CAIRO, July 4 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian army has taken the country to a new beginning by forcing the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood (MB) group, yet the group still has a chance to survive, analysts say.
On Wednesday evening, the Egyptian military ousted Islamist-oriented Morsi, after giving him a 48-hour deadline to resolve a growing political division that split the nation in half, and assigned Adly Mansour, chief of the Supreme Constitutional Court, to temporarily run the country until a new president is elected.
In its roadmap for a transitional period, the army also announced suspension of the current controversial constitution and ordered preparations for the upcoming presidential election.
"Egypt is now starting a new stage of confidence and reconstruction that will be achieved through drafting a new constitution and forming a new parliament," said Gamal Salama, head of political science department at Suez University.
Although Salama did not expect a presidential election within one year, he expressed optimism about the future of post-Morsi Egypt.
A couple of days before ousting Morsi, Defense Minister Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said in a statement that the military would not be part of politics or rule, reassuring Egyptians and the country's national and political forces that it would not return to politics again. ' The military ran the country for about 17 months following the uprising that toppled ex-president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.
"The army knows well its national role and it would not get itself involved again in ruling the country," Salama said, stressing that the military learned from the previous mistake when it was criticized for violating democracy and freedom during its temporary rule.
Morsi's ouster was faster but more difficult than that of Mubarak, as millions of people who took to the streets to topple him and the MB were faced by massive pro-Morsi Islamist protests, but Mubarak did not have such considerable support before he resigned.
Nevertheless, Salama believes that the MB is able to survive the crisis and rejoin political and social life "but with its normal size."
"If the MB incites their followers to violently protest Morsi's removal, they would be completely erased from the future political life," the professor said, urging the group to realize that they were ousted by the people's rejection, not by the army.
In the view of Mohamed al-Saeed Edrees, a political expert at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, the ouster of "the Brotherhood's president" returns Egypt back to normal.
Edrees said the Brotherhood has a supreme leader who is believed to be "president of the president," referring to Morsi's loyalty to the group's leader as "a catastrophe."
"The Brotherhood is still like any Egyptian faction or group that should not be isolated from the society and the political life," he said, arguing that only those who wronged the country should be tried while the rest should be treated as equal fellow citizens.
He added that the group still has a chance to overcome the crisis by legalizing its presence in Egypt, either as a political party through its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party, or as a charitable Islamic organization that has nothing to do with politics.
Edrees said the major mistake of the group, which led to Morsi's downfall, was that it attempted to monopolize authority and impose control over the country's parliament and key institutions, disregarding the outcry of opposition and even the average people in the streets.
"The deep mistake is that the group imagined it owned Egypt," he said, "so they started to use Egypt to serve the interests of the group, not use the group to serve the interests of Egypt."
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