Egypt has stunned the world again. At the moment world opinion is divided over whether what is happening in Egypt is a popular revolution supported by the army or whether it is a military coup. One body of opinion understands what is happening. This has been keeping track of developments in our country over the months that have passed since the 25 January Revolution, and it realises that the massive outpouring of Egyptians into streets and squares around the country was the natural consequence of these events. This outpouring represented millions of people voting with their feet in order to rectify a revolution that had been derailed. The opposing view is informed by a knee-jerk reaction to the mere sight of the army. It overlooks the fact that the army moved in order to protect the largest demonstrations in Egypt's history after those promoting violence and terror from the ultra-Islamist right had reiterated their threats to “crush to death” all those protesting peacefully against the now-ousted former president Mohamed Morsi. Egyptian history is a world science. The lessons of the Pharaohs continue to surprise the world with insights that break all familiar moulds. The lesson coming from Egypt today is that the ballot box is not a kind of large glass prison into which elected leaders can confine the people once they have cast their vote. It is that constitutional legitimacy, the kind that grants a president a certain number of years in office, cannot be a chain to shackle the will of free citizens. Instead, there must be constant checks, controls and monitoring of authority, which means a permanent opportunity to alter course. It also means that when driven beyond a certain point the people can and will mobilise en masse to break the bonds that shackle them. The historic movement that the world has just seen was a thoroughly Egyptian grassroots movement. The Tamarod (Rebel) petition harks back to the campaign of the Egyptian national independence movement to collect powers-of-attorney in 1919 that would authorise the nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul to negotiate with the British occupation authorities on behalf of the Egyptian people. Moreover, this Tamarod petition drive, in itself a quintessentially democratic mechanism, but with the stamp of the ingenuity of Egypt's youth, succeeded in collecting more than 22 million signatures — as corroborated by national identity card numbers — perhaps setting a world record for the largest petition drive in history. The movement remained consummately Egyptian up to and through the largest political rally in the history of mankind, estimated by the Western media at 33 million men and women amassed beneath the single banner of the Egyptian flag in order to voice a single demand: early presidential elections and the chance to bring the revolution back on course and realise its aims. As a result, the Egyptian people have forged a new value of democratic practice as an alternative to the deaf legitimacy of the ballot box. This is the legitimacy of satisfaction. As long as a ruler's performance remains satisfactory to the broadest cross-section of the people, and not just to a particular faction or interest group, the people will grant him the legitimacy to continue in office. However, if the ruler strays grossly off course and violates the social contract between him and the electorate, the people have the right to revolt. The Morsi regime was a model of the latter type of ruler. Not only did Morsi renege on his pledges to the people, but he also proved determined to work against the demands of the 25 January Revolution. In the process, his regime lurched from one failure to the next —in its handling of the economy and security in particular — and the former president issued decrees and declarations that polarised the society as never before and threatened to drive the country to the brink of civil war. All this was due to his single-minded focus on empowering the Muslim Brotherhood, from which he hails, and its supporters and on fostering terrorism through his regime's overt and indirect support for armed groups in Egypt and in neighbouring countries. What brought down the Muslim Brotherhood was the Muslim Brotherhood itself. It was this organisation's self-serving understanding of the meaning of the state, its arrogant aloofness from society, and its alliance with an empire that did not rush to its side when it called for help that sealed its fate. The Brotherhood proved itself to be unable to understand the state in the abstract sense or the meaning of the state in Egypt. To many of its members, the state was a kind of conspiracy against the faith, a mysterious enemy that they labelled with the term “deep state”, by which they did not mean a state that originated in antiquity. They made no effort to see the state as the institutionalised framework for organising a complex modern society, or as part of the social contract that necessitates participation and partnership between the diverse components of society. The source of their arrogance was a sense of moral superiority coming from the fact that they operate in the name of Islam. In their boundless arrogance, Brotherhood members focussed on changing the mode of religious belief, rather than on changing the mode of production. Egypt urgently needs to reduce its rates of unemployment and poverty and to develop agriculturally and industrially. It cannot afford to wait for investments that will never come. However, such urgent