| Preface to the Canto edition | |
| Note to the nonspecialist reader | |
| Introduction | 1 |
| 1 | One's world as it really is | 29 |
| The radical sensibility | 32 |
| The Bath Party: a retrospect | 48 |
| The Islamic response: radical fundamentalism | 60 |
| Conservative fundamentalism | 74 |
| 2 | Egypt as state, as Arab mirror | 89 |
| The legacy reassessed | 96 |
| The Egyptian search | 108 |
| The ways of the pharaoh, the ways of others | 115 |
| The push of the desert, the pull of the Mediterranean | 124 |
| Egypt as mirror, as state | 139 |
| Beyond the pharaohs: the "normal" polity, the burdened land | 155 |
| 3 | Fractured tradition: the claims of authenticity, the realities of dependence | 169 |
| The "revolution" contained | 174 |
| The dominant order's brief triumph | 182 |
| The question of authenticity and collaboration | 199 |
| The rulers' Islam, Islam of the ruled | 213 |
| The ways of the ancestors, the ways of the world | 233 |
| Notes | 253 |
| Index | 269 |