman who pleaded with Mr. Morsi to call for new elections or take another run at reforming the constitution. The goodwill ambassador was dismissed as being self-serving.
But the kind of lynch-mob mentality now being exhibited by Egypt's military leadership and by those who once called peacefully for democracy will not defeat this movement. As long as there are masses of people crying out for dignity, there will be a Society of Muslim Brothers.