Shadi Hamid writes: When Mohamed Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically elected president last year, it was an especially sweet victory for the Muslim Brotherhood, the region’s oldest and most influential Islamist movement. After a long history of repression, the Brotherhood had finally tasted triumph. But their short-lived rule ended Wednesday when Egypt’s army deposed Mr. Morsi.

The Brotherhood’s fall will have profound implications for the future of political Islam, reverberating across the region in potentially dangerous ways. One of the most important political developments of recent years was the decision of Islamist parties to make peace with democracy and commit to playing by the rules of the political game. Leaders counseled patience to their followers. Their time would come, they were told.

Now supporters of the Brotherhood will ask, with good reason, whether democracy still has anything to offer them. Mr. Morsi’s removal will breathe new life into the ideological claims of radicals. Al Qaeda and its followers have long argued that change can’t come through the democracy of “unbelievers”; violence is the only path. As the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri once said, “What is truly regrettable is the rallying of thousands of duped Muslim youth in voter queues before ballot boxes instead of lining them up to fight in the cause of Allah.”

Al Qaeda’s intellectual forebears emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, and were shaped by events that bear an eerie similarity to those of this week. In 1954, a popularly backed Egyptian Army moved against the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting thousands and dismantling the organization. Prison had a radicalizing effect on Sayyid Qutb, a leading Brotherhood ideologue, who experienced torture at the hands of his captors before being executed in 1966. Many of Mr. Qutb’s followers later left the Brotherhood’s embrace and went their own way, setting up militant organizations that would begin perpetrating acts of terrorism.

In 1954, no one could have guessed that the brutal crackdown against the Brotherhood would set in motion a chain of events that would have terrible consequences for the region and America. [Continue reading…]

Wendell Steavenson writes: The crowds on the street in Egypt over the past days have been overwhelming — they have numbered in the millions. Waving flags and tooting whistles, trumpeting vuvuzelas, drumming and shouting and chanting and honking and singing — Tahrir reached such a noisy level of jubilation that people were joking, “Did Egypt win the World Cup?” Walking among them, dodging fireworks, it felt upside down: a popular protest to oust President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was democratically elected, in which, since Monday, the military has taken the side of the protesters. From one perspective, what is happening in Egypt represents an extraordinary repudiation of political Islam. From another, it is an outright military coup — a repudiation of the process of politics itself. Whatever the air of joyousness, dozens of people have died across the country. The danger did not dissipate with the announcement by the military, on Wednesday night, that Morsi was not President any longer and that the Constitution had been suspended.

The crowd in Tahrir has been varied: families, including women; people with prayer calluses and Afros, some wearing plastic sandals and others Gucci sunglasses; farmers and accountants. But there’s no doubt that there are many from the middle-class “couch party”: people who were more or less O.K. with Mubarak, who tend to trust the Army, and who had not been out to protest before. Police were hoisted onto shoulders. Overhead, military helicopters dropped flags for the cheering masses. On TV — the military had taken control of state media — aerial footage of the immense throngs played on a loop to a soundtrack of martial victory music.

On Monday, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, issued an ultimatum: the two sides, government and opposition, had forty-eight hours to come up with a compromise plan or else the military would step in with its own “roadmap.” The crowds on the street went wild, taking it as a sign that they had already won. But this was also very clearly a coup. (Twitter captured the national sense of humor — only Egyptians could announce a coup forty-eight hours in advance!) As much as the generals say they are honoring the will of the people, they engineered a showdown, and got one. The Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters, if outnumbered, were also gathering in the streets. Among the anti-Morsi crowds that kept coming, to fill practically every square and intersection in the country, people seemed to think that the Army was not like it had been before, that it was not the Army of Hosni Mubarak and military trials. Sisi would not “sit on the chair” — that is, take the throne.

