Robert Fisk writes:

Just when the Arab dictators desperately need to drink the secure, cool waters of an Arab summer, along came the Egyptians yesterday to poison the well. Deep into its depths, those dictators could see a flickering enmeshed face, fragile, fingers playing over its nose and mouth, the arm of a man on a stretcher raised to prevent the light getting too close but – for just a few brief moments – with the same old arrogant eyes. Then the heavy black mike appeared in the man’s left hand. “I am here, your honour,” said a chillingly strong voice. “I have not committed any such crimes.”

Yes, the Egyptians really did put their wretched, ancient dictator on trial yesterday, along with his effete, sullen sons – both dressed in white as if heading for yet another summer tennis party, an illusion broken only by the green Koran under Alaa Mubarak’s arm. An encouragement to his dessicated, 83-year-old father, Hosni? Or an insult to the dead?

The lawyers screamed their clients’ pain; of torture, of snipers, of the murder of Egypt’s own people in the January-February uprising, of the brutality of the security forces, of corruption on a Mafia scale. And to whom else did these terrible charges apply? We thought about Damascus, of course. And Tripoli. And the Bahraini capital of Manama. And of Rabat and Amman and Algiers and Riyadh…

And across the vast, arid wastelands of the Arab despots, the government televisions continued to show game shows and cooking classes and domestic dramas and friendly crowds, all of whom loved their presidents and kings and potentates, who could never – could they? – be accused of these awful crimes. Outside Egypt itself, the only live coverage of the trial was broadcast by post-revolutionary Tunisia and that nemesis of the Mubarak regime and of the United States and of Israel: the Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television.

“Are you Mohamed Hosni Sayed Mubarak?” asked Judge Ahmed Refaat. Or Bachar al-Assad? Or Muammar Gaddafi? Or His Majesty King Hamad? Or even His Highness King Abdullah, Guardian of the Three Holy Places in a place called Saudi Arabia?

Lauren Bohn writes:

“All Americans think I’m a terrorist,” 34-year-old Salafi political organizer Mohammed Tolba exhales with his trademark belly laugh. He grips his gearshift and accelerates to 115 miles per hour down a winding overpass in Cairo. “But I only terrorize the highways.” Since the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Tolba has constantly been on the go. “The media says we all wear galabeyas (long Islamic dress), put our women in niqabs (a face veil), and will cut off people’s hands,” Tolba says, dramatically feigning a yawn. “We’re the new boogey-man, but people need to know we’re normal — that we drink lattes and laugh.”

To this end, the silver-tongued IT consultant shuttles regularly from the modish offices of popular television personality Bassem Youssef (he’s starring in a segment on the “Egyptian Jon Stewart’s” highly anticipated new show) to the considerably less shiny quarters of Cairo’s foremost Salafist centers. He’s been conducting leadership and media-training workshops for Salafis. “These guys don’t know how to talk to the public,” says Tolba, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion. “Once they open their mouths and face a camera, man, they ruin everything.”

The same might be said for their debut on Egypt’s main stage last Friday, as hundreds of thousands of Salafis joined other Islamist groups in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Droves of people from governorates across Egypt got off buses near Tahrir Square, chanting “Islamic, Islamic, we don’t want secular.” One Salafi, Hisham al-Ashry, beamed with pride as he walked back from the square to his tailor shop downtown. “Today is a turning point, we finally showed our strength.” Meanwhile, “the liberals and the leftists are freaking out. God protect the nation and revolution,” noted popular blogger Zeinobia.

Who are the faces and voices of an oft-deemed bearded and veiled monolith that packed the square? And what exactly do they want?

“Salafi” has become something of a catchall name for any Muslim with a long beard, but Salafism is not a singular ideology or movement with one leader. As Stéphane Lacroix, a French scholar of Islamist movements, explains, it’s more a “label for a way of thinking” guided by a strict interpretation of religious text. Salafis aspire to emulate the ways of the first three generations of Islam. Many Salafis have cultivated a distinctive appearance and code of personal behavior, including untrimmed beards for men and the niqab for women.

The Salafi culture has been growing in Egypt for decades, but until the revolution had little formal political presence. “Satellite salafism” hit Egypt in 2003, with around 10 Salafi-themed TV channels broadcasting from Egypt on Nilesat. The intensely popular Al-Nas, Arabic for the People, began broadcasting in 2006. Its programming focuses on issues of social justice and sermons by prominent Salafi preachers, like Mohammed Yaqoub and Mohammed Hassan, whose tapes and books are common fixtures among street vendors throughout Cairo. Nobody knows exactly how many Salafis there now are in Egypt, but Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh, a presidential candidate formerly of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently estimated their number at around 20 times the number of Muslim Brotherhood members (unofficial reports estimate Muslim Brotherhood membership between 400,000 to 700,000 members).

