Emad Effat: Human side to Tahrir Square violence.

CAIRO, Egypt – With Molotov cocktails lighting up the darkness on the street in front of the parliament building where street battles between the army and protesters erupted Friday, a man in his 50s was breaking sidewalk tiles with a metal bar into small chunks.

He was piling them for protesters to hurl at the army in response to a brutal crackdown by soldiers on a largely peaceful sit-in in front of the cabinet building which was directed against Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces, or SCAF.

He looked up at us and with a grin and said, “Welcome to Egypt!”

His face was warm, framed by wire-rimmed glasses and he had the long thin beard of an Islamic scholar. A few hours later this man, Emad Effat, was shot dead on Qasr el Eini Street just off Tahrir Square. Eyewitnesses said the gun shots came from soldiers. An investigation is underway into his death and eight other civilians killed in the demonstrations in which the Egyptian military is being widely criticized for an excessive use of force.

I am back in Cairo for the third time since the heady days of the January and February popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, with cameraman Tim Grucza and Egyptian reporter Mohannad Sabry. We’re seeing familiar faces, people who we’ve gotten to know in Tahrir Square and who we keep in touch with. They become a human touchstone to the dramatic political events of a historic moment in Egypt. They are faces of the revolution, or what some more skeptical souls call “the military coup.”

Effat was a particularly well known character in the square, referred to simply as “the sheikh” because he served as a deputy to the Grand Mufti of Egypt who works under the umbrella of Al Azhar, the oldest and most prestigious theological institute in Islam.

He was popular among young protesters – secular and religious alike – for issuing a religious decree that banned voting for any political candidates in the ongoing elections who are known as “feloul,” or “remnants” of the regime of Hosni Mubarak.

Saturday night, a march in his honor was held by thousands from Al Azhar Mosque to Tahrir Square. The mourners walked into the square with the acrid smell of burning buildings and the charred heaps of old tents and tables and chairs that had been torched by the military in a harsh crackdown.

Thousands of protesters lined the side street where he had been shot and the clashes continued, a formalized dance of rock throwing and Molotov cocktails followed by surges and beatings by the military, a blaze of violence which is going into its second day in the long, simmering malaise that defines this point in Egypt’s continuing revolution.