Revolution has "no name, no religion"

CAIRO - Looking out his office window just a few hundred meters from Tahrir Square's surging crowds, Michael Meunier's voice crackled with emotion as he described the scene following the announcement that Hosni Mubarak had resigned and turned Egypt over to the military.

"It's total jubilation. Everyone's celebrating. Mubarak's gone!" he told The Media Project by phone.

Meunier, a U.S.-educated Egyptian Christian, is spokesman for the National Coalition for Change, a minority-rights-focused opposition group that formed quickly during the protests and gathered together NGOs, minority political parties and syndicates demanding a completely new constitution.

He said the consensus among his colleagues today was that Egypt has been transformed in all aspects.

"More than a moment of independence, this is a moment of revolution - a moment of re-birth," Meunier said.

"The Egyptian people have never launched a successful revolution until today. This is a beautiful moment for Egypt and for the whole Middle East because it is a victory of the people. It's a movement with no name, no leader, no religion."

Meunier's observation about the movement's religion is especially important, since he has been working intensely since 2007 to secure religious equality for Egypt's 14 million Christians, the Middle East's largest Christian minority.

Copts are cautiously optimistic, Meunier said. This turn of events has made them more hopeful about the future than they were even one week ago.

"Christians are just as jubilant as everyone else," he said. "This is a good time for us. We are together declaring our independence from dictatorship and corruption."

Meunier is already turning his attention to the formal political process in his reborn Egypt. He and other Coptic Christians trust the military to oversee the transition and to take minority rights into account because military leaders said from the outset they were on the side of the people. And, Meunier said, that has been proven true.

In the next few days, Meunier expects the military to suspend the current constitution, dissolve Parliament, and return control of the country to the people. He also believes that trials for corrupt officials will begin in short order.

Most importantly, he expects the next steps to bring a new constitution designed to secure a secular state.

"We don't know what the sequence of these changes will be," Meunier said, "but we do know that the military does not see itself as a substitute for the will of the people."

Egypt is now in the hands of the regime's leader, Defense Minister Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. Crowds greeted Tantawi like a liberator as he made his way toward the presidential palace amid an "indescribable sense of euphoria", Al Jazeera reported.

Meunier watched as Tantawi stopped along the route to personally greet and speak with protesters. Despite the outpouring of adoration, Meunier doesn't worry about Tantawi making a power grab.

"After this lesson, no one person would ever want to hoard power in Egypt again," Meunier observed.