One spring afternoon, shortly after the fall of Baghdad, Abu al-Ela Mady was plotting Egypt's future from his modest political science institute on Qasr al-Aini, one of Cairo's dustiest and busiest streets. Before I entered his dimly-lit office, as I had done so many times when I lived in Egypt during the 1990s, I was imagining him as he was in those days: his big smile rising above the pile of papers perched a foot high on his oak desk; a cold cup of milky tea sitting to his right; a few telephones ringing in various spots around the room.

Our long conversations, usually held over the roar of a rickety air conditioner, invariably ended with Mady presenting a convincing case that Islamists would bring more democracy to Egypt than President Hosni Mubarak. For much of the last 20 years, Mubarak has been the only candidate in presidential elections, and he has arranged to win by at least 96 percent of the vote. Just thinking about the state of Egyptian politics often prompted Mady, a lanky and high-strung man, to jump from his desk chair to give his words an added urgency.

Then, he would open his coveted telephone book and throw out a few numbers of people I should call, opening a window into the closed world of Egypt's Islamic politics. It often took time to sort through the names of those who were in jail and those who had been freed.

When I entered his small office on this spring afternoon, I was surprised to find Mady sitting with a bubbly, fast-talking young woman with streaked sandy-blond hair and wearing a frilly blue-jean dress. Because she appeared to be too secular to be a fellow Islamic activist, I was stumped that he was alone with an Egyptian woman -- many of his co-religionists consider such behavior a breach of Islamic ethics.

"This is Suzanne," Mady said, introducing us. "She's a television presenter, and she had me on her show." The woman's pageboy haircut bounced as she stood to shake my hand. "I hope you don't mind if I stay for your meeting," she said, "because I help Abu al-Ela out when I have time away from work."

Suzanne Herfy, a 30-year-old star host of The Focus, a program on Egypt's first independent satellite channel, and Abu al-Ela Mady, a 40-something seasoned and popular Islamic activist, were bridging the gap between secularism and Islam -- no small feat for a country that has been torn between these two forces for three-quarters of a century.

In 1928, Hasan al-Banna, a schoolteacher from upper Egypt, launched the modern Islamic movement with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Through the decades, the Brotherhood has vacillated between an organization that used violent methods to try to create an Islamic state and one that cooperated with the government. The Brotherhood split in the late 1970s, spawning two trends: One inspired Islamic democrats such as Mady to establish a social movement as a way of making Egypt more pious, and the other led to the creation of militant groups. Some of the militants, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy and chief ideologue, later joined the Al Qaeda network. The militants who remained in Egypt assassinated Egyptian officials, including President Anwar Sadat in 1981, in their attempts to overthrow the government.

By the late 1990s, however, the government had won the war against the militants by crushing the organizational strength of their two main groups. But the militants had achieved success on another front: They exposed the state's deep degree of repression and authoritarianism.

While ordinary Egyptians were never sympathetic to the militants, they nonetheless woke up and discovered that an Islamic alternative could challenge the autocratic state. Islamic democrats from Mady's generation stepped in to fill the void. By 2000, the Islamic democrats were enjoying great popularity in a budding civil society. The last holdouts were the secularists. During the time I was away, from 1998 to 2003, Mady apparently had figured out how to win over skeptics like Suzanne Herfy who otherwise would have little to do with him.

"I met Abu al-Ela at an Iftar that his cultural society held," she explained, referring to the celebratory meal held each evening at sunset to break the fast during the holy month of Ramadan. "I was so inspired by this society that I asked him how I could become involved."

The society was created after the Egyptian government banned a political party Mady had founded with a few other activists, one of whom was a leader in the Christian Coptic community. Called al-Wasat, or the Center Party, it was intended to bring together Christians, secularists, and Islamists to challenge the half-century rule of Mubarak's government. The regime actually began after the 1952 revolution, which brought former president Gamal Abdul Nasser to power. Since then, control of the government has remained in like-minded hands.

But the state accused Mady and the other Muslim founders of using the party as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was officially banned in 1954 but often tolerated. After years of court battles, Mubarak personally intervened and declared the party illegal. The Islamists then were forced to find another avenue to mobilize Egypt's disparate factions.

The cultural society they created was more difficult to ban than the Center Party and perhaps more appealing to a cross section of Egyptians. Each week, the society holds seminars about how to create a democracy that is compatible with Islamic traditions and values. So far, it has proven successful, drawing the most unlikely of crowds, including pop stars and other members of the secular elite.

Just as important as the society's activities is its implicit message: Egypt's moderate Islamic movement has softened, parted ways with the Old Guard running the Muslim Brotherhood, and understands it must include diverse views and interests if it expects to gain the trust of Egyptians who in the end will decide if Islamists can be trusted one day to lead the country.

This less doctrinaire approach has struck a chord across the Islamic world, blurring the boundaries between Islam-based politics and that of the rising modern middle class. In Turkey, the moderate Islamists of the Justice and Development Party were elected to lead the government in November. In Morocco, activists are creating non-governmental organizations to challenge the authoritarian powers of the monarchy. This quietist approach seeks to eventually oust the Arab world's authoritarian leaders at the ballot box.

