Egypt is dangerously close to slipping off a precipice. A transition that began with exuberance and high hopes may be destroyed or at the very least delayed for months or years. As these prospects loom, so does the pre-emptive debate regarding “Who is Losing Egypt?” Who is to blame for the descent into economic chaos, into escalating identity conflicts and into a severe crisis of legitimacy that Jim Zogby’s most recent poll says has left the Muslim Brotherhood only 28% support — in short, toward the abyss of a state collapse that the military is openly warning may require its intervention?

One thesis, proffered by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party — and by my Georgetown University colleague John Esposito — is that the secular opposition is largely responsible for the current mess. Advocates of this position echo a useful distinction made by Tareq al-Bishri — a leading judge who led a constitutional reform committee early on in the transition — that Egypt’s Islamists are democrats but not liberals, while non-Islamists are liberals but not democrats. Elaborating on this thesis, Esposito suggests that secularists are trying to create a crisis that will invite the military back in. Their demand that President Mohammed Morsi resign, he suggests, might be calculated to produce this result. Decrying such an outcome, he insists that the only legitimate arena for changing the government is planned (but postponed) national elections.

A counter thesis, proffered by the leaders of the April 6 Movement, is that they are not merely trying to force early parliamentary elections and in so doing replace a government produced by an "illegitimate" process: They are also trying to prevent the installation of a government that is using every measure to build a permanent electoral majority and thus shut out the opposition. Pointing to the example of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, they insist that the purpose of the June 30 protest is to prevent the imposition of a “Turkish style” electoral autocracy on Egyptian society.

Not surprisingly, the complex reality Egypt is facing does not easily fit into either one of these polarized accounts of the crisis. Somewhere in the fuzzy middle there exists a closer approximation of an elusive truth, and perhaps a basis for moving beyond the worsening impasse.