AP Photo

Across Cairo, in the upscale suburb of Heliopolis, thousands of demonstrators had surged past a military barricade and up to the walls of the presidential palace. Abdel Hamid and his colleagues believed that the country’s opposition planned to storm the palace and overthrow Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s Islamist president. If that happened, Abdel Hamid says, Islamists were prepared to take the country back by force. They’d stop playing by the rules of Egypt’s democratic experiment and impose their vision of religious rule.