I’m surprising myself by writing this.  And I’m sure I’ll surprise — and maybe severely disappoint — many of you who read this blog.  But then Egypt has been surprising us all for the past two years, and I suspect will keep surprising us for some time to come.

The point being:  even though I share the extreme wariness — indeed, the loathing — of the idea of the military intervening in politics (any military, anywhere), I’m glad that the Egyptian military has ousted the Morsi regime.

Is it really a coup d’état, as many (non-Egyptian) liberals are saying, and as the Muslim Brotherhood insists?

Not exactly.  The army forcibly removed a democratically elected government, but not a democratic one.  An analysis of the Brotherhood’s dismal failure in The Huffington Post points to its “limited understanding of democracy, which is restricted to the mechanics of voting, elections and ballot boxes, while showing precious little appreciation for the values that make up the essence of a democracy, such as the rule of law, citizenship, equality and human rights…  Morsi and the Brothers believe that winning an election gives them carte blanche to run the state as if it was their feudality.”

A constitution illegally rammed through is not democratic.  Nor is a refusal to be held accountable.  Or an iron grip on all offices.  Or repeated attempts to ban freedom of speech and to undermine the judiciary.  Or the demonization of all opposition as treason, and the summary arrest and torture of opponents.  The Brotherhood won election by the slimmest of margins (with a percentage of the vote that would by all accounts be halved if elections were to be held again today), but instead of acknowledging this and reaching out to the public as a whole, it opted for authoritarianism.

Egyptians did not follow Western rules in response.  They did it their way, taking to the streets, which is something Americans might have done in far greater numbers when George W. Bush won two elections under highly questionable circumstances in the United States.  Much of what he accomplished was way beyond the bounds of legitimacy.  And need I really say that the same goes for a certain government elected in Germany in 1933?

Not that the Egyptian military is any sense a neutral power-broker.  It’s protecting its own interests — or as the New York Times headline has it, acting in allegiance to its privileges.  And those privileges are vast.  The Egyptian army is a huge corporation, essentially a state within the state.  And like most big corporations, it’s a law unto itself.  Which is precisely why the opposition called on it to act, which it did with what many outside Egypt (and of course within the Muslim Brotherhood) see as alarming alacrity.

Will the generals do what they promise and restore a real democracy?  Nobody can be certain.  But I suspect that in essence, when push comes to shove, they will be shoved.

The era of political quietism and subjugation of public opinion is over.  Egyptians are no longer afraid to speak out.  They’ve found their voices.  And I seriously doubt if, having found them, they’ll let themselves be silenced again.  Or be flummoxed by heady electoral promises.

The generals know this as well as anyone else.  And whatever else they may be, they’re no fools.  Successful businessmen never are.  They have to be fully aware that if they do not organize new elections as promised, the ensuing public outcry will dwarf that of the past several days.

What’s happening in Egypt is a continuation of what began two years ago with the overthrow of Mubarak.  It gives the lie to the dumb journalistic meme of “the Arab spring,” as though revolution were a a seasonal matter, limited to a two-month timespan, and as though change could be achieved overnight.  Real change is a long process, and a difficult one.  But what strikes me more than anything about Egypt right now is that despite the military, it promises to be an irreversible one.

Unlike Egyptians themselves, I can only hope that this promise is fulfilled.

Great conversation on Al Jazeera’s The Stream yesterday:  I was with Lisa Fletcher and Anushay Hossain in the studio — I love her blog Anushay’s Point  — and Omid Safi, Nouman Ali Khan, and Michael Muhammad Knight joined in on Skype.  Plus an excellent video comment from Hind Makki in Chicago, which led to a lively post-show discussion, starting at the 25.15 mark, on reclaiming the narrative from both ‘Islamist’ extremists and Islamophobic bigots.

It’s a good thing Nouman Ali Khan wasn’t in the studio, because I’d only have totally embarrassed him by leaping up to give him a huge hug.  I really do have to figure out how to be cool on TV…

Like I say, hang around for the post-show segment — the silent majority is silent no longer!

[youtube=http://youtu.be/mtbsSXe6f2k]

Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.

Sometimes, the best things happen to exactly the right people.  Like when I opened the New York Times this morning to find a review of G. Willow Wilson’s new novel, Alif the Unseen, on the front page of the Arts section.  Yes, she lives in Seattle (when not in Egypt), and yes she’s a friend, and yes I’d be raving about this novel even if I’d never met her and she lived in Timbuktu.

I was waiting to write about it until the official publication date, July 3, but now that Janet Maslin’s beaten me to it, I’m free to enthuse.  Because Ms Maslin only gets the half of it.

In a peculiar kind of shorthand, Maslin runs straight to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels as her comparison.  But that’s ignores how sophisticated this novel really is.   She’d have done better to think of Phillip Putnam’s The Golden Compass, then of Phillip K. Dick, then of…

But no, comparisons won’t do it.  Take a close look at the cover — the computer board inside the Kufic-style name — and you’ll see instantly that Alif the Unseen is unique:  a totally entrancing digital-age novel that combines computer hackers with genies, the serious reality of the Arab spring with the fantasy of A Thousand and One Nights,  mathematical philosophy with accidental theology, myth with playfulness.  In fact what’s stunning about it is how many levels it works on.

So I won’t even try to tell you what the novel’s “about.”  That’d only be to turn magic into plodding summary.  There’s a solid touch of genius in Willow Wilson’s genie world, and the only way to get it is to read it.  Enjoy!

You might think it absurd that a woman driving a car is news.  But then this is the absurdity known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, now frantically trying to censor video clips of Manal al-Sharif driving.  An apparently government-supported online drive is under way to beat women caught driving, and al-Sharif  (this is her, to the right) is being held in detention for “inciting public opinion” and “disturbing public order.”

That is, for driving while female.  DWF.  A crime.

Watch the Al Jazeera report here.  Check out the newly replicated Facebook page here.  Read al-Sharif’s instructions for the June 17 ‘drive-in’ protest here on Saudiwoman’s Weblog.

And then consider the far greater absurdity of the continued existence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which refuses to extend the most basic civil rights (even the vote) to half its population, and whose wealth and power is entirely fueled by the Western thirst for oil.  An intensely repressive Middle East regime, that is, funded directly by Western money.

But that’s only the surface.  This Western oil money is still funding the worldwide Saudi export of the most conservative and repressive form of Islam.  If there is one single country that has enabled violent Islamism, it’s not the perceived enemies of the United States like Libya, Afghanistan, or Iran, but our “good friends” the Saudis — our oil dealers.

The Saudis thought they had escaped “the Arab spring.”  They sent their military into Bahrain to help squelch protests there.  They encouraged the violent suppression of protests in Yemen.  They thought they had things under control.

But another kind of Arab spring may now be in the making.  An Arab summer, perhaps.  Six months ago, a single Tunisian street vendor couldn’t take it any more and sparked a revolution by setting himself on fire.  Now a tech-savvy Saudi woman refuses to take it any more and threatens to spark another revolution by simply taking the wheel.

This is how it starts — with individual acts of defiance, with a refusal to knuckle under, with an insistence on basic dignity.  And with the support of a vast and unsquelchable online community.

The links are above.  Go to it, everyone.