On 15 September 2013, I sat in the living room of Tariq’s small apartment, located on the tenth floor of a run-down high-rise building in al-Sayyida Zainab. Tariq, whom I had befriended a year ago, was the captain of one of the Brotherhood’s families in Cairo’s Darb al-Ahmar neighbourhood. This would be my final research visit in Egypt: three months later the Brotherhood would be declared a terrorist organization, and Egypt would become too dangerous to conduct research on this topic.