The attack by terrorists on February 16, 2014 on a tour bus in Taba, Sinai, killing three and wounding 17 South Koreans is a mirror incident. Tragic as it is, it sums up the contours of Egypt's war on terror in the post-Morsi period.
Is that war winnable, and why?
It definitely is winnable, and here is why: Since 1952, Egypt, under military rule until the Revolutions of January 25, 2011, and June 30, 2013, has become a highly security State. Calling it a security State is not to praise it, but to describe it. The security apparatus, during the Arab Spring in Egypt, was not dismantled. It simply became invisible.
When the Muslim Brotherhood became ascendant, its one-year in power was denied the cooperation of that deeply rooted apparatus. The security forces (police, intelligence, special forces, and the army) saw in the Morsi regime the face of an old adversary wearing a transparent Islamist veil.
So when that regime denied the secularists their fair share of the power pie, both the army and the police knew exactly where to go to kick the Brotherhood out from the presidential palace. They appealed to the masses, and the response to that appeal on June 30, 2013 was massive. Egypt was not going to be a turbaned theocracy.
As the old security apparatus once again finds its footing in the Egypt of interim President Adly Mansour, it is coming back to the front lines of the battle for a historic and secular Egypt.
Let us have a quick look into the nature of Egypt as a State. Dr. Gamal Hamdan has published a 4-volume book in Arabic entitled The Personality of Egypt. In the last volume, he points out the Egyptians inner pride in what the author describes as "the genius of location" in these words: "Since long time ago, Egypt has given the Arabs their first city of one million inhabitants." (p.664).
Pride in demography as well as in location and history, has caused the national flag in Tahrir to be raised on January 25, 2011, with the inscription "I love Egypt." No Islamist flags, with their two raised swords, and definitely no black flags of Al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates like Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (Friends of Jerusalem) were to be seen at that time.
Now Ansar has been claiming responsibility for its terror in Sinai. Aside from the daily mopping up by the army and the police of these groups, Egypt, in a bold challenge to terrorism, is putting Morsi and 35 other Brotherhood leaders on trial. The charges of espionage and conspiracy with foreign powers (i.e. Hamas, Qatar, etc.) carry the death penalty.
On the media front, foreign journalists saw in the Taba attacks on the South Korean tourists "worrying new evidence that militants...were broadening their campaign against civilians." In a worthy rebuttal, Counsellor Adly Mansour, Egypt's President, called it "a despicable act of cowardice directed at innocent tourists." The South Korean were in Sinai visiting the Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine.
In its own way, the terrorist attack on tourism in Egypt, an industry which provides millions of jobs and a big chunk of badly-needed foreign currency, has sharpened the lines of battle on terrorism in Egypt. In a meaningful lament, Egypt's Tourism Minister, Hisham Zaazou, said, "I am very sorry this happened."
Gone by the wind any residual sympathy in Egypt for Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood; so has any limits on the use of power within national territory against terrorist acts; so has the humanitarian practice of easy admission into Egypt of refugees from whatever Arab origin.
So has any softening of security measures against dissent; so has any receptive ears for various human rights groups a strict application of the standards of civil society during civil strife. The outlook in Cairo today is that the country is at war with an elusive enemy which national security requires its pursuit to the bitter end.
Consequently, Egyptian chauvinism is definitely on the rise; the diversity of Egyptian public opinion on the eve of presidential elections is behind ever-tougher measures against any hint of sympathy for terroristic Islamism; a land slide for Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi as the next president of Egypt is now a near certainty.
The old call by former President Nasser that "security trumps development" is once again in vogue. Egypt's Prime Minister Al-Biblawi called on all tourists "to evacuate Sinai;" His Minister of Tourism, on his way to visit the injured South Korean passengers in Sinai declared: "This will not recur." The Egyptian security empire is getting ready to strike back in full force!!
