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!!
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