In the latest news from “democratic” Egypt, certain factions among Egypt’s Muslim community are demanding that the new Egyptian president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political leader, get rid of those awful “pagan” pyramids.
Perfectly reasonable.
Radical Muslim Clerics Call for Destruction of the Pyramids
You know this is pretty funny. I was just asking an Egyptian co-worker last week if we could ever see such a thing happen in Egypt under this new political cloud. He told me that the people of Egypt would never allow such a thing to ever take place.
Time will tell and let’s not forget the depth of human stupidity.
Kinda reminds me of Isaiah 19:2-4
2 “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian—
brother will fight against brother,
neighbor against neighbor,
city against city,
kingdom against kingdom.
3 The Egyptians will lose heart,
and I will bring their plans to nothing;….
4 I will hand the Egyptians over
to the power of a cruel master,
and a fierce king will rule over them,”
declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.”
Well, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud is Bahraini and Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi‘i is a Saudi, so is it really correct to say that they represent “certain factions among Egypt’s Muslim community”? They probably have some adherents in the US for all we know, but I wouldn’t call them “representative of US factions”.
Yes, when they have followers who agree with them, enough so that the president is pressured.
Yeah. The US would really want this.
Its probably an hoax: if I am reading up this article, it claims only the muslim Amr bin al-As, destroyed the library of Alexandria when history showed Ceasar burned it by accident, then Aurelian and also the Coptic Pope Theophilus..
a lot of it must be just fear mongering..
not a hoax; just nuttiness.
woah after verifying various sources, the news about the salafis wanting to destroy the pyramids are true..
Poor Egypt having to choose between military or islam fascism..
Consider the source: that appears to be an idologically right wing website. Have you found anything else, anywhere, which can corroborate the claim made on that page?
yes; it circulated quite a bit, left and right. It appears to be some extra-nuts radicals, even by Muslim Brotherhood standards. I have no doubt that the MB will ignore them.
@LostAngel: Google shows only known right wing sites giving this info. So I strongly doubt its veracity.
and so we can trust what the left wing puts out? Right. Who cares – as long as it’s not the National Enquirer (is that still around) or the Onion, it may be the case.
It has now been exposed as a hoax. I’ve never met an Egyptian who was anything other than proud of their country’s monuments. That any of us in the west fell for it says more about our attitudes to Islam than it does about Egyptian attitudes to their heritage.
give me the site so I can post a link to it. Even if true, the MB would ignore it.
Sorry, but radical Islam has earned the attitude toward it.
Although this instance may or not may be a hoax, these people destroying their ancient past are not main-stream Muslims, but a highly radicalized minority. They are small, but dangerous and have done irreparable harm to archeological remains in a number of countries. These few people want to reinvent history, making anything existing before 622 C.E. as something to be loathed and eradicated. Where they cannot play to the ignorant masses, they intimidate and kill. For such persons, dynamiting a statue is an act of piety, kicking a 3,000 year old mummy to dust is an affirmation, and crushing non canonical thought, exalting.
Muslims are a highly creative people with a long history, who have disseminated important technological and cultural information throughout the West both in the past and in the present. There has always been a small core of luddites and extremists who crave power though destruction and repression in all cultures and Islam is not immune. Each culture has had a dangerous period where groups tried to remold thought through fear, violence, and destruction. This is one of those times.
Keep in mind the great Buddha of Afghanistan with its videoed destruction is not a sole example or aberration. To shrug off warnings about recent and impending destruction, as “right-wing reportage” or “anti-Muslim slant”, simply is putting your head in the hot, gritty sand. The thing to remember about extremism, regardless of flavor, is that it is seldom the will of the majority. Egypt and other middle eastern countries are going through a highly volatile period of rearranging political systems and stances, so the outside needs to keep hands off of internal problems of sovereign nations, whenever possible.
agreed that the problem is a radicalized minority, but the math is disturbing. Even a 1% minority = millions.
@ Miro Collas. I get most of my political news from the left or independent medias – I am very defensive and is usually very skeptical about mainstream news ( I suffer nausea when seeing the name David Horowitz) so I usually verify my news…in this case I try an translated version of an arab news paper.. try google on the cleric who made the statement and see the English translation.. The Cleric a nutcase similar to Pat Robertson in the US ot t some extremist Rabis in IIsrael.
@ coastconfan,
I agree western powers must keep off these countries but we do not. Wherever the West (not just the US) intervened actually slowed down
democratic movements instead of advancing it..
Point taken.
Well you see, part of the problem is that much like protestant Christianity, there is not a lot of regulation as to who gets to make pronouncements. In Islam there are a large number of unregulated mullahs and there is not much control over one issuing a fatwa on various subjects. In most cases the mullah is minor and the fatwa is just an opinion and treated as such by mainstream Muslims.
The problem comes in with Western media treating all mullahs with the same gravity and authority. To differentiate between major and minor mullahs and to cull out eccentric or non-canonical pronouncements can prove to be an impossible task not only for Western media and their views/readers, but even with Islam*. So when somebody makes a pronouncement, opinion or fatwa, it’s really difficult for people outside the community to differentiate between an important cleric or a guy with no standing in Islam, on a curb ranting to nobody in particular.
Fatwas are not set in stone, nor are they universally accepted even within the community it was issued. Some are set aside and some are ignored because those doing so have full information as to the cleric, the issue, and the circumstance. We here in the West don’t have that intimate knowledge, so when the media finds a nut job ranting, they give him the same stature as a major cleric.
For example, we here in the U.S. (and hopefully the press) know Christian nut job religious figures and downplay or discount the rants. Joebob Snakeslinger of Chitlin Switch, Dumcluck County, just doesn’t have the same stature as a pronouncement by the Vatican or a recognized Protestant church leader