David Cole, in an article in the New York Review of Books dated November 7, 2013, asked the perennial question: "The End of the War on Terror?" He answered his own question by saying, "Some have suggested that this is a permanent state of affairs, and we might as well get used to it!!"
I wager that Egypt's response shall be quite different. For it is not fighting terror beyond its frontiers. Its forces are not over-extended. Egypt has boots on the ground, an inflamed public opinion, thousands of agents who can blend, alliances within Sinai bedouin structures, and a determination to see its internal war on terror winnable.
In his speech on the subject of fighting terrorism at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013, President Obama quoted President James Madison's warning to the newly created United States of America: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Well, in today's Egypt, this may be read in a different arrangement: "Continual warfare (against terrorism) might by the price of preserving Egypt's freedom."
No compromise is attainable with the agents of death and destruction.
That is especially so with Ansar (The Friends of Jerusalem), an affiliate of Al-Qaeda in Sinai, which is fighting the wrong war, with the wrong tools, for the wrong cause, in the wrong place, with a contrived adversary, with a predictable result -publicized conflict for fundraising with no hope for an Ansar victory.
It is time for Egypt to try to puncture this balloon of vaunted anti-Islamic myth which goes falsely by the name of "jihad." Theirs is a nihilistic ideology which reached the zenith of idiocy when it glorified Osama Bin Laden, a world class faithless fanatic, by calling him "Sheikh Bin Laden," "a martyr," and a source of religious Islamic opinions called "Fatwas."
There is nothing on record that indicates that Bin Laden had ever sat for a class on Sharia or Islamic jurisprudence. His issuance of Fatwas was nothing more and nothing less than a means for the usurpation of power. And his ideological descendants, whether in Sinai or elsewhere, do not possess the capacity to comprehend that ultimately they are doomed, because terrorism is a dead-end street.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Friday, February 14, 2014
On CNN, Fareed Zakaria Keeps on Claiming that "Egypt is a Mess"!! As Compared to What?
So I ask him in this posting: "A mess as compared to what?"
If Zakaria employs that term as applicable to Egypt because of the rising level of terrorism in the country, it has been common wisdom since Lockerbie of 1981 that terrorism cannot be ended, but can be contained. Let us now look at the new phenomenon of so-called "jihadism" on the Egyptian front.
Is there anything new in that alarmist reporting about so called jihadists returning to Egypt to fight for the restoration of the Morsi regime? None whatsoever!! A researcher at the New America Foundation opines from the comfort of his office in Washington, D.C. that "Egypt is again an open front for jihad!!" On the basis of that faulty premise, the New York Times on February 6, 2014, goes on to describe Egypt as "the birthplace of political Islam," and as such "has sent fighters to battle zones from Kandahar to the Caucasus for decades."
The facts are: the Muslim Brotherhood, from 1928 to 1954, had no record of mass violence. Calling Egypt, where the Brotherhood was founded, "the birthplace of political Islam," is sheer ignorance. And sending fighters to battle zones, as if terrorism is stamped with a "made in Egypt" label, has no demonstrable evidence. Above all, there is no terror ideology that has its roots in any faith, Islam included.
An entire dictionary of terms defining terrorism has grown like poison ivy on the walls of Islam. It has become the source for faulty labels, including the term "jihadism." In Islamic law (Sharia), there is no aggressive war, only defensive war, and there is no principle which calls for killing the innocent. The only explanation which I find admissible in the media jargon about the so-called "political Islam," "jihadism," and "Islamic terrorism" is the thread of Islamophobia. Terrorism has no religion.
It is interesting to note that U.S. media, including Zakaria's CNN weekly program, has scoured the entire map of the Muslim World to select "a birthplace" for terrorism. Their faulty GPS pointed first to Tehran, then to Riyadh, then to Islamabad, then to north-east Afghanistan. Each one of these locations had its place in the hot sun of adverse publicity. The fact of the matter is that terrorism travels, and its spread from southeast Asia to the Caucasus, and from Kandahar to Timbuktu is an aspect of its morphing into a franchise. And Islam, as a cover, is readily available. Why? Because any Muslim can claim the right to render a fatwa (a non-enforceable legal opinion), under the guise of ijtihad.
