Egyptian religious scholars have disagreed on the way they reacted to the military coup that toppled Egypt’s first democratically elected president on the 3rd of July, 2013. Whereas some of them – such as Shaykh Ahmad al-Tayyib, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar Mosque, and Shaykh ʿAli Jumuʿa, Egypt’s former Mufti – openly supported the coup, others – such as the Egyptian, Qatar-based Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and Shaykh Hasan al-Shafiʿi, who was advisor to al-Tayyib himself until the time of the coup – openly condemned it. The justification that these scholars put forward for their respective positions ranged from presenting the coup as “the lesser of two evils” – in the words of al-Tayyib – to lengthy rebuttals of the claims that President Muhammad Morsi had lost his legitimacy to rule, as al-Qaradawi and al-Shafiʿi did. Depending on public statements that these religious scholars made during and in the immediate aftermath of the coup, this paper will examine their arguments in view of the circumstances in Egypt in the few weeks prior to the coup. Its main argument is that the differing positions of these scholars do not necessarily mean that we cannot speak of one Sunni understanding of political legitimacy. However, this understanding, which had to accommodate many contradictions in the past, is both broad and flexible enough to allow even contradictory positions – which could be politically motivated – to appeal to it. In this theory, therefore, scholars are always able to make their own judgment on the basis of what they regard as the “greater evil” in each case, which judgment obviously depends on their perception of the circumstances of each case. The paper will thus discuss how the arguments that some Egyptian scholars made reflect their perception of what was happening on the ground at the time of the coup, which perception was crucial for the weighing the evil of deposing an elected president against the evil of his remaining in power. It also discusses how they sought to justify their positions on “religious” grounds, either by citing textual sources or employing, explicitly or implicitly, some Sunni doctrines on political legitimacy. For this last point, it will discuss how medieval Sunni scholars dealt with two incidents from early Islamic history: the murder of the caliph ʿUthman, and the (anti-)caliphate of ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Zubayr.