Morsi addressed the nation at 11:30 P.M. on Tuesday. He spoke with passion, sometimes with anger, and he was defiant. He used the word “legitimacy” so many times that it began to sound like a fist thumping on the table. He reiterated that he was democratically elected — and that was that. It was the feloul, he said, the remnants of the old régime and the deep state, who were taking advantage of the protests for their own schemes. He complained that the bad economy — a major complaint against him — was the fault of the previous government. He might have been right about all of that. But he did not directly address the public’s grievances, other than with a brief aside about a possible reconciliation committee or amendments to the Constitution and getting the youth involved. None of that was new: the opposition — itself fractious and divided — has thrown up its hands at these kind of pluralistic assurances. He did not mention the protests. It was as if he was living in a parallel universe, shut in a room where his own arguments bounced off the walls and echoed back to him. [Continue reading…]

Video, apparently showing Morsi’s arrest yesterday — this being the nature of a coup: those in high office get arrested for being in high office and then some bogus ‘crimes’ get discovered. Morsi is now being accused of having ‘insulted’ the judiciary:

Reuters reports: Egyptian judicial authorities opened an investigation on Thursday into accusations that deposed President Mohamed Mursi and 15 other Islamists had insulted the judiciary, investigating judge Tharwat Hammad said, imposing a travel ban on all of them.

It was second formal order banning Mursi from leaving the country since the military removed the Muslim Brotherhood politician from power on Wednesday.

Nathan Brown writes: The final, desperate hours of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president ousted by the military on Wednesday, were in one sense merciful, but also pathetic. After a brief feint that called to mind the image of Salvadore Allende picking up a gun to defend his presidency, Morsi resorted instead to a series of increasingly desperate verbal signals, including ineffectual crises about his own legitimacy and attempts to grasp expired offers of compromise. The result made him seem less like a martyr than a property owner waving his deed at a wrecking-ball operator who has already destroyed his home.

Waving that deed—or, less metaphorically, attempting to fall back on constitutional text and electoral legitimacy—would have much to persuade a neutral observer if any such creature still exists. Yes, it is true that the Brotherhood did well in elections; that it was not able to govern fully but still saddled with responsibility for Egypt’s insurmountable problems; that important state actors never accepted its authority; that its opposition was unified only by a desire to make the Brotherhood fail; and that Egypt’s rumor mill transformed preposterous rumor into established fact with breathtaking speed.

But it is also undeniable that Morsi and the Brotherhood made almost every conceivable mistake—including some (such as reaching too quickly for political power or failing to build coalitions with others) that they had vowed they knew enough to avoid. They alienated potential allies, ignored rising discontent, focused more on consolidating their rule than on using what tools they did have, used rhetoric that was tone deaf at best and threatening at worst. Had they hired a consultant from the Nixon White House, they would have done a more credible job, at least by being efficient.

The Morsi presidency is without a doubt one of the most colossal failures in the Brotherhood’s history. What lesson will the movement learn from it, if any?

In studying Islamist movements over the last decade, I generally found that the most rewarding time to speak to leaders was about a year or so after an election. During the heat of the political battle, they made decisions like most politicians do (on the fly, often overreacting to yesterday’s headlines) and spoke like most politicians do (providing glib spin than reflective analysis). But at calmer moments, they spoke less like politicians and more openly. And there was a reason why: The movements prided themselves (justifiably) on an ability to learn. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The United States declined on Wednesday to criticize Egypt’s military, even as it was ousting Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi from power.

Minutes before Egypt’s army commander announced that Mursi, the country’s first democratically elected president, had been deposed and the constitution suspended, the U.S. State Department criticized Mursi, but gave no public signal it was opposed to the army’s action.

Asked whether the Egyptian army had the legitimacy to remove Mursi from power, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “We’re not taking sides in this.”

The muted U.S. response – at least thus far – to the dramatic events in Cairo suggested that Washington may be willing to accept the military’s move as a way of ending a political crisis that has paralyzed Egypt, a long-time U.S. ally.