As the pendulum of approbation/disapprobation swings now in media thinking, and is now disfavoring post-Mubarak/post-Morsi Egypt, the history of U.S./Egyptian relationship has kept up with its gyrations. During the dictatorial Mubarak regime, Egypt was one of "the black holes" to which America's "enforced rendition" of suspected terrorists for the purpose of torture was a common practice. When the dictatorship of Mubarak was ended by the millions in Tahrir, and was followed by electing Morsi as President, one of the primary supporters of his Brotherhoodization of Egypt was Ann Patterson, former U.S. Ambassador to Cairo. That support remained undiminished even after the Egyptians by the millions, protected by the military, caused Morsi's ouster.
It was therefore not surprising to hear Michael McFaul, the present U.S. Ambassador to Moscow who is leaving his post to academia at Stanford define Russia's attitude toward the U.S. On Zakaria's CNN program he stated: "Most Russians believe that the U.S. is fomenting regime change around the world." It was a shrewd move by Putin to send "good luck" greetings early this week to Field Marshal El-Sisi.
Within a few days of that revealing statement by McFaul came another revelation to confirm that notion. It was in a taped conversation between a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and the American Ambassador to the Ukraine. That exchange, which included an expletive against the European Union by that senior lady diplomat, evidenced Washington's activism in the internal affairs of the Ukraine, the birthplace of pre-communist Russian nationalism.
All of the above makes the present reading of the works of the late Robert A. Dahl a must. Dahl defined American politics and power in a very refreshing and authentic way. He said: "Instead of single center of sovereign power, there must be multiple centers of power, none of which is or can be wholly sovereign."
Mr. Fareed Zakaria: If Egypt, in your oscillating judgements is now "a mess," then how would you impartially describe the inability of President Obama to get his important reformist agenda legislated except by resorting to bypassing Congress through executive orders as per his constitutional right? Until today, one-hundred sixty-eight executive orders have been issued by President Obama to get the U.S. moving ahead in spite of the insane politics of the Tea Party, Senator Ted Cruz, and the political hordes of the American political right.
Fareed: You have a pulpit, CNN, which is huge by comparison to mine, this weekly blog. You get paid for using CNN as a medium; I don't get paid for writing this blog. Your is for what goes for public information; mine is for public education. In spite of these differences, there should be similarities -sticking to credible facts, and making judicious conclusions based on them. Though we share in being both U.S. naturalized citizens, we do not share in many outlooks, especially when it comes to the role of the military in national crises.
For example, I see no stigma attached to Egypt's difficult transition to democracy, even if El-Sisi, through the coming presidential elections, becomes the third Egyptian president in the post-Mubarak era, succeeding Morsi, then Mansour. From your recent interview with Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi of Egypt at Davos, your questions were laced with negativity about this prospect.
Personally, I look upon it this way: There is a qualitative difference between a military man becoming, through democratic means, the ruler of Egypt, and an America which practices democracy at home, but uses military rule off shore -Guantanamo!!
This, to me as a law professor, is a form of political/military laundering using the tactics of money laundering in the Caribbean. The same American tactic has been perfected in "forced rendition" to other countries, in the prisons in Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and in Pagram (Afghanistan).
Then that tactic was elevated to a new science: shifting parts of the U.S. military power abroad to private security companies, like the infamous Black Water of Erik Prinz. Black Water was even given diplomatic immunity by the U.S. State Department as if it was a sovereign entity.
So when Black Water killed 17 innocent civilians in Iraq in 2007 in Al-Nesoor Square, Baghdad, immunity sheltered it from prosecution. When later I visited the scene of that war crime in Baghdad, I knew that I was standing on the ground of a real American mess!!
