Deadly fighting has Egypt reeling this weekend. According to state-controlled al-Ahram, the health ministry announced that 38 people (now updated to 46) have been killed in clashes between security forces and Islamic-supremacist supporters of the imprisoned deposed president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood claims that the actual death toll is 120, with some 4,500 others wounded.

The Egypt Independent reports that hundreds of Morsi supporters stomed the campus of ancient al-Azhar University after attacking local residents with rocks and bottles. As I recount in the latest issue of NR, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the army ousted Morsi, Sisi gathered by his side some key Islamists who supported the coup — including al-Azhar’s grand mufti, Ahmed el-Tayeb. My argument then, as now, is that Islamic supremacism is the dominant ideology in Egypt, and for all the hoopla about turning away from sharia and toward real democracy, the Islamists would not go quietly:

When Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the constitution last December, Morsi’s approval rating was 60 percent. It nosedived in the following months because Egypt slipped deeper into chaos: food shortages, starvation, rising crime, and — emblematic of sharia cultures — increasing repression of religious minorities and women. Nevertheless, Egypt as a whole has not shed its Islamic-supremacist character.

Thus, the Islamist flank of General Sisi’s ad hoc support network vanished within days. The army killed scores of rioters — Islamists and their jihadist shock troops demanding Morsi’s restoration. The al-Nour party [the fundamentalist "Salafist" party that is a sometime rival and sometime ally of the Brotherhood, and that briefly supported the coup] quickly bolted, though not before blocking the secularist effort to appoint Mohamed ElBaradei as prime minister (he was later appointed vice president for foreign affairs). Meanwhile, for green-lighting Morsi’s ouster, Grand Mufti Tayeb was scalded by Islamist scholars. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the globally renowned sharia jurist and Brotherhood totem, announced that most of the al-Azhar faculty found the coup to be a profound affront to Islam.

Struggling to defuse the tension, the new interim president, Adly Mansour (plucked by Sisi from the High Constitutional Court), issued a “constitutional declaration” under which Egypt will be governed in the post-Morsi transition. Its opening articles reaffirm that Islam is the religion of the state and that sharia, derived from ancient Sunni canons, is the main source of legislation.

Naturally, the secularists, progressives, and religious minorities professed shock. “We did not take to the streets to give legitimacy to religious-based political parties that were about to erase Egypt’s identity,” thundered the Maspero Youth Union, one of the savvy progressive groups spotlighted by the media as Morsi fell. But these groups are actually trying to create a new Egyptian identity. The current one, Islamic supremacism, will not be easily erased.

This has already gotten very ugly, and given Egypt’s dire economic straits, it is just the beginning.