It was 3:00 AM on Wednesday, February 29, 2012, when a man with a long beard, a Salafi member of the newly-elected Egyptian Parliament, walked in a police station to file a criminal complaint. His face was nearly completely bandaged. His report caused that police station to come to full alert. Soon a wide dragnet was in full swing.
A Salafi is supposed to be a Muslim man of God; a strict observant; a traditionalist who claims to live and act as Muslims lived and acted 1400 years ago in Arabia. Salafis are a copy of the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia. To them, Sharia in its most unevolved interpretation should be the law of the land. They were nurtured by the Mubarak regime to counterpoise the Muslim Brotherhood, which ,by comparison to the Salafis, is a moderate Muslim grouping.
The bandaged face of the complainant conveyed to the police the perpetration of a heinous crime. That Salafi, they were convinced by his story, was a victim of an armed robbery. It was a highway robbery between Cairo and Alexandria. The Salafi alleged that five masked assailants had intercepted his car, beat him up with the butts of their guns, messed up his face, robbed him of 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($16,666) then sped away in their black Cherokee Jeep.
Later the Salafi with that bandaged face repeated his story before TV cameras as his distraught wife looked tearfully on. In the meantime, the Police, fanning out in search of the criminal offenders, brought back to their station 30 black Cherokee Jeeps to investigate the whereabouts of their owners at the purported time of the alleged crime against "a man of God," and a "member of Parliament" to boot.
National security and economic resurgence were the priorities of the new Egypt. Thuggery (baltaga) had to be stopped. The bandaged face was to be the face of strict police reaction to the security deficit of which all Egyptians are complaining.
Suddenly people in white coats were presenting themselves to the police investigators, with shocking evidence. A senior physician explained to the police the reason for the bandages on the face of the Salafi complainant. The physician, through hospital uncontroverted records of his specialized establishment, had earlier that day released the Salafi from hospital following surgery for a nose job!! The bandages were those of the "Salma Hospital for Specialised Surgery." They were not there because of a hate crime against the Salafis.
Soon the Salafi block in the Egyptian Parliament scrambled to save face -a face without bandages. Dismissal from Parliament of that liar with a freshly straightened nose job was the only response from national scandal. The 30 black Cherokee Jeeps and their owners were released; parliamentary immunity was lifted in order to clear the way for the Ministry of Interior to press charges for lying to the authorities; and apologies from the Salafi to his party, his movement, his Parliament, and his nation, followed in succession.
The nose job which had cost that liar eight-thousand Egyptian pounds ($1,333) had a greater cost -the credibility of the Salafi movement. That movement was mercilessly ridiculed at the national level. For that movement, with which the Muslim Brotherhood adamantly refused to be allied, had defied the moderateness of Islam as called for by Al-Azhar, the historic seat of Islamic learning in Cairo for more than one-thousand years.
The national program of the Salafis became a rich subject for cartoonists. Calls by the Salafis from their headquarters in Alexandria, for covering ancient Egyptian monuments with wax, for stopping and teaching of English, and for the full niqab (full face cover) became the subjects of ridicule. "Nose-gate" has just entered the vocabulary of post-Mubarak Egypt.
LIAR LIAR, YOUR PANTS (OR NOSE) ON FIRE!!!
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