For the United States, this same phenomenon now poses a stark challenge in Iraq: how to fulfill its pledge of creating a representative political system without handing the country over to Muslim activists who would surely emerge as the choice of the people.

"We have learned how to distinguish between different groups within the Islamic movement," Herfy told me. Her comments signaled how Egyptian society has matured since the heated days of the militant attacks a decade ago, when any Islamic activist was assumed to have violent intentions.

Just as society has become more sophisticated about the Islamists, Herfy explained, the Islamists have become more flexible about which Egyptians can join their ranks. "Abu al-Ela's society is criticized by the Muslim Brotherhood because unveiled women like me are allowed to attend the meetings, and Christians sit on the board. I am close to the society because I feel their sincerity, and this is something that is missing in the political life the government has created."

Egypt's Islamic democrats have no well-defined organization. They spread their message and battle the government through nongovernmental organizations, Coptic-run health centers in upper Egypt, human rights groups, mosques, and the national lawyers' union. Their amorphous existence is an asset: They reach out to ordinary Egyptians from an array of interest groups, and they can organize a march or other forms of dissent on a moment's notice.

In late March, a few evenings after protests against the war in Iraq had erupted across the Arab world, a group of Egyptian lawyers met at the national Bar Association near Cairo's central train station. The lawyers were planning to capitalize on two days of antiwar protests that had erupted in Revolution Square in downtown Cairo and at Al-Azhar, a 1,000-year-old mosque and university complex that is the seat of learning for the Sunni Islamic world.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians had demonstrated in the largest protests since the bread riots of the 1970s. Demonstrations are banned without government authorization, which is rarely given. In the same breath with which the protesters chanted slogans against the US-led attack on Iraq, they also criticized Mubarak and repeated the mantra coined by Hasan al-Banna and his Muslim Brotherhood: "Islam is the solution."

The lawyers thought Egypt could be at a turning point: It was unheard of that anyone would openly criticize Mubarak, a crime under Egyptian law. And more important, Osama bin Laden, who maintains widespread support across the Arab world, had called upon Muslims to overthrow authoritarian rulers who receive support from the United States. With a $2 billion stipend each year from Washington, Egypt is near the top of bin Laden's list.

When Nabil Osman, the government spokesman, was asked after the protests to comment about the taboo against Mubarak being broken, he suggested that such criticism was nothing extraordinary: "Everyone is entitled to his or her point of view, and the fact that people came up with these petitions, publicly and openly, is proof of the openness of the society." Osman said he couldn't remember the last time Mubarak was criticized in public.

The lawyers also planned to play to Egyptian rage over another issue as well: Security forces arrested an estimated 800 to 1,500 demonstrators, beat some, and detained many without charge. Human rights groups circulated some of the testimony that the protesters gave before a judge during hearings in which the government tried to extend the detentions.

"At the Khalifa police station a guard tied my legs. Then a commissioner in charge of transferring hit me with a stick," Gamal Abdel Aziz, a lawyer who had participated in the protests, told the judge. "He hit me until the stick broke on my body, and it is possible that I have a fractured left forearm."

But when the lawyers met that evening at the union headquarters, security forces encircled the building and plans for widespread protests were scrapped.

It did not take a war to inspire the lawyers to become politically active. Like much of Egypt's professional class, the lawyers grew up on a dream of upward mobility for all. But by the time they graduated, they were left with little more than the prestigious university diplomas proudly displayed on their parents' mantelpieces. The salaries of most lawyers, doctors, and engineers were never enough for a simple wedding party or a new apartment of even a short holiday at one of Egypt's world-known beach resorts.

When I lived in Cairo, men like Abu al-Ela Mady rose to national prominence by offering a way out. The Islamists won control of the lawyers' union in free and fair elections -- a novelty in authoritarian Egypt. Their victory was repeated in the engineering, pharmacists', and doctors' unions, comprising hundreds of thousands of middle-class professionals.

The Islamists running these unions offered medical insurance for tens of thousands of members, loans to buy houses and cars, as well as short-term funds for getting married. With a great boost to their popularity, the Islamists believed their takeover of the unions would be a dress rehearsal for their ultimate goal -- a seat inside the government.

Soon, the government saw the threat at hand and closed the syndicates. But after many court battles, the lawyers' union managed to reopen.

These days, lawyers are reluctant to speak openly about the state of affairs in Egypt and the Middle East with an American journalist; the war has made Arabs across the region loathe Americans, and many are afraid to reveal their antipathy. But soon, the lawyers began to debate the issues among themselves and included me in the conversation. "Look, let's face it, everyone is afraid," said Ahmed al-Sayyid, a bearded, chubby man sitting around a white wrought-iron table with a group of fellow lawyers. "The people are afraid and the Egyptian government is afraid. Our government now faces pressure from all sides. Pressure from us for more freedom and pressure from the United States to reform the political system. Everyone knows that if free elections are held, the Islamists will come to power."