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports:

In downtown Cairo on Wednesday morning, people huddled around television sets to watch an historical moment unfold as former President Hosni Mubarak, his two sons Gamal and Alaa, and former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly faced trial on charges of murder for killing protesters during the 18-day uprising that led to Mubarak’s resignation.

Their gazes were glued to the TV screens in disbelief as they watched the dictator who ruled them for 30 years lying on a hospital bed inside a cage, wearing the white uniform of a defendant.

In a car parts shop downtown, a dozen people stood chatting and waiting in anticipation. When the former president appeared on screen, the observers cheered. Then suddenly quiet fell on the shop. As the employees of the shop and passersby watched the trial, they demanded complete silence, asking anyone who talked to remain quiet.

Many around Cairo expressed joy that some kind of real justice is being served.

“This is a historic day,” said Islam Khalil, a 28-year-old lawyer. “It shows progress and development of our country. I feel that I took my right and the rights of all those who have been living under his suppression.”

Mostafa, who owns a clothing shop in Bab al-Louk, agreed. “Glimpses of justice are finally starting to show in the country. I do not feel sorry for him. If someone stole LE 100 from you, would you be sorry for that person? What if he stole a whole country?” he said.

Anthony Shadid reports:

The sheer symbolism of the day made it one of the most visceral episodes in modern Arab history. In a region whose destiny was so long determined by rulers who deemed their people unfit to rule, one of those rulers was being tried by his public. On this day, the aura of power — uncontested and distant — was made mundane, and Mr. Mubarak, dressed in white and bearing a look some read as disdain, was humbled.

“The first defendant, Mohammed Hosni al-Sayyid Mubarak,” the judge, Ahmed Rifaat, said, speaking in a wood-paneled courtroom to a cage holding Mr. Mubarak, his two sons, Gamal and Alaa, former Interior Minister Habib e-Adly and six other senior officers.

“Sir, I am present,” Mr. Mubarak replied into a microphone, from his bed.

“You heard the changes that the prosecutor made against you,” the judge said from the podium. “What do you say?”

“I deny all these accusations completely,” he replied, wearily waving his hand.

Then he handed the microphone to his son, Gamal.

The trial began precisely at its start time, 10 a.m. in Cairo. While the other defendants took a seat, Mr. Mubarak’s sons remained standing, the youngest, Gamal, seeming to block the view of his father from the cameras in the courtroom. Mr. Mubarak appeared tired but alert, occasionally speaking with his sons, who both held Korans.

As Mr. Mubarak denied the charges in the proceedings, which were broadcast on a large-screen television outside the police academy, his opponents gathered there roared in disapproval.

“Then who did it?” some asked.

The scene was tumultuous there on a sun-drenched parking lot, with a few dozen of Mr. Mubarak’s supporters sharing space with his opponents. At times, they scuffled; in intermittent clashes, the two sides threw rocks at each other. As Mr. Mubarak arrived at the courtroom, some of his supporters cried, waving pictures that read, “The insult to Mubarak is an insult to all honorable Egyptians.” Others shouted adulation at the screen.

“We love you, Mr. President,” some chanted.

Those sentiments were overwhelmed by the denunciations of his critics, in a trial that seemed to incarnate all the frustrations and degradations of a state that treated its people as rabble. Someone was finally being held to account, many said Wednesday.

Sandy Tolan writes:

After midnight the Cairo heat finally broke. Mamdouh Hamza, an Egyptian civil engineer, businessman and longtime government critic, was sitting in a plastic chair in an outdoor café at Tahrir Square, puffing on a water pipe. The white-haired Hamza was holding court with his cadre of young revolutionaries, to whom he’d become a kind of beneficent godfather. My colleague Charlotte and I had met him an hour earlier, having interviewed him for a story on Egyptian agriculture and food issues we’re producing for US public radio and TV.

Hamza – builder of major Egyptian development projects but nevertheless a longtime critic of the regime – had been trying to keep a dialogue going between the military council and his “kids” But recently things had broken down, and that morning at 5am, he said, something disturbing and perhaps unrelated happened: Someone called Hamza to say he’d been hired to kill him. But the would-be hit man had changed his mind – “I like you,” he told Hamza – and so he had given the blood money back. Or so the story went.

Hamza seemed to think this was all a hoax, designed to rattle him, and he had no plans to heed the reluctant killer’s warning: that Hamza shouldn’t show up at the square the next day, lest he take a bullet.

Now came Wael Ghonim, he of the social media revolution, with his own followers, to say hello to Hamza. He engaged the older man about finding common ground with the Islamists. Charlotte caught the moment on camera – a young man in a purple pinstripe shirt and designer wire-rim glasses, talking to the shaggy haired professor nearly old enough to be his grandfather – but when Ghonim spotted Charlotte, he insisted she stop shooting. “If you use this,” he said, “I will sue you”. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be seen speaking of reconciliation with the Islamists; rather, a friend reported, he said he didn’t want to be caught on camera being friendly with Hamza, a fellow secularist.

