God's Partisans Are Back

That the true intentions of a religious organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, would become the most hotly debated issue surrounding the overthrow of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, would have garnered guffaws among Western intellectuals only four decades ago. At that time, virtually all of them—all of us—were in the grip of secularization theory: the belief that religion was a dying supernova, enjoying its final glow before disappearing from history. America's foreign-policy establishment is still under the theory's spell.