The rise and fall of Mohamed Morsi, who died last week at age 67, captured the tribulation of the Arab Spring.

In her commiseration of his death, the Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood operative and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman quoted the first lines of the great Arab poet Nizar Qabbani’s poem on the death of a previous Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser: “We killed you last of the prophets, it is not new to us the killing of Companions (of the Prophet) and Saints.” The words could not have been more unsuitable. A line from Shakespeare’s helpless and tragic “Hamlet” would have been more fitting.