Saturday was the anniversary of the fall of Hosni Mubarak. A nationwide general strike has been called, and other acts of civil disobedience: a boycott of all products from military-owned factories (this includes sundries such as olive oil and washing powder) and non-payment of taxes. The alleys around the Ministry of the Interior are a war zone, with latter-day sans culottes, kids from the slums, in dirty ragged clothing, stretched out in gutters to sleep after battling the authorities all night.

Last year, I realized I was overusing the word “cacophonous” to describe Egypt’s post-Mubarak ongoing revolution. This year, I find I have switched to “roiling.” A little over a week ago, the Port Said football tragedy left more than seventy fans dead, beaten and stampeded to death after a pitch invasion while the police stood by watching. Was this football hooligans run amok? An event staged by foreign agent provocateturs wishing to weaken Egypt? Revenge by the police who hated the fans for besting them in Tahrir Square? Evidence of a wider plot by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to destabilize the country and roll out the tanks? Many Egyptians seem to fervently believe one or another version; some believed more than one at the same time.

It was similar with the tear-gas and rock-throwing violence outside the Ministry of the Interior. The protesters were all kids! They were foreign agents (a favorite shibboleth of the state media)! They were brave revolutionaries suffering their bodies to be peppered with birdshot (several died as a result).

Thirty years ago, exactly to the day, the President of Syria, Hafez al-Assad, put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama by bulldozing the city. No one knows how many died; estimates vary between ten thousand and forty thousand. Assad’s message was simple: mess with this regime and we will bury you all. Thomas Friedman called it “Hama Rules.”

Faced with his own uprising since April, Hafez’s son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, has kept his death toll ticking up in smaller increments. On Friday, the Syrian army shelled the recalcitrant neighborhood of Khalidiya in the restive and bloodied city of Homs, where there have been ongoing skirmishes between pockets of the Syrian Free Army and regime forces for weeks. Residents reported that gunfire and armed regimist gangs were everywhere. The shaky cell-phone videos uploaded to YouTube, which have come to define the Syrian uprising, showed a hospital filled with dead and wounded, striped bodies, saline drips, blood, contorted death masks. Human-rights groups are reporting more than two hundred dead, the highest death toll for a single day in the last ten months. A few days ago, I sat with Peter Harling, the Syria analyst for the International Crisis Group. He had just come back from Damascus and was as miserable and pessimistic as all my Syrian friends. “It is accelerating,” he told me, “whether towards the President’s downfall or to civil war.”

On Wednesday night, the Port Said soccer team Al Masry beat Cairo’s Al Ahly in an Egyptian League home match. The Al Masry fans invaded the pitch—in celebration, but also looking for vengeance in a long feud. It turned into a hooligan rampage. More than seventy Ahly supporters were killed: beaten; stabbed; thrown from high stadium tiers; trampled in a corridor inside the stadium as they tried to flee, and found doors locked from the outside. The violence was not overtly about politics, but Egypt’s streets are roiling now, with marches and sit-ins and demonstrations and strikes. We are in the middle of a revolution, and everything is political.

The tragedy sparked outrage and anger, and the emotions were directed at the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, which rules the country and has been seen as prevaricating on handing over executive power to a civilian authority. Egyptian soccer fans known as Ultras are well organized—disciplined, tough young kids under a capo system. In the Battle of the Camels during the revolution, they were at the vanguard of the defense of Tahrir Square. Many Ahly fans said that the police were taking their vengeance on the Ultras for having beaten them a year ago. Why were the doors locked? Why were the fans not searched as they came in carrying knives and flares and clubs? Why did the riot police stand by and do nothing? Who turned the stadium lights off just as the fight began?

Last week, Sam LaHood, head of the International Republican Institute—a group that advises on the logistics of democracy, with ties to prominent Republicans and backed by U.S. funds—was prevented from leaving Egypt. Nine other Americans were issued travel bans. Sam said that he presented his passport to the immigration officer at the airport. He was told to stand aside. A woman officer told him that he could not leave the country and she couldn’t tell him why. Something had twisted sharply in the tale. When his office was raided in December, police took everything: computers, documents, and “every stick of furniture, even book shelves,” he told me. The office has been sealed for the past six weeks. The American Embassy, furiously working the phones and high connections to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, was assured that everything would soon be given back. I talked to Sam this morning (he’s a friend): “Not a slip of paper has been returned,” he said.

In late December, there was violence again on Tahrir Square; the Army and the black-clad security police battled demonstrators—with tear gas, Molotov cocktails, bricks, and gunshots—leaving more than a dozen dead. A month ago, it seemed possible to say, cynically, that nothing had really changed since Mubarak fell. The military regime that Nasser and the Free Officers brought to power in 1952, and which Mubarak had headed for thirty years, remained in charge of Egypt, with the country under the de facto authority of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

In the year that has passed since the first gatherings in Tahrir Square, on January 25, 2011, Egypt has been riven by paroxysms of protest and violence, crackdowns and martyrdoms. The screaming headlines, the noise of chanting, the gag of the tear gas—the yelling, jostled, bloody foreground—has meant that it has been very difficult to manage any perspective. But over the past three or four weeks the mood has calmed, as people have absorbed the results of a parliamentary election and readied themselves for a new era in which political debate may take place in a legitimate, elected forum, rather than on the streets.

