For a plethora of reasons, the root causes that led to June's revolution should be thoroughly considered. The 30 June Revolution was not only a political revolution aiming to change the state institutions, and it was not a typical social revolution mainly involving an autonomous lower-class revolt, as described by the US social scientist Theda Skocpol. It was not a revolution from above, as it was started and propagated through networking within broader non-elite circles. The major thrust of the revolution remained within the masses, with invariably limited input from the conventional political forces and actors. The June Revolution combined many features characteristic of multiple types of revolution, and it is of high importance to understand its main causes, an endeavour that has multiple implications. First, the identification of such reasons places June's events within the broader context of the 25 January Revolution, along with its ebbs and flows, its actors and detractors, and its impediments, whether internal or external. One thing that was unique about the June Revolution was that it was remarkable for the masses to undertake two successive, as well as successful, popular moves in less than three years, each ending with the toppling of the respective ruling regime. It is important to compare the number of participants in both events, in order to show that in June 2013 the vast majority of Egyptians came out onto the streets in a rare form of direct democracy aiming at toppling the Muslim Brotherhood regime. However, it would be historically wrong as well as politically expensive to delink the two revolutions, paving the way to the evolution of deep splits within the revolutionary body, the major actor of change in both revolutions. There should not be a discontinuation between the two events, save for the exclusion of the respective enemies of the people. On the other hand, it is not uncommon to see multiple waves within the same revolution: the course of any revolution is a function of its leadership, ideology, visionary changes in the internal front, reactions in the international context, and so on. The stages of any given revolution have been postulated by historians like the US academic Crane Brinton in his Anatomy of Revolution, for example. Some commentators have endorsed the description of the 30 June Revolution as a second or third phase of the 25 January Revolution. The terms “wave” or “phase” are to some extent inadequate to describe the June Revolution, however, given its political repercussions on the domestic, regional and global levels. Nevertheless, whether a phase or wave in a larger process, the fact remains that the June Revolution was the climatic scene of the 25 January Revolution, with perhaps the same key actors — the masses, political vanguard and army — playing the same respective roles. A different target as well as a different revolutionary mobilisation process existed in the 30 June Revolution, however, than in the earlier revolution, and as a result different power dynamics were prevalent. The 30 June Revolution was preceded by many popular moves, of which the December uprising against the constitutional declaration of ousted former president Mohamed Morsi was the most important. It can be said that the start of the June Revolution should be traced to the failure of the December uprising to achieve its objectives in the cancellation of the unilaterally promulgated constitutional declaration and of ensuring real popular participation in the process of drafting the new constitution. These popular aspirations were dashed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which made every effort to ensure majority approval of its own draft constitution. However, the December uprising demonstrably reflected the precariousness of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, exposing the eroded pillars of its popular acceptance. The regime's brutal suppression of the uprising exemplified beyond any doubt its failure to contain the rising grievances of the masses, while highlighting one of its gravest sins: the reliance on its own cadres to violently subdue peaceful opponents. No less serious was the regime's moral coercion of the uprising when the Brotherhood arrogantly resorted to continuing its drastic moves. However, on the other hand the December uprising also illustrated the inadequacies of the traditional opposition leadership and its lack of preparedness to lead the angry masses. The uprising thus demonstrated the need for a new forum that could express the masses' legitimate demands. It was the failure of the December uprising that paved the way to the emergence of the Tamarod (rebel) Movement in starting the revolutionary mobilisation process. Similarly, the masses identified the need for the army to condone their demands and to act as a protective shield against Brotherhood violence. Calls for the army to intervene were on the rise. The latter's role was pivotal to the enforcement of the nation's will in toppling the Brotherhood regime in nearly the very same way that it had endorsed the 25 January Revolution against the regime of ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. Secondly, the identification of such causes would help to illustrate the nature of the June Revolution as a fully-fledged revolutionary act that pre-emptively ousted the Brotherhood regime. This can be illustrated by examining, in addition to the root causes, the major actors and their motives. Here it is important to mention that US academic Jack Goldstone's description of June's popular move as a counter-revolution lacks substantiation in as much as the major actors in the 25 January Revolution were also the main forces in the June Revolution. Apart from changes in the composition of the vanguard and army leadership, one did not see any new actors. The Tamarod Movement as the vanguard of the June Revolution substituted itself for the highly divided, as well as shaky, coalition of the January revolutionaries. The latter had been lost in the transition, while the events of the post-January Revolution had obviously gone beyond many of them. Indeed, the Tamarod movement represented the second line of truly committed revolutionaries, those who were not ruined by the jubilation of the January revolutionaries in the aftermath of their success. The movement was not a group of activists mobilising people through social media, as happened with the January Revolution. Instead, it was essentially formed of grassroots revolutionaries who directly mobilised the masses through direct communication at nearly all levels in the various parts of Egypt. The result was a broader appeal to the masses, and this could be easily seen in the June Revolution and on 26 July, despite the fact that the Islamists were not participants among the masses. It was striking how over-represented societal subsets like Copts and women were within the revolutionary masses, though this over-representation also reflected growing anxieties among such subsets because of their historical reluctance to participate in elections, let alone take part in popular revolutions. The army was invited by the vast majority to intervene in the political scene, and there is no evidence of predetermined efforts by the army to topple Morsi. A new generation had replaced an older one, and this was the only change that had taken place within the army since