“If you use this, I will sue you,” the Google MBA repeated to Charlotte, a smile frozen onto his face, before moving off with his entourage.

Signs of strains between secular and Islamic forces have been showing for months. But both sides were expected to be represented in Friday’s mass demonstration. Hamza predicted between 800,000 and a million people would show up.

At two in the morning we headed back downtown to catch a few hours sleep. As we climbed into the taxi, the bearded Salafis, bussed in from all over the nation, were pouring single file into the square: a stream of white robes and skullcaps, part of a planned show of force by Islamists. They would be spending the night in the square, ready with their banners and chants as the sun rose on Cairo three hours later.

Anthony Shadid reports:

Tens of thousands of Egyptian Islamists poured into Tahrir Square on Friday calling for a state bound by strict religious law and delivering a persuasive show of force in a turbulent country showing deep divisions and growing signs of polarization.

The shape of Egypt five months into its revolution remains distinctly undecided, and Islamists have long been the best organized political force in this religiously conservative country. Some activists speculated that their show of strength would serve as a jolt to the secular forces who helped to start the revolution but who remain divided, largely ineffectual and woefully unprepared for coming elections.

Others speculated that it might force groups to pick sides in a country where the glow of unity after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in February has dimmed amid recriminations over the pace, style and substance of change.

“Islamic, Islamic,” went a popular chant. “Neither secular nor liberal.”

After days of negotiations between the rival factions, the demonstration Friday had been billed as a show of national unity, but adherents to a spectrum of religious movements — from the most puritan and conservative, known as Salafists, to the comparatively more moderate Muslim Brotherhood — vastly outnumbered other voices in a sun-drenched Tahrir Square. The numbers of Salafists, in particular, represented the most definitive declaration yet that they represent a formidable force in Egyptian politics, riding an ascent since the revolution that has surprised and unnerved many secular and liberal activists — and poses new challenges to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It’s simple,” said Mohammed Awad, a 28-year-old accountant. “We’re stronger than any other force in the country, and we’ve made that clear on this day.”

Steve Negus at The Arabist adds:

A few notes on yesterday’s demonstration in Tahrir, generally viewed as an Islamist show of force. First, the numbers. Based on visual cues (beards, galabiyas), signs and slogans I’m guessing at least 90 percent of those in Tahrir were affiliated with the Islamists, and at least half of those were Salafi. I’m guessing also that this was one of the half dozen largest Tahrir “million” rallies since January. The square wasn’t elbow-to-elbow all the way through, but it was elbow-to-elbow in some spots, and a lot of people stayed camped out on downtown streets where they had gone to pray. I understand why the numbers have alarmed revolutionaries who had come to think of the square as their own space.

There have been some reports that Salafis tried to forcefully take control of a speakers’ stage, but the parts of the demonstration which I witnessed were peaceful. I saw no instances of bullying. Islamists and non-Islamists mingled and argued. I saw one angry anti-Islamist marching up Qasr al-Aini between ranks of weary demonstrators shouting “Egypt, my kind mother/I’m not leaving you to the Brothers!”, yet she did not get much of a reaction.

The Salafis’ slogans were provocative. I didn’t hear the “Obama, Obama, we’re all Osama” or “Shut up secularists!” lines that journalists reported, nor did I see Saudi flags. But the tone of what I did here was pretty defiantly affirmative of an Islamic identity for Egypt, ie, not a civic one. “Raise your head high! You’re a Muslim!” might not sound so bad unless you realize it’s a variation on a far more Christian-friendly original, “Raise your head high. You’re an Egyptian”.

A bit of background: Islamist groups including both Brothers and Salafis had originally planned a Friday rally to oppose the idea of “supra-constitutional principles” proposed by some left/liberals — which as they saw it, was a way for Tahrir revolutionaries to decide what was going to be in the constitution before any elections, and before anyone else had a chance to contribute. But the mostly leftist and liberal groups occupying Tahrir weren’t going to vacate the square, so it looked like there were going to be two rival demonstrations. Islamist and non-Islamists got together and agreed to merge the two rallies and focus on things with which they could agree — ie, swifter trials for officials, justice for the “martyrs”. But the demonstrators to whom I spoke, at least the Islamist ones, were clear that they were there to oppose the supra-constitutional principles, and for Egypt to “remain” Islamic.

Many liberals and leftists considered this to be a bit of an ambush. Look at it from the Salafi point of view, though. They’re already worried that the established political forces, none of whom have got to where they are through elections, are going to shape the constitution behind their backs. They finally get a chance to organize an Islamist show of force to insist that they be listened to, but then it’s decided that they can’t actually be Islamist at it. So, it would have been a minor miracle had the Salafis stuck to the program, and chanted only anodyne, uncontroversial slogans.