The expected has now occurred: a massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of such fierceness that he may well have imagined the cowed and psychologically seared demonstrators would return to their homes with their tails between their legs.

But the Muslim Brotherhood’s white flag is not in evidence. And as the arrests of the remaining Muslim Brotherhood leaders continues, the leadership of this, now, populist Islamist national protest will scatter and diffuse down to street level, with likely ugly consequences — not least for Copts who stood shoulder to shoulder with Sisi as he declared his coup.

The United States and the EU have misread the ground. They underestimated the visceral Gulf and Egyptian "deep-state" hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood, and their fervor to cripple the Muslim Brotherhood movement once and for all. By ignoring the clear signs that this antipathy was becoming deeply elemental, and instead attempting to wheedle through, by narrating Morsi’s overthrow as a "renewal of democracy" — to assuage the military through such "balanced" language — the United States and the EU have made themselves both look silly in the region, and have achieved a hearty dislike from all sides in Egypt.

If the immediate consequences of these events are unforeseeable — as the protest leadership dissipates to unknown street captains — there are nonetheless some pointers that emerge for the future of Sunni Islamism: Some 26 years ago, a debate began in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan about the future course of Sunni Islamism. And an "idea" was born.