Still, the distant attitude toward Mursi, who has come under U.S. criticism in recent days, could open up President Barack Obama to complaints he has not supported democracy in the Arab world.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House or the State Department to the military’s announcement that it was installing a technocratic government to eventually be followed by new elections.

Those at Tahrir Square got what they wanted, but do they want what they will get? Only time will tell

— Mtoto Mzuri (@Mme_Adeola) July 3, 2013

The New York Times reports: A top adviser to President Mohamed Morsi issued an open letter Wednesday afternoon lamenting what he called the imminent takeover of Egypt’s first freely elected government.

“As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last lines I get to post on this page,” the adviser, Essam el-Haddad, wrote on his Facebook page. “For the sake of Egypt and for historical accuracy, let’s call what is happening by its real name: Military coup.”

Mr. Haddad and his family went to the streets two years ago to help oust former President Hosni Mubarak, he wrote. “We stood, and we still stand, for a very simple idea: given freedom, we Egyptians can build institutions that allow us to promote and choose among all the different visions for the country. We quickly discovered that almost none of the other actors were willing to extend that idea to include us,” he wrote, charging that the opposition and bureaucracy had refused to collaborate with elected leaders from the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Today only one thing matters,” he wrote. “In this day and age no military coup can succeed in the face of sizable popular force without considerable bloodshed. Who among you is ready to shoulder that blame?”

And he warned with new force that the president’s Islamist supporters would not go quietly. “Hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in support of democracy and the Presidency,” he wrote. “And they will not leave in the face of this attack. To move them, there will have to be violence. It will either come from the army, the police, or the hired mercenaries. Either way there will be considerable bloodshed.” [Continue reading…]

Magdi Abdelhadi writes: There was no way this could end well. Mohamed Morsi and his supporters thought God was on their side, and their opponents concluded that they were up against religious fascists who would turn Egypt into another Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The hyperbole reflects an intensely polarised society and highly charged political atmosphere, where the voice of reason and moderation has been drowned out by the clamour for jihad on one side and for the military to rescue the country on the other.

Morsi clearly thought his speech last night (most probably his last) would be perceived as a heroic stand for democracy. Instead, it was seen by the people he most needed to persuade of his sincerity as a coded message to his most militant followers to unleash war on their fellow Egyptians, viewed as “enemies of the true faith”.

Reactions on social media were almost instantaneous as he delivered his speech on state television, word by word and gesture by gesture. Many were angry that the army had not prevented this man from delivering a speech that in their eyes amounted to incitement to violence. His readiness to die in defence of legitimacy (a word he uttered nearly 200 times) was interpreted as the code word for action by Muslim Brotherhood activists against their political enemies. Instead, it was his supporters near Cairo university who came under attack, and 16 were killed overnight. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Egypt’s armed forces would suspend the constitution and dissolve an Islamist-dominated parliament under a draft political roadmap to be pursued if Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and his opponents fail to reach a power-sharing agreement by Wednesday, military sources said.

The sources told Reuters the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was still discussing details of the plan, intended to resolve a political crisis that has brought millions of protesters into the streets. The roadmap could be changed based on political developments and consultations.

Chief-of-staff General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called in a statement on Monday for Mursi to agree within 48 hours on power-sharing with other political forces, saying the military would otherwise set out its own roadmap for the country’s future.

MENA reports: Diplomats and their families are leaving Cairo as the grace period the army gave to political powers to resolve the current impasse draws to a close, state-run news agency MENA reports.

Flights to and from Cairo have also decreased.

Diplomatic staff left the country on civilian flights or private jets dispatched by their home countries, while security intensified in departure and arrival halls.

Over 200 American families from the embassy’s staff left Cairo on more than 15 flights.

Among them, the husband of the US ambassador, the wife of the Turkish ambassador and his two sons, and 22 of the embassy’s staff who headed to Istanbul.