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Egyptian mourners march in Port Said on January 28, 2013 during the funeral of six people killed in clashes the day before (AFP/Getty Images)

On Sunday, President Mohamed Morsi declared a state of emergency in three of Egypt’s troubled provinces, following a weekend of violence in which 48 people were killed in clashes with police. In doing so, he resorted to a tool that had defined the rule of his predecessor, the autocratic Hosni Mubarak, who kept emergency law in force for thirty years as a way to clamp down on dissent. While Morsi’s state of emergency applies only to three cities so far – Port Said, Ismailia and Suez – and is limited to a month’s duration, it has fuelled opposition fears that the president is straying ever further from the ideals of the revolution that brought him to power.

• On Friday – the second anniversary of the uprising in Egypt – clashes erupted in Cairo, and six Egyptians were killed during confrontations in Suez between anti-government protesters and security forces. “The dividing line between the nation’s secular and Islamist camps and the difference in their perceptions of the political moment that defined the country’s recent history could not be starker”, wrote Borzou Daragahi.

• A court on Saturday sentenced to death 21 Port Said locals for their part in deadly football violence last year. The ruling sparked violent clashes between police and protesters in the city, in which 30 people died. The army was deployed after rioters attacked police stations and tried to storm the prison to release those relatives who had been sentenced to death. At a mass funeral the following day, violence again broke out. “Tens of thousands of angry residents marched behind a procession of caskets, chanting slogans against Mr Morsi and vowing to avenge the dead,” wrote Heba Saleh.

• There was a certain inevitability to the announcement of a state of emergency, Borzou Daragahi suggests in his Global Insight column: “In the absence of institutional reforms, without any upgrading of the popular legitimacy of Egypt’s institutions, the state must resort to the same methods as Mr Mubarak to re-establish public order.”

• There is little sign that Morsi’s attempts to impose order are working. In Port Said on Monday, there were calls for a protest march to begin in the city at 9pm – the hour at which the new curfew is meant to begin. Meanwhile in the capital city, demonstrators continued to show their discontent, reports Borzou Daragahi: “By nightfall, plumes of smoke wafted up from central Cairo as protesters faced off against police firing teargas. At least one man, apparently a bystander making his way home from work, was killed by gunfire early on Monday morning, local media reported.”

Best of the rest:

• Announcing the state of emergency on Sunday evening, Morsi said he was acting “to stop the blood bath” and called the violence in the streets “the counterrevolution itself”. It was a “stern, finger-waving speech”, reports the New York Times.

• The weekend’s turmoil “brought the precarious state of modern Egypt into full display — with dual sources of unrest and potential mayhem”, writes Ashraf Khalil in Time magazine.

• “Brothers in arms once upon a revolution, those who toppled former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are now foes, bitter ones”, writes Ali Hashem for Al-Monitor. “It’s known that revolutions devour their children; it’s Egypt this time that proved it right.”

• “Perception becomes reality quickly in politics, so when the state looks beleaguered, it is beleaguered,” writes Steve Negus in a post for The Arabist blog. He considers five options available to the Brotherhood in its attempt to reassert control.

• Writing days before the latest crisis, Cynthia P. Schneider, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that “the US is out of step with the Egyptian people” in continuing to support Morsi’s government: “The Pentagon plans to proceed with the delivery of 20 F-16 jets to Egypt, a step that looks to Egyptians like a vote of confidence in Morsy. Unchanged since the revolution, US aid policy toward Egypt still makes the military alliance its priority.”

• In a July 2004 Letter from Cairo, the New Yorker’s David Remnick looked at Mubarak’s constant state of emergency, under which “tens of thousands of Islamists and other political opponents… passed through [Egypt's] jails, usually without trial or charge“.

• The BBC investigates the emergence of Black Bloc anarchists in Egypt’s protests.