The end of ‘moderate Islam’?
When the news started to pour in from Cairo on July 3 regarding the fate of the power of the toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, we were in the garden of the U.S. embassy residence in Ankara for the Independence Day reception and in a conversation on the subject with Bülent Aliriza, the head of Turkish desk of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). As the deadline of the military ultimatum approached, the subject turned from the sharp messages delivered on freedom of expression and assembly in Turkey by U.S. Ambassador to Ankara Francis Ricciardone, to the coup d’etat against Morsi, the first Egyptian president freely elected. By the time we moved to a nearby Italian restaurant, the power game in Cairo was over.
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