Was it a military coup or a popular uprising? The serious efforts that Egypt’s new leaders, both military and political, are investing in the question of how the overthrow of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi should be defined brought me back to the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s famous work, Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, which he published in 1955. Egypt has followed along the path set for it by the Free Officers over half a century ago, in 1952, when they planned and launched their coup. Here and there a side road or a detour was paved to help cope with the changes brought by time, but the ideological infrastructure of that path remains the same: The army stands above everything else.

Army officers who kept their senior positions after the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are now the most significant power in Egypt. In every modern state, the army is subject to the authority of the civilian leadership. Egypt, however, continues to follow the path first paved by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the presidents who succeeded him, the late President Anwar Sadat and Mubarak. They rose from the army and followed the same path. In the land of the Nile, the officers’ caste wields the ultimate power. They have the supreme authority to determine what is good and what is bad. They decide what the right path is to ensure Egypt’s military and political future.

Three years after the revolution, Nasser wrote a book containing his ideas about it. These insights could undoubtedly have been written today. “Were we in the army not obliged to do what we did on July 23, 1952? … The revolution of July 23 effectively fulfilled a great aspiration that throbbed in the heart of the Egyptian nation ever since it began, in the modern era, to be its own master and determine its own destiny.” The explanation given for the officers’ coup then was exactly the same as the explanation being given today: It fulfilled the will of the people. The fact that there were no demonstrations in Tahrir Square or outside the palace of the deposed King Farouk did not cause Nasser to express misgivings about his version of events or about the legitimacy of the path he chose.

“Why was the army successful in accomplishing this revolution?” he asks, and goes on to expand on the question. “The military mindset on which I was raised assigns just one responsibility to the army: to die along the borders of the homeland. If so, then why was our army compelled to act within the capital, instead of on the borders? … In the past, we were the ‘terror and the scourge’ with which the despotic ruler intruded upon the equanimity of the people. Now the time has come to turn that scourge against the despot and intrude upon his sense of equanimity. … We felt with every fiber of our being that this task was our burden to bear, and that if we did not fulfill it, it would be as if we turned down a sacred task that Providence itself has imposed upon us.”