Elections began today in Egypt. Here is the official Voters’ Guide—it was distributed as a poster, with twelve steps, each illustrated:

1) Go to the polling station between 8 A.M. and 7 P.M. with your national I.D. card.
2) Wait your turn in line with your I.D. card in hand. Priority will be given to the elderly and the handicapped.
3) Go inside the polling station and show your I.D. card to the head of the polling room.
4) Take two ballot papers of two different colors, one for the individual candidates and one for the party lists.
5) Go inside the voting booth.
6) On the ballot paper of the party list, tick the party that you want.
7) On the ballot of the individual candidates, tick beside two names of your choice.
8) Fold the papers in half and hand them to the head of the polling station.
9) Put the ballot paper for the party lists in the ballot box for the party lists.
10) Put the ballot paper for the individual candidates in the box for the individual candidates.
11) See the secretary of the polling station and sign your name or leave your fingerprint by your name on the voter list.
12) Dip your finger in the phosphorous ink and leave.

Shobra is a central Cairo neighborhood, poor, working class, narrow lanes, live chickens in bamboo crates, a kerosene truck doing its rounds. It rained this morning and the streets were muddy. I was with Hussein, one of the neighborhood’s tough guys. (He has a homemade pistol and an outstanding charge of attempted murder—he says he beat up a man who slapped his nephew in the street.) There were middle-aged men in suits and ties, some clean-shaven, some with reading glasses, some with beards, some with mustaches and prayer calluses, and a man leaning against his big motorcycle with a pirate skull painted on the engine casing. We walked down an alley lined with election posters. Each candidate and party has a symbol to help people identify them on the ballot papers: a key, a butterfly, an apple, a mango, a knife, a fork, a screwdriver, a megaphone, an electric blender, a camera, a motorcycle, a car, a ship, a train, a firetruck, a light bulb, a chandelier, a lighthouse, a lantern, a sunflower, a gold bar, a basketball hoop, a football, a cactus, a guitar, a violin, a ruby.

It was Friday today, and Tahrir Square was packed. It was in a mix of every mood I have seen it in over the past ten months: politically focussed, “The people want to topple the Marshal!”; carnival-like, with face painters and food stalls; determined, with tents and supplies and field hospitals; organized, with volunteers checking bags and I.D.s at the entrances; thuggish, with plenty of knots of young kids from poor neighborhoods; and creative: a new sign had been erected for Mohamed Mahmoud Street, renaming it, “The Street of the Eyes of Freedom”—a reference to the many who had lost their eyesight from police birdshot.

The army has built a wall out of concrete blocks on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Doctors in white coats stand on top, as a volunteer cease-fire line. In the streets and alleys leading up to the charred stretch where the tear gas and rocks rained over between protesters and police for five days, protesters now man barbed-wire barricades, stopping kids and passersby from coming too close and provoking the authorities. The police have withdrawn; the army has replaced them, and there is a truce. But the wall that separates the crowds on Tahrir from the Military Council is actually a gulf of generation, perception, and culture. The violence may have stopped for the moment, but the clarion call for a transfer to civilian rule has not.

Faced with thousands on Tahrir Square, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces turned to tactics that look very much like they have been copied straight from Hosni Mubarak’s playbook. In the course of his rambling, self-justifying, calm-down-we-are-pretending-to-promise-concessions speech last night, Tantawi evoked, as his former boss once did, the spectre of foreign forces at work, agitating Egyptians in the service of their own agendas. “Some powers,” he warned ominously, vaguely, “are trying to bring down the trust between the Armed Forces and the people of Egypt, and they are targeting the fall of the Egyptian State.” A hangover from the Mubarak era is a suspicion that any foreigner could be an Israeli or a spy, especially if he or she is carrying a camera. On the square over the past couple of days, I have been increasingly stopped and questioned by protesters. Who is she? they ask my translator. What is she doing here? Get her out of here! There are foreigners creating trouble here! We stop and remonstrate and reason and usually they end up apologizing: They were only making sure—did we hear the report on state TV that three foreigners were arrested in Mohamed Mahmoud Street? We should take care! The three were foreign American University of Cairo students, and they were released, but their presence on state TV news and in the rumor mill, in these tense times, ratcheted up the xenophobia.

For the first time since he assumed the executive position as de facto president when Mubarak fell, Field Marshal Tantawi addressed the Egyptian people yesterday. He appeared on television, seated, reading from a prepared speech. He gave as uncharismatic and flat a delivery as you might expect from a man chosen to be the Defense Minister of a dictator who had fired his predecessor for being too popular. He gave no particular concessions—elections should go ahead; a new unnamed “government of salvation” would take over in the meantime—and seemed to be appealing more to the people at home than the thousands in Tahrir Square. The transition period was very difficult, he said, and it was not easy trying to plot a way through it. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had done its best; it had never had any intention of staying in power; SCAF and the Army existed only to serve the Egyptian people and to defend Egypt, he added. Of course, he continued, the “government of salvation” should “work in coöperation with SCAF.” He ended by saying that SCAF would be willing to transfer authority immediately, through a referendum, if needed.

A pall of tear gas hangs over Tahrir Square. The two-dollar gas masks being hawked by entrepreneurial vendors work quite well, but many people can’t afford them and use paper surgical masks or simply wrap scarves over their faces. Everywhere there are volunteers spraying saline into protesters’ red and streaming eyes, or handing out tissues. A million-man march was called for this afternoon and, as I write, thousands are streaming into the square, forming a crowd as dense as I have seen it since the final days of the revolution in February. The crowd is thickest near the entrance to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which runs from between the landmarks of the American University in Cairo and a Hardees restaurant to the Interior Ministry two or three blocks away. Protesters have been battling state-security police there for four days.