By Sunni M. Khalid 

In the 61 years of Egypt’s republic, through four conventional wars with Israel, decades of military dictatorship and emergency law, waves of political repression and economic stagnation, there had never been a day like Wednesday, August 14,2013 – a date that shall remain forever etched in Egypt’s collective psyche.

At dawn, Egyptian security forces laid siege to the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque in east Cairo’s teeming Nasr City, one of two redoubts for supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi. When the security forces, some wearing black hoods, using high-powered rifles, tear gas, bulldozers and armored personnel carriers, were finished, anywhere from 700 to more than a thousand people – including women and children – lay dead, with thousands more injured. Until then, no Egyptian government had ever slaughtered hundreds of its citizens in its streets in a single day.

Perhaps 10 times more people were killed or injured on the streets of Cairo in one day than were killed or injured during the three weeks of protests to oust Mubarak in 2011, or about the same number of people who died during the low-level Islamist insurgency that swept Egypt in the 1990s.

If there was ever any doubt about where Egypt’s star-crossed path to democracy stood, all one had to do was look at the carnage and charred tableau on the streets around Rabaa al-Adawiya. Or at scores of Coptic churches, police stations or government buildings in Cairo and elsewhere, or the presence of heavily-armed police, soldiers and tanks.

Egypt is not ruled by figurehead president Adly Mansour, the colorless, bespectacled judge plucked seven weeks ago from the constitutional court. No, the man calling the shots is Defense Minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi, 59, the same man named by Morsi last year to lead Egypt half-million man army. The 62-year-old Morsi, Egypt’s only democratically elected president, is being held incommunicado seven weeks after his ouster.

Yet it is Morsi’s aborted presidency that looms over Egypt’s democratic experiment and has fired continuing mass protests all over the country by tens of thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Al-Sisi has promised that a new constitution will be drafted and presidential elections within six months. But after last week’s massacre, the question is not whether Egypt’s rollercoaster ride toward democracy will continue, but if the Arab world’s most-populous nation will fully descend into civil war, a chilling possibility in a region that has seen bloody, protracted internal wars in Algeria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

As Egyptians look with trepidation towards the future, they face a rather narrow set of sobering choices. There is the current perpetuation of the secular authoritarianism under the Army, or a return to the near chaos of a return of political Islam, as witnessed briefly under the inept Morsi. Either option appears likely to be played out over years, promising the kind of political and social instability that can only damage Egypt’s teetering economy even further.

Scholars and pundits have often argued Egypt’s unstable mix of overwhelming poverty, high population density and widespread illiteracy simply don’t provide a secure enough foundation for Western-style democracy. But even detractors were stunned by the sheer enthusiasm with which large numbers of Egyptians who went to the polls to cast ballots in the last two years of elections.

In the end, however, it was not the electorate that failed Egypt, but those they elected. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, as well as other Islamist parties, which did not initially join the demonstrations to topple dictator Hosni Mubarak two-and-a-half-years ago, dominated the early polls and used their parliamentary majority to ram through a constitution that secular leaders, feminists and others objected to.

The showing of the Brotherhood should have come as no surprise in a country where religious piety has increased dramatically. While banned from politics for some 50 years, the Brotherhood had existed as a social welfare organization, winning the hearts and minds of millions of Egyptians with food, charity and its message of faith. Their decades of organization gave them a decided advantage against nascent secular parties, once the ban on their political activities was lifted in 2011.

But the current crisis is not simply a political contest. If it were, the Brotherhood’s estimated 350,000 members would no doubt prevail against any other rivals, but their foe is the Egyptian military. But the Brotherhood squandered its opportunity to rule, as well as the sympathy of many Egyptians. And now they face an old foe that has stood in their path to take power for 60 years, the Army. With a half-million troops, the Egyptian Army is the largest armed force in the region and has unquestionably been in control since the charismatic Gamal Abdel-Nasser and the Free Officers overthrow the effete King Farouk in July 1952.

The Army controls a significant part of the Egyptian economy, with some estimates ranging as high as 40 percent. It’s senior officer operate hotels, resorts, banks, factories and construction companies. The Army rebuffed calls to be put under civilian command and its budget is also beyond civilian scrutiny.

True authority in modern Egypt rests in the use of force, or the mere threat of using it. Since the state has usually controlled a monopoly regarding force, it has been able to demand the respect of most Egyptians. Only the most fanatical have ever violently challenged state institutions. Nearly all, including the Brothers in the 50s and 60s, have been ruthlessly crushed. For those who do not challenge the state, most Egyptians are allowed to live their lives without too much interference –a prescription for enforced tranquility in far too many nations. In the past, that was enough to ensure stability for decades.

But Egypt and Egyptians truly did change in January 2011. Not only did Egyptians mount non-violent protests to overthrow a dictator, but also then subsequently installed an inept elected civilian head-of-state. They have tasted political freedom and it remains highly unlikely that either the Muslim Brotherhood, or their secular opponents, who have applauded Morsi’s ouster and last week’s crackdown against the Brothers, will stop agitating for genuine democracy, not a pale facsimile promised by the Army.

The very idea of a government that is directly accountable to its people is something that paternalistic government officials repeatedly told me the Egyptian masses were not “ready” for. Egypt’s leaders, including Morsi acted as if they genuinely believe that they alone knew what is best for the nation. The country is too poor, so the justification goes, that its people are too uneducated and backward to exercise their rights in a full democracy. Perhaps, so the canard continues, at some undetermined date, far off in the future, the Egyptian electorate will be “mature” enough to exercise full democratic rights.

But the time has passed for such arguments. Egyptians are impatient for change. And assurances by a military that has discredited itself after decades of misrule will not be able to satisfy very many of Egypt’s 85 million people.

Already, the Brotherhood, with much of its top leadership in jail or on the run, has regrouped, mounting more mass protests and vowing to continue its campaign to have Morsi reinstated, no matter how seemingly unrealistic. The Army appears in no mood for negotiation and retains its monopoly on power. And, in the middle, are the Egyptian masses, who long for peace and stability above all else. The time is not yet ripe for compromise and may not be for some time.

Like never before, Egypt is perched precariously on the ledge. Either its leaders will be able to guide the nation through the current crisis and regain the momentum of the march towards democratization, or selfishly plunge the nation into an abyss of a bloody civil war, with widespread economic deprivation and instability that may consume not only Egypt, but the rest of the Middle East and, indeed, parts of Europe and the United States as well.

Sunni M. Khalid is a veteran journalist, who was based in Cairo for three years.