economic measures were not among the Brotherhood's priorities. The Brotherhood started with a call to apply Sharia (Islamic) law, as if Islamic law was not already applied in Egypt. It behaved as if Egypt's Muslims were not Muslim enough and as if society was in need of the kind of religious guidance that only it, the Brotherhood, could provide. In the end, the Brotherhood clung desperately to the straw of “legitimacy”, by which it meant electoral legitimacy, thinking that this gave it an irrevocable mandate to do what it wanted. It did not factor in the need for the legitimacy of popular approval. Brotherhood members rushed to embrace the scourge of neoliberal capitalism, perhaps unaware of the fact that this form of economics turns societies into masses that are marginalised from the modes of work and production, from dignity and respect, and from the value of the individual as an end in itself. They prayed for investments that never came, or that would only come at a heavy price, most importantly at the cost of Egyptian self-respect and of the self-respect of the society and the state, inclusive of the army. It seems never to have occurred to them that the army would go against their will and reassert national pride. They could not understand that millions of marginalised people living on the fringes of society, whom the capitalist system regards as unworthy of independence and of anything other than slavery, would seize the chance to overthrow any regime promoting such policies, including the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood regime was the mirror image of the old regime, and it too is now another old regime, because it could not fathom the significance of the aspirations of a marginalised people and it could not understand that people are people, and not just the means to some other end. At some point, the Brotherhood regime must have had some foreboding that imposing its project for the establishment of a Brotherhood-led Islamic caliphate would not be the kind of picnic it had imagined. How can one otherwise explain the armed groups and militias that were being trained for the moment that they would clash with a society that resisted their schemes? How else can one explain the large quantities of weapons now seen in the hands of the supporters of the ousted president, people who are doing their best to terrorise the public in the streets today? But something very important eluded the Brotherhood's leaders, who failed to appreciate that the people were truly a people and the masses were members of a society. There should be no embarrassment at using such vocabulary, now that this has forced its way back into politics by the front door, so to speak. The 30 June demonstrations and those that took place over the following days were grassroots uprisings against conditions that had been breeding mounting discontent and anger over the past two years. These people, Egypt's people, now find it hard to understand why some in the rest of the world are apparently unable to understand that their new revolution is the continuation of the revolution against the former Mubarak regime. The 25 January Revolution was not so much a rebellion against Mubarak as it was an uprising against the conditions generated by the Mubarak regime, conditions that the Morsi regime persisted in perpetuating. The situation was the same in both cases, if not worse in the case of the latter. The causes of the discontent and the need for change were virtually identical, and the army in both cases acted as a facilitator, although in the latter case it acted with greater resolve and firmness, thereby helping to minimise the risks. The gap between what has been happening on the ground in Egypt and what some observers from abroad perceive derives from a kind of cognitive gap with respect to understanding the nature of the relationship between the Egyptian army and the people. Egypt is the only country in the world in which, from the beginning of the Pharaonic era through the age of the Islamic dynasties, the army has been regarded as the cornerstone of the survival and continuity of the state. Since ancient times, a special relationship has developed between the people and its army, not unlike the relationship between the Egyptian people and the Nile. This is an existential relationship. It rests on security and stability and the commitment to the inviolability and protection of the nation's borders. This special relationship between the Egyptian army and the Egyptian people has been particularly evident in the modern era. To better understand the nature of this relationship, it is important to take a closer look at the creed of the Egyptian army and the sentiments of the Egyptian people towards it. The army's long-established traditions, the distribution of its forces over various theatres of operation, and its large formations all tell us that this is not an army that is interested in power for its own benefit. When the army staged what was clearly a military coup d'état against the monarchical regime headed by King Farouk in 1952, the Egyptian people poured out in support of the Free Officers' Movement. As a result, this overthrow became a “people's coup” that has gone down in history and has continued to be commemorated annually as the 23 July Revolution. In 1977 and 1986, the army was brought in at the request of the Egyptian president in order to restore calm to the streets and enforce a curfew following outbreaks of rioting and unrest. The army