Abdullah made it clear that he doesn’t particularly like either Erdogan or Mursi but that he distrusts the Turk more because he is cannier. Both men seek absolute power, Abdullah believes, but Erdogan is taking a slower, more deliberate approach than Mursi. “Instead of the Turkish model, taking six or seven years — being an Erdogan — Mursi wanted to do it overnight,” he said.

The king, among other Arab leaders, is worried that the Obama administration has an overly naive view of the Brotherhood and of other Islamist leaders. This is one of the main subjects he will address when he has dinner tonight with U.S. President Barack Obama, who is visiting him in Amman, the Jordanian capital. (Another main issue, of course, is the disintegration of Syria, to Jordan’s north.) The king was careful not to criticize Obama to me, but he did lament that U.S. officials discount warnings about the Brothers as the empty complaints of Arab liberals or those vested in the status quo. Some Westerners, he said, argue that “the only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood.”

He made these comments to me a couple of months ago. But the truth of his argument about the Brotherhood’s extremism — and impatience — was borne out anew a week ago, when the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt issued an extraordinary, and extraordinarily disturbing, rejoinder to the draft of a declaration calling for an end to violence against women that was eventually passed at the annual session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.