Much of Egypt is celebrating Mohamed Morsi’s ouster as president, as well as the dissolution of his Muslim Brotherhood cabinet on June 3. Yet protests that began on June 30 could have predicted the demise of the Brotherhood, as doubts about their loyalty to the 2011 revolution had been questioned long before their rise to power.

Much of Egypt is celebrating Mohamed Morsi’s ouster as president, as well as the dissolution of his Muslim Brotherhood cabinet on June 3. Yet protests that began on June 30 could have predicted the demise of the Brotherhood, as doubts about their loyalty to the 2011 revolution had been questioned long before their rise to power.

Correspondents accompanied the first day’s demonstrations in Ismailia on June 30, where there was a mixture of opposition revolutionaries and remnants of the Mubarak regime who were disregarding the cry by Mohamed Beltajy, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who desperately told demonstrators: “Wash your hands of the counterrevolution!”

But Waleed el Sudani, member of the media secretariat of the former Nationalist Party (Mubarak’s party) in Ismailia, who was at the crowded demonstration that began in front of the Municipal House, claimed that the Brotherhood had been the real counterrevolutionaries, dating as far back at the British occupation.  He claimed that the term feloul (meaning agents of the former Mubarak regime) was a term created by the Brotherhood to discredit their opponents.

Too young for corruption

“How can you put the word revolution youth together with members of Kifaya—2004 grassroots political movement— and members of the former ruling party?” El Sudani wondered, calling the Brotherhood’s use of the term feloul a historical paradox, as it was first used in the 1940s to describe the Muslim Brothers as agents of the British occupation authority against the popular will, represented by the Al Wafd Party—one of Egypt’s oldest liberal parties.    

El Sudani took part in all activities protesting the Muslim Brothers since Morsi’s contested constitutional declaration in August 2012, in which Morsi granted himself unlimited powers with no judicial oversight.

Sudani insisted that he and his 1970s and 1980s generation have been the least politically corrupt as they were not allowed by the party’s leaders to assume any leading positions before turning forty years old.

Everyone’s right to demonstrate

Participation in the 30 June demonstration, however, was not limited to the former regime’s youth. In the same demonstration, Correspondents met a well-known leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Tamer el Jundi, the general coordinator of the International Council in Al Mamar Square. “Can anyone deny the role of some honest leaders of the Nationalist Party in service of the people of Ismailia without any personal gains?”

Former international football judge Hussein Ali Musa, a leader of the former ruling party, claimed to make no gains from his political activity, contrary to some party leaders who had taken advantage of their positions to get land and money, he said, adding that many members of the former ruling party had taken part in the revolution, rejecting the corrupted conditions of the Nationalist Party.

El Jundi said he would never forget that the Muslim Brothers relied on feloul in the Shura Council, who had joined President Morsi on his plane in his visits abroad. “How was this action permissible for the Muslim Brothers, while it was impermissible for honest people of the former regime to work with the revolutionaries against the Muslim Brothers’ oppression to all?” he asked.

 “What’s in the heart remains in the heart,” said Sameh Farouq, secretary of the Third Quarter in the Party of Constitution in Ismailia, after seeing some members of the Nationalist Party in June 30 demonstrations. He hasn’t forgotten their involvement in corruption, but he also didn’t deny them the right to participate in a withdrawal of confidence from Morsi.         

The concept of feloul, explains Farouq, changed more than once after the revolution, especially since the Muslim Brothers themselves had argued against the political exclusion law against feloul, indicating that the word would be used against any party that lost power.