"We hate the system we have now, which resembles a monarchy," chimed in another lawyer at the table. "We can't support a regime which has controlled people for so long. We have been under emergency law for 22 years."

"What should be done then?" I asked. "Will the government change on its own?"

"Never," answered al-Sayyid. "But democracy will come to Egypt over time."

Ahmed Seif, a lawyer and director of the Hisham Mubarak Legal Center, is unwilling to wait. Sitting in his dusty office decorated with inflatable effigies representing the United States and Israel, Seif is one of the few activists challenging the Egyptian government head on.

"The struggle for democracy in Egypt is now at a breaking point," he declares. His law practice and his political activity melt into one these days. When I visited him, he was counseling the parents of a few antiwar demonstrators who had been arrested in March and remained in jail.

A former political prisoner, Seif has seen the dark side of the regime and is not afraid. Along with 36 other Egyptian professionals, Seif filed suit in April against Mubarak and the minister of the interior for ordering the arrests and detentions of the antiwar demonstrators.

"This is the first time the president's name has been written in a legal complaint," he says proudly.

In another act of defiance rarely seen in Egypt, Seif and about a dozen nongovernmental organizations issued an open letter to the Interior Ministry. "The undersigned organizations know you have spent the last three days torturing our colleagues, antiwar activists and other Egyptian citizens who have walked the same path of the millions of citizens all over the world and have peacefully expressed their protest of the killing going on in Iraq," it said.

"We are writing this message to advise you not to sleep too deeply at night. We wish to inform you that you will be very wrong to think that you are not immune to accountability, trial and punishment."

Seif believes the war in Iraq has created a serious crisis for Mubarak, because it inspired a discussion that amounted to a referendum on his rule. For the first time in decades, Egyptian grievances have come together over three distinctive sentiments: their support for Islam, their opposition to colonialism, and their unbridled nationalist stance. In the eyes of Egyptians, Mubarak's unwavering support for his patron, the United States, helped pave the way for American intervention in the region.

In the past, Mubarak has faced demands to establish a free press, free elections, and a multiparty system, but the war encouraged old and even new critics to become more vocal. And the debate is not limited to antiwar demonstrators chanting slogans in Revolution Square.

Islamic and secular intellectuals found common cause during the war. In statements published in some Egyptian newspapers and in Arabic publications abroad, they blasted the president for blaming the Iraqi people for Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. In a television address one day before the US bombing began, Mubarak said that Iraq should "take responsibility for the serious position it has put us all in."

Egypt's intellectuals, however, place all blame on the United States. At a cocktail party held during the war at the home of a European diplomat, a few members of the secular elite voiced their outrage.

"The United States thinks you can create democracy in Iraq with the same speed with which you can order a burger at McDonald's," said a history professor who teaches at the elite American University in Cairo. "This war demonstrates the Americans' complete ignorance about the Middle East."

The Bush administration has vowed that its mission to install democracies will not stop with Iraq. High-ranking officials want Egypt to overhaul its political system as part of a US campaign to create democratic governments throughout the region. Convinced that the teaching in Egyptian schools is akin to the radical madressas, or Islamic schools, in Pakistan and other countries where young men are inspired to join Al Qaeda, conservatives in the White House are also demanding changes to Egypt's educational system. A program is underway to send American educators to Cairo. The Bush administration believes that the textbooks used in primary and secondary schools are too critical of Israel. The US government also intends to introduce teaching methods that inspire analytical thinking, rather than the rote-learning method, which is more common in many Egyptian schools.

This policy is a great departure from the past, when the US government was willing to turn a blind eye to authoritarian rule in Egypt in exchange for its support for the 1979 peace agreement with Israel and continued help in negotiating peace between Palestinians and Israelis. But now US officials have made specific demands: They have made it clear to Mubarak, 75, that his 40-year-old son, Gamal, whom the president has chosen to be his successor, should not come to power without a free election in which other candidates are allowed to run.

In February, Gamal, a banker who is well-established in Egypt's business community, traveled to Washington for an unofficial visit in what his father hoped would be his coronation by the Bush administration. But Middle East analysts who attended social gatherings held in his honor said US officials rebuffed him.

This rejection has given hope to Mubarak's political opponents who look toward the president's death or retirement as the end at last of authoritarian rule. Not only do they oppose the idea that Mubarak's son, Gamal, could replace his father, but they hope the end of the presidency will at last force a free and fair election.

"Maybe we are looking at the last days of the Mubarak legacy," says Seif.

The mounting pressure on Mubarak has put the United States in a quandary: Demands for political change in Egypt and the Middle East might not produce the result the Bush administration had in mind. The Islamists are poised for power. But the domestic reforms they would implement would undermine US interests in the region, and the Islamists' foreign policy would be far less tolerant of Israel and US interference in the Middle East.

These ideas are not the Islamists' alone but those of most Egyptians. "Reform, in my opinion, has to be indicative of our goals and interests and by us, not through outside pressures," Abu al-Ela Mady wrote in an article published in the Egyptian press. "Especially those coming from the United States."