So, Fareed (your name in Arabic is translated into "unique"): The mess exists only through your process of subjective selection!! Unfortunately, this has become your unique fare which on your weekly CNN program, you preface it by : "I have today for you a great show!!"
- To Tunisia, where the Islamic party "Al-Nahda" gave up power to enhance democracy?. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood clung to power, refusing to compromise with the secularists;
- To Turkey, where Prime Minister Ordogan, skipping over his primary concern for civil peace in Turkey, preferring to interfere in Egypt's internal affairs?. In Egypt, the two revolutions resulted into a gush of nationalism that refused outside intervention.
- To the Ukraine or to Thailand, where mobs have overwhelmed their presidencies demanding regime change?. Egypt has already passed this hurdle except for the so-called Islamists challenge.
- To the U.K., where the country may break asunder if Scotland does not heed the pleading of Prime Minister Cameron not to secede?. Egypt's unity between North and South was already enshrined since the rule of Pharaoh Narmer 5000 years ago.
- To the U.S., where the great Jeffersonian democracy under the U.S. Constitution is daily threatened during the Obama administration with the unending stalemate between the Democrats and the Republicans?. In Egypt, it would be impossible to imagine a government shutdown for 16 days as happened in the U.S. in late 2012.
- To Russia, where four rebellions in its four corners are using terrorism as a means of gaining at least an autonomous special status within the Russian federation?. In Egypt, there are no such rebellions, except for random attacks on the transitional government which is fast learning how to employ counter-terrorism measures. As to Syria, or to Libya, or to Yemen - just forget it!!
If Zakaria employs that term as applicable to Egypt because of the rising level of terrorism in the country, it has been common wisdom since Lockerbie of 1981 that terrorism cannot be ended, but can be contained. Let us now look at the new phenomenon of so-called "jihadism" on the Egyptian front.
Is there anything new in that alarmist reporting about so called jihadists returning to Egypt to fight for the restoration of the Morsi regime? None whatsoever!! A researcher at the New America Foundation opines from the comfort of his office in Washington, D.C. that "Egypt is again an open front for jihad!!" On the basis of that faulty premise, the New York Times on February 6, 2014, goes on to describe Egypt as "the birthplace of political Islam," and as such "has sent fighters to battle zones from Kandahar to the Caucasus for decades."
The facts are: the Muslim Brotherhood, from 1928 to 1954, had no record of mass violence. Calling Egypt, where the Brotherhood was founded, "the birthplace of political Islam," is sheer ignorance. And sending fighters to battle zones, as if terrorism is stamped with a "made in Egypt" label, has no demonstrable evidence. Above all, there is no terror ideology that has its roots in any faith, Islam included.
An entire dictionary of terms defining terrorism has grown like poison ivy on the walls of Islam. It has become the source for faulty labels, including the term "jihadism." In Islamic law (Sharia), there is no aggressive war, only defensive war, and there is no principle which calls for killing the innocent. The only explanation which I find admissible in the media jargon about the so-called "political Islam," "jihadism," and "Islamic terrorism" is the thread of Islamophobia. Terrorism has no religion.
It is interesting to note that U.S. media, including Zakaria's CNN weekly program, has scoured the entire map of the Muslim World to select "a birthplace" for terrorism. Their faulty GPS pointed first to Tehran, then to Riyadh, then to Islamabad, then to north-east Afghanistan. Each one of these locations had its place in the hot sun of adverse publicity. The fact of the matter is that terrorism travels, and its spread from southeast Asia to the Caucasus, and from Kandahar to Timbuktu is an aspect of its morphing into a franchise. And Islam, as a cover, is readily available. Why? Because any Muslim can claim the right to render a fatwa (a non-enforceable legal opinion), under the guise of ijtihad.
