I am back from my trip to Egypt. Ghosted and jetlagged from all the travel (two days ago I was in Abu Simbel on Lake Nasser), I am still puzzling over my junket. But the obvious question to answer is this: Were my hosts successful? They wished to show me a developed, moderate, civilized Arabic-speaking Islamic nation. Was that what I saw?

Well, with some regrets, I cannot not in all conscience call Egypt developed, either economically or politically. To an economist's eye, walking into Egypt was like walking into an elegant, high-ceilinged room in an old Anglo-French house and seeing that it had been subdivided into a dozen smaller rooms and that three families had moved in. Everywhere in Egypt one sees signs that the country was more developed--and less crowded--in its colonial past than it is at present. To make matters worse, as I said in my last column, Egypt seems terribly dependent on American dollars from direct aid, tourism, and imports and exports.

Politically, too, Egypt seems a basket-case. A question I asked everywhere was, "Have you ever voted in an election, or known anyone who has?" Without exception, everyone I asked said they had never voted. They often had some vague knowledge that the more tribally minded in Egypt would vote in regional elections--but of the national elections that the government claims return President Mubarak to office with 97 percent of the vote every five years, they knew nothing.

Did I see a moderate Islamic country? Here the answer is more nuanced. Certain conservative intellectuals in the West have argued, especially in recent months, that there is something essentially immoderate and fanatical about Islam--that its borders, in Bernard Lewis's phrase, are always bloody--and that to say otherwise is the worse kind of naive political correctness. According to this formulation, jihad means what it says: it is an obligation laid upon all Muslims to politically expand the borders of the Islamic world. And certainly it would be foolishness to say that jihadis like Osama bin Laden do not mean what they say when they call upon Muslims everywhere to smite the infidel. I met a few Islamicists myself in my travels up the Nile.

And yet... and yet.... Wherever I went in Egypt I met kindly, educated Muslims who were keen, almost desperate, to prove to me that Islam is not a warrior religion, that is not at odds with the rest of the world, that the jihadis did not represent the mainstream of Islamic thought but were rather an abomination. I was told repeatedly that Islam has a prohibition against the kind of suicide that the suicide bombers of Islamic Jihad and Hamas practice, and that Islam condemns the murder of innocents.

Sometimes, my hosts were a little disingenuous. I was told repeatedly that the political expansion of Islam that occurred even in the Prophet's lifetime was not achieved at the blade of a sword. But what I did discover was this: Islam, like every religion, has its fanatical side that comes out during periods when its more conservative members feel under attack and marginalized; and that Islam also has its civilized and moderate side. It may be that fundamentalists are right in saying that the civilized version of their faith is less true to its spirit than their more fanatical brand. In the case of Islam, I am not enough of a scholar to say.

But I am now sure that both the fanatical and the civilized are varieties of Islamic religious experience. And that everywhere in Egypt, the intellectual capital of the Muslim world, are sweet-natured, life-loving, educated, and moderate Muslims who are as horrified--more horrified--by the violence that has been done in the name of the Prophet than we are here in America.