CAIRO — By taking the presidential oath on the morning of July 4, Judge Adly Mansour became the second interim president in the history of Egypt after Sofi Abu Taleb, who took over for an eight-day stint after Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Mansour, the 68-year-old head of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional, was ordered to temporarily fill the presidential seat by Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who led a military coup and ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi.

Mansour’s assumption of Egypt’s presidency took place only two days after he was elected head of the constitutional court; his predecessor, Judge Maher el-Behiri, had retired on June 30, the kickoff day of the massive protests that forced the departure of the country’s first freely elected yet finger-wagging, bloodshed-threatening Morsi.

In Egypt, a new president is sworn in in front of the head of the Constitutional Court and the higher judicial committee, but since the court’s chief judge was appointed interim president, Mansour took the presidential oath in front of his higher judicial board as military troops and armored vehicles surrounded the southern Cairo building.

“I was ordered by the Egyptian people to take responsibility; they are the masters and leaders who, on June 30, corrected the path of their honorable revolution that started on January 25, 2011,” said Mansour after taking the oath.