How did bloodshed emerge as a promising solution to the tensions and troubles of the

revolutionary period? And how did different people who were on a particular side of the events from

2011 to 2013 react to the bewildering violence of the victorious in summer and autumn 2013? With

these questions, I want to contribute to a conversation opened by engaged academics writing about

Egypt, in order to try to understand the wide-scale support for killing that emerged in Egypt in the

summer of 2013. My core argument is that, although the violence unleashed after June 30, 2013,

evidently was the result of intentional manipulation and escalation by the most powerful players

involved, many Egyptians’ actual support for that violence was thoroughly moral in character, a

consequence of an intensifying process of polarization where the need to defend right against wrong

was caught up in an ongoing sense of tension, confusion, and anxiety. In this mood of ‘broken fear’—not

the same as the overcoming of fear, the expectation that ‘there will be blood’ was a promise of reaching

clarity, purity and truth through a decisive battle. The incitement to bloodshed and the spiral of

violence can be described as a form of ethical cultivation where a sense of purity is established through

dramatic and radical confrontation. Paradoxically, during the bloody summer of 2013, moments

of irbak—confusion, bewilderment, loss of solid ground—sometimes were more likely to open up ways

out of the circle of hatred and confrontation than firm and clear principles. Wickedness and violence

are akin to righteousness and purity, and there are times when weakness and confusion can be the

better ethical stance. In this vein, I argue that if commentators failed to notice the inherent cultivation

of violence, it was not because it wasn’t there, but because we didn’t want to see it. It didn’t fit well

into the beautiful picture of revolutionary resistance. But we cannot separate beautiful resistance from

terrible bloodshed, just as we cannot isolate the flourishing of cultural life from the spread of violent

street crime in and after 2011, as they belong to one and the same process.

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