the 25 January Revolution. This generation, led by a charismatic leader of its own, was raised within the culture embedded in the Egyptian armed forces of not meddling in politics. Yet, what alarmed this new military leadership, particularly General Abdel-Fattal Al-Sisi with his intelligence background, was that the Sinai was becoming a direct threat to Egypt's national security. According to commentator Sahar Aziz, the army interpreted Morsi's soft approach to Sinai security as evidence of his conflicted loyalties between his sympathies with the extremist Islamist groups and his obligations as president to preserve security in Sinai. “Morsi's soft approach to security in the Sinai alienated the Egyptian military and provided another reason for them to support the opposition,” Aziz writes. With almost the same actors and respective roles, the June Revolution cannot be shallowly described as a prearranged conspiracy of aspiring politicians or military officers who seized power and installed a new ruling elite, whether military or civilian or a hybrid of both types. Third, attempts have been made to identify the long list of reasons behind the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is important to differentiate between the reasons behind the Brotherhood's fall and the reasons that made Egyptians revolt against the Brotherhood regime. Such a differentiation has implications for the whole Egyptian political landscape with all its actors. It may also help clarify answers to the question raised by some commentators about the nature of the revolution on 30 June. The 30 June Revolution was not just about regime change. It was about much more than simply ousting a decaying political regime. For the angry masses, the Revolution was also about ending Islamist rule as a viable political option. The latter's previous dominance, if not monopoly, of the political scene had appeared to be discontinuous with Egypt's history, even if the masses had earlier invalidated many of the other political forces and actors that had ruined the transition period and had paved the way for the Islamists to emerge relatively unchallenged in the presidential and parliamentary elections. Within the same context, the masses willingly and deliberately reinstated the army as the most trustworthy force or actor on the political scene. These two arrays of reasons may look interrelated, though they are not identical. On the one hand, there were numerous reasons that made inevitable the Muslim Brotherhood's fall. These were intrinsically related to the organisation's built-in or genetic mix of outdated leadership, policies, ideology, discourse and behaviour. This mix of intrinsic or self-perpetuating factors made the Brotherhood's first, and possibly last, experience of rule in Egypt predestined to fail. Put differently, these inherent factors were characteristics of the organisation and were detrimental to its performance, if not its existence, as a viable political option. It would be no surprise were the Brotherhood to run the risk of failing again, were it to be in future once again integrated into the political process, given its currently outdated paradigms. In fact, the Brotherhood has demonstrably failed nearly everywhere and at almost every period it has acted, whether in power or in opposition. As a result, the group has contradicted the wishful thinking of scenarios laid out by some western researchers regarding the “moderating effects” of political participation on the Islamist movements' strategies, behaviour and organisation. Such effects are a myth, as has been shown by the terrorist acts committed by the Brotherhood and its affiliates in the aftermath of the June Revolution. The ongoing scenes of terror historically favoured by the group have pointed to the failure of many such analysts and commentators to grasp the complex realities of the Egyptian political scene. More seriously, this obvious failure has also misled many western decision-makers, who have evidently lost track in their reactions to the June Revolution. In 2011 Goldstone, commenting on the Arab Spring, wrote that “for a revolution to succeed, a number of factors have to come together. The government must appear so irremediably unjust or inept that it is widely viewed as a threat to the country's future; the elites (especially in the military) must be alienated from the state and no longer willing to defend it; a broad-based section of the population, spanning ethnic and religious groups and socioeconomic classes, must mobilise; and international powers must either refuse to step in to defend the government or constrain it from using maximum force to defend itself.” It is no exaggeration to say that many such factors were present on the political scene before the June Revolution, impacting on the legitimacy of the ousted Muslim Brotherhood regime. Indeed, such factors drove the Egyptians to undertake their successful revolution in June. US commentator Walter Russell Mead, while erroneously describing the June Revolution as a “bloody coup,” stated that “Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.” The same could be said about the alienation of nearly all the state institutions, including the deserted presidential institution that was abandoned by Morsi's own appointees. Yet, there has still been a desire in the international context to deny the right of the Egyptian people to rectify the path of the 25 January Revolution. Goldstone ran up against his own criteria by describing the June Revolution as a counter-revolution, for example. Egyptians revolted against the Muslim Brotherhood in as much as they concluded that the group had become a real danger to Egypt and that its continuation in power would jeopardise their future and their state and society. People revolted to put an end to the Brotherhood's ceaseless endeavours to consecrate its own regime, hoping that this would dominate the Egyptian state and society. Building its own political regime has been the Brotherhood's objective since it came to the forefront after the 25 January Revolution. This was the basic and straightforward reason for the revolt. The 30 June Revolution did not come about in a hasty manner, since Egyptians took the time to identify the failing regime as dangerously incompatible with their own identity, culture and future. The group's unilateral rule of Egypt led to a lack of trust among the masses, which utterly rejected it. Indeed, the historical concerns of many Egyptians regarding the Muslim Brotherhood, its history, ideology and political behaviour, were only verified by the group's short tenure in power in either the legislative or the executive branches of government. In sum, the practices and policies of the group have been self-demonising, if not self-destructive. Such a growing perception changed over the months to a deeply entrenched hostile attitude towards the Morsi regime and its backbone of the Brotherhood. What might be considered as the common denominator of this popular rejection was the growing perception that the Brotherhood was incompatible with the Egyptian state and society. One way of illustrating this perception would be to quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet — “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” In effect, the Brotherhood's dismal record in office and its recent acts have only gone to prove that this was indeed the case.