could have seized control at this time and turned against the ruling regime, but this thought never so much as occurred to any of its commanders. On 28 January 2011, the army was brought in by the then president Hosni Mubarak, and this day, which became known as the “Friday of Fury”, marked a major turning point in the 25 January Revolution. It was then that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) began to realise that the throngs that had amassed in Tahrir Square constituted a people's revolution and that the army had a duty to support the demands of the people. A new legitimacy had arisen, a revolutionary legitimacy, and this overrode the constitutional legitimacy of the Mubarak regime. In recognising this new legitimacy and siding with the people, the army paid its debt to a people that had recognised and supported the army-led revolution in 1952. A similar scenario occurred in the 30 June demonstrations, when some 33 million Egyptian men and women stood their ground in public squares throughout the country in order to demand presidential elections. During the build-up to that day, the threat of violence on the part of Morsi supporters was unmistakable. Such menaces were made explicit in the proclamations of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the emirs of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya and jihadist groups during the conference in support of Syria, but Morsi did nothing to counter their belligerent tenor or to prevent the further polarisation of society. The verbal assaults and threats against anti-Morsi demonstrators were then reiterated with even greater vehemence by the pro-Morsi camp during its ironically called “Rejection of Violence Friday” rally at the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City. As a result, the army had no choice but to act. It issued a statement reassuring the people that it would not allow harm to befall them, and it gave all political factions, including the president and his supporters, time to take the initiative to reach reconciliation in the interest of forestalling a clash between Egyptians and a potential threat to the Egyptian state and national security. When all such efforts reached deadlock and the people were beginning to pour into the country's streets and squares, the army found itself compelled to respond to the call of the people in order to protect them and to realise their will. The world abroad appears to have forgotten the four days of sustained demonstrations by more than 30 million people and to have homed in instead on the movements of the army and its commanders. In the process, it has overlooked the anger and discontent that had been accumulating for months among all segments of society — the judiciary, the intellectuals, artists and cultural workers, the journalists and media professionals, the youth, women, religious minorities and businessmen — along with that of millions of ordinary families who had been burdened by strains due to the government's failures in handling the country's pressing economic, social and security issues. It is the mutual affection and respect between the Egyptian people and the army that gives hope that the army will now refrain from taking centre stage and reentering politics. It is not just that the SCAF's failure to handle the interim period following the 25 January Revolution is still fresh in people's minds. It is also the case that the Egyptian people want to move towards a modern civil and democratic state founded on the rule of law, pluralism and consensual democratic governance, and the respect for human rights and the principle of equal citizenship. It is out of the love and respect we feel for the army that we do not want to see its officers and soldiers dragged into the mire of politics and partisan disputes. This would only enfeeble the army, whereas we want to see the army remain strong, such that it can focus on its natural role, which is to preserve and enhance its combat capacities so that it can safeguard the security of the country and that of its citizens at home and abroad. We long to see the continuation of the creed that defines the relationship between the army and the people, which is that the army is for the people and the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army is with the Egyptian people, as opposed to with the ruling regime, notably in cases when the latter deviates from the democratic path and threatens the welfare and unity of the nation. The Egyptian people have been disappointed and even angered by Western and international reactions that have reflected an inability to understand what drove them to the demonstrations on 30 June. Their message to the world is twofold. You are no more averse to military rule or to the overthrow of the legitimacy of the will of the majority than we are, this message reads. And it continues by saying that you are not our guardians or entitled to control our exercise of free choice, which is precisely what we did on two occasions that were unprecedented in world history. The Egyptian people staged the largest-ever peaceful demonstrations for democratic change on 25 January 2011. On 30 June this year, they broke their own record, and they would do this again if this is what it would take to ensure a real Arab Spring that would realise the aims and aspirations of the 25 January Revolution, restore the rights and dignity of the Egyptian people, and lead Egypt to reassume its natural place as a leader of nations.
