Talked a little bit about the situation in Egypt in a lesson today. Realised just how little is the little I know about what's going on there. One obviously savvy reporter on Sky News - who continue to impress me in their coverage of a wide range of issues - reckons that it's reasonable to talk about the possibility of a civil war on the scale of the nightmare that unfolded in Algeria after the Islamists were denied government. He was thoughtfully careful to differentiate the possibility from the probability, but it was chilling to listen to him nonetheless.
He also wondered aloud whether Egypt is quite ready for democracy, and he wasn't being narrowly racist, simply realistic in terms of recognising that a stable polity functioning on democratic lines demands a sense of the need for compromise on all sides - and we aren't seeing much of that in Egypt from anybody. Let's pray we won't see thousands dying so that the lesson has to be learnt the hardest way of all.
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