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rapture of the Brotherhood in college. He became a doctor, and eventually wormed his way into Parliament the way everybody in the banned Brotherhood sneaks in: by running as an independent, with a wink and a nudge. Once in Parliament, he rabble-roused, holy-rolled, and generally made a nuisance of himself. He griped about corruption. He was a driving force behind the riots over Banquet of Seaweed, a popular Syrian novel the Brotherhood deemed too lewd and blasphemous for Egyptian bookstores. By 2003, the government was fed up. They kicked Heshmat out of Parliament and threw him into jail for six months. Damanhour, his hometown, went crazy. Riots erupted. The army was dispatched. Young men were beaten and carted off to jail. And then, for years, bitterness festered.

This election was to be Heshmat’s comeback. The townspeople were still angry; they wanted revenge as badly as Heshmat did, maybe even more. Every man and woman I met in the streets vowed to vote for Heshmat. If the government plays any of its old tricks, they said through tight jaws, they’ll have a fight on their hands.

“They humiliated the people.” Heshmat was perched in a thinly stuffed armchair. “But now I’m even stronger. I may have lost a parliamentary seat, but I won another seat in the heart of the people.”

In his ill-lit walkup office, plastic flowers erupted from the walls and aides bent in prayer, foreheads pressed to the floor. Sitting before Heshmat, I asked the question I always asked Islamists: A lot of Egyptians worry that if the Brotherhood gets more power, you will impose hijab on women. This is the fear of secular and Christian Egyptians. Is it true?

Heshmat didn’t like the question, not coming from a young American woman. He frowned and launched into a lecture on the feminist values of Islam. Muslim women keep their names after marriage, own property, and choose their husbands, he argued. “Islam grants so much liberty, but only in a moral framework,” he said. “This moral framework benefits us a lot. It gives us a lower HIV rate, makes sure there are no children out of wedlock.”

You didn’t answer the question about head scarves, I said.

“We get asked all the time to respect others, but others should also respect us and our privacy and our specifications,” he said, shooting me a sharp look. “Globalization shouldn’t be a globalization of morals, of interfering in affairs of every stripe.”

It didn’t go much better with the other candidate, Mubarak’s man. His name was Moustafa Fiqi. He had been educated in London and sent around the world as an Egyptian diplomat. He hadn’t won the election yet, and theoretically the odds were against him. But powerful people in Cairo were already whispering that he would rise to a prominent role within Parliament.

Fiqi hardly bothered to campaign in Damanhour. Instead, he borrowed a computer shop to serve as headquarters and dispatched his “campaign manager,” who turned out to be a mid-ranking intelligence officer.

When I met Fiqi, he flashed Dior cufflinks and spoke careful English. The Muslim Brotherhood, he argued, was trying to take over the country. The national anthem scratched, over and over, from a cassette player.

“Our Brothers on the other side should know, and I’ve announced from the beginning, I’ll quit if there’s any rigging,” he pledged in a campaign rally that night. “I believe in my freedom and the freedom of others.”

That was the last I saw of Fiqi.

The diplomats lounged in a teahouse off the main square, sipping thimbles of Lipton and looking pleased with themselves. They were two men, both on the young side, an American and a Frenchman. It was election day, and they’d trekked from Cairo to observe the balloting. We hauled chairs over to join them.

Everything’s quiet here, they said, draining their teacups, postures slack. We’re going to move on.

We’ve heard they’ve been fighting since morning, we said.

We don’t see anything, they said. They were bored. They were headed by car for Alexandria.

Hossam and I wandered around the corner to the closest polling station—and into the heart