As the pendulum of approbation/disapprobation swings now in media thinking, and is now disfavoring post-Mubarak/post-Morsi Egypt, the history of U.S./Egyptian relationship has kept up with its gyrations. During the dictatorial Mubarak regime, Egypt was one of "the black holes" to which America's "enforced rendition" of suspected terrorists for the purpose of torture was a common practice. When the dictatorship of Mubarak was ended by the millions in Tahrir, and was followed by electing Morsi as President, one of the primary supporters of his Brotherhoodization of Egypt was Ann Patterson, former U.S. Ambassador to Cairo. That support remained undiminished even after the Egyptians by the millions, protected by the military, caused Morsi's ouster.
It was therefore not surprising to hear Michael McFaul, the present U.S. Ambassador to Moscow who is leaving his post to academia at Stanford define Russia's attitude toward the U.S. On Zakaria's CNN program he stated: "Most Russians believe that the U.S. is fomenting regime change around the world." It was a shrewd move by Putin to send "good luck" greetings early this week to Field Marshal El-Sisi.
Within a few days of that revealing statement by McFaul came another revelation to confirm that notion. It was in a taped conversation between a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland and the American Ambassador to the Ukraine. That exchange, which included an expletive against the European Union by that senior lady diplomat, evidenced Washington's activism in the internal affairs of the Ukraine, the birthplace of pre-communist Russian nationalism.
All of the above makes the present reading of the works of the late Robert A. Dahl a must. Dahl defined American politics and power in a very refreshing and authentic way. He said: "Instead of single center of sovereign power, there must be multiple centers of power, none of which is or can be wholly sovereign."
Mr. Fareed Zakaria: If Egypt, in your oscillating judgements is now "a mess," then how would you impartially describe the inability of President Obama to get his important reformist agenda legislated except by resorting to bypassing Congress through executive orders as per his constitutional right? Until today, one-hundred sixty-eight executive orders have been issued by President Obama to get the U.S. moving ahead in spite of the insane politics of the Tea Party, Senator Ted Cruz, and the political hordes of the American political right.
Fareed: You have a pulpit, CNN, which is huge by comparison to mine, this weekly blog. You get paid for using CNN as a medium; I don't get paid for writing this blog. Your is for what goes for public information; mine is for public education. In spite of these differences, there should be similarities -sticking to credible facts, and making judicious conclusions based on them. Though we share in being both U.S. naturalized citizens, we do not share in many outlooks, especially when it comes to the role of the military in national crises.
For example, I see no stigma attached to Egypt's difficult transition to democracy, even if El-Sisi, through the coming presidential elections, becomes the third Egyptian president in the post-Mubarak era, succeeding Morsi, then Mansour. From your recent interview with Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi of Egypt at Davos, your questions were laced with negativity about this prospect.
Personally, I look upon it this way: There is a qualitative difference between a military man becoming, through democratic means, the ruler of Egypt, and an America which practices democracy at home, but uses military rule off shore -Guantanamo!!
This, to me as a law professor, is a form of political/military laundering using the tactics of money laundering in the Caribbean. The same American tactic has been perfected in "forced rendition" to other countries, in the prisons in Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and in Pagram (Afghanistan).
Then that tactic was elevated to a new science: shifting parts of the U.S. military power abroad to private security companies, like the infamous Black Water of Erik Prinz. Black Water was even given diplomatic immunity by the U.S. State Department as if it was a sovereign entity.
So when Black Water killed 17 innocent civilians in Iraq in 2007 in Al-Nesoor Square, Baghdad, immunity sheltered it from prosecution. When later I visited the scene of that war crime in Baghdad, I knew that I was standing on the ground of a real American mess!!
So, Fareed (your name in Arabic is translated into "unique"): The mess exists only through your process of subjective selection!! Unfortunately, this has become your unique fare which on your weekly CNN program, you preface it by : "I have today for you a great show!!"
Friday, February 7, 2014
Destruction of Egypt's Artistic Patrimony Is a Form of Genocide
In the mid 1950's, I had the good fortune of assisting the late Professor Lemkin of Yale University. He was lobbying for increasing the number of UN Member States acceding to the Genocide Convention. From Lemkin I learnt a great deal about various forms of genocide. These included the destruction of museums, antiquities, artistic relics, and historical sites. He described the destruction of cultural heritage as genocide because it eliminates the ID of the nation affected -a war crime.
The truck bomb blast of January 24, 2014 in Cairo, though in principle aimed at Cairo's police headquarters, wrecked also the Museum of Islamic Art. Centuries of art from all corners of the vast Islamic world were largely obliterated. Exquisite medieval lamps, among other countless artifacts representing Islamic history from the seventh to the 19th centuries were reduced to rubble. The Antiquities Ministry lamented the catastrophic loss while the Friends of Jerusalem, (Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis) gloated over its heinous act of destruction. It called it revenge for the ousting of the Islamist rule of Mohamed Morsi while the consequences of its war crime were a devastation of a critical part of Islamic ID.
To Ansar, power has priority over art and monuments. It thus shares the Taliban ideology which led to the destruction of the Buddhist Temples of Bamian in Afghanistan. Here Ansar also takes a bow of approval of the Muslim Brotherhood's description of the monuments of ancient Egypt as idols worthy of destruction. The form and contents of their opposition to secular rule have the sword's other edge of cultural obliteration. To them, Islam is a non-evolving faith which cannot co-exist except in forms of practice which they claim to be the right path to salvation -to paradise. How misguided can one be?!
At the age of 8, my late father, Sheikh El-Sayed Muhammad El-Ayouty, a graduate of Al-Azhar and a teacher of Islamic history, took me from our village in eastern Egypt to Cairo to introduce me to the country's cultural centers. Starting with Egypt of the pharaohs, where the pyramids and the sphinx stood guard, for millenia, he took me to "old Cairo" to visit the Coptic "Hanging Church" where he pointed out: "This is where Jesus, Mary and Joseph came from the east to take refuge from Roman persecution." Then it was the turn of Islamic Cairo, with its great mosques and lofty minarets and its wondrous Museum of Islamic Art.
Even as a child, I felt proud to be born in such a country with deep historic and diverse roots. This is when my turn towards universalism began. I became a part of all humanity!! Thanks Dad!!
Reports about the criminal devastation at the Museum of Islamic Art state that it had nearly 1471 artifacts on display in 25 galleries and 96,000 objects in storage. Its second floor also houses Egypt's National Library. There are several rare manuscripts and papyri that suffered damage at the hands of those cultural terrorists.
The country's ID destruction had also been visited upon at the Mallawi museum in El-Minya Province which lies about 200 miles south of Cairo. Mob attacks last August, one month after the ousting of Morsi, resulted in the theft of 1050 of the 1089 artifacts. These included pharaonic statues, jewelry and Greco-Roman coins.
Coptic places of worship have also come under wanton attacks in convulsive sectarian violence of Brotherhood vs. Copts. These churches are the repositories of what Orthodox Christianity had, since 200 years after Christ, bequeathed to Egypt and the world in terms of icons, bibles, manuscripts and all artistic representations of the Coptic cross.
In addition to funds flowing to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities from UNESCO, the U.S. and other international donors, secular Egypt is also responding. Included in the counter-attack against that cultural barbarism are the creation of an Egyptian non-profit by the name of the Egyptian Heritage Rescue, founded by Abdel-Hamid El-Sharif, and a magazine devoted to Egypt's heritage and history by the name of Al-Rawi, whose publisher is Yasmine El-Dorghamy, a woman at the front line of heritage defense.
In the aftermath of those attacks, a banker in Cairo summed up the feelings in Egypt against the Brotherhood. "Who else but the Muslim Brotherhood has an interest in this kind of attack?," he asked. And on behalf of the government, the Interior Minister, Mohamad Ibrahim, declared: "These attacks would not deter the Egyptians in their fight against black terrorism." That is the same cabinet member whom the terrorists tried to kill last August.
Such determination to confront terrorism also has Egypt's economic interest in view. The country depends upon 20% of its foreign earnings from tourism. And whenever terrorism enters, tourism exists!!
The truck bomb blast of January 24, 2014 in Cairo, though in principle aimed at Cairo's police headquarters, wrecked also the Museum of Islamic Art. Centuries of art from all corners of the vast Islamic world were largely obliterated. Exquisite medieval lamps, among other countless artifacts representing Islamic history from the seventh to the 19th centuries were reduced to rubble. The Antiquities Ministry lamented the catastrophic loss while the Friends of Jerusalem, (Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis) gloated over its heinous act of destruction. It called it revenge for the ousting of the Islamist rule of Mohamed Morsi while the consequences of its war crime were a devastation of a critical part of Islamic ID.
To Ansar, power has priority over art and monuments. It thus shares the Taliban ideology which led to the destruction of the Buddhist Temples of Bamian in Afghanistan. Here Ansar also takes a bow of approval of the Muslim Brotherhood's description of the monuments of ancient Egypt as idols worthy of destruction. The form and contents of their opposition to secular rule have the sword's other edge of cultural obliteration. To them, Islam is a non-evolving faith which cannot co-exist except in forms of practice which they claim to be the right path to salvation -to paradise. How misguided can one be?!
At the age of 8, my late father, Sheikh El-Sayed Muhammad El-Ayouty, a graduate of Al-Azhar and a teacher of Islamic history, took me from our village in eastern Egypt to Cairo to introduce me to the country's cultural centers. Starting with Egypt of the pharaohs, where the pyramids and the sphinx stood guard, for millenia, he took me to "old Cairo" to visit the Coptic "Hanging Church" where he pointed out: "This is where Jesus, Mary and Joseph came from the east to take refuge from Roman persecution." Then it was the turn of Islamic Cairo, with its great mosques and lofty minarets and its wondrous Museum of Islamic Art.
Even as a child, I felt proud to be born in such a country with deep historic and diverse roots. This is when my turn towards universalism began. I became a part of all humanity!! Thanks Dad!!
Reports about the criminal devastation at the Museum of Islamic Art state that it had nearly 1471 artifacts on display in 25 galleries and 96,000 objects in storage. Its second floor also houses Egypt's National Library. There are several rare manuscripts and papyri that suffered damage at the hands of those cultural terrorists.
The country's ID destruction had also been visited upon at the Mallawi museum in El-Minya Province which lies about 200 miles south of Cairo. Mob attacks last August, one month after the ousting of Morsi, resulted in the theft of 1050 of the 1089 artifacts. These included pharaonic statues, jewelry and Greco-Roman coins.
Coptic places of worship have also come under wanton attacks in convulsive sectarian violence of Brotherhood vs. Copts. These churches are the repositories of what Orthodox Christianity had, since 200 years after Christ, bequeathed to Egypt and the world in terms of icons, bibles, manuscripts and all artistic representations of the Coptic cross.
In addition to funds flowing to the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities from UNESCO, the U.S. and other international donors, secular Egypt is also responding. Included in the counter-attack against that cultural barbarism are the creation of an Egyptian non-profit by the name of the Egyptian Heritage Rescue, founded by Abdel-Hamid El-Sharif, and a magazine devoted to Egypt's heritage and history by the name of Al-Rawi, whose publisher is Yasmine El-Dorghamy, a woman at the front line of heritage defense.
In the aftermath of those attacks, a banker in Cairo summed up the feelings in Egypt against the Brotherhood. "Who else but the Muslim Brotherhood has an interest in this kind of attack?," he asked. And on behalf of the government, the Interior Minister, Mohamad Ibrahim, declared: "These attacks would not deter the Egyptians in their fight against black terrorism." That is the same cabinet member whom the terrorists tried to kill last August.
Such determination to confront terrorism also has Egypt's economic interest in view. The country depends upon 20% of its foreign earnings from tourism. And whenever terrorism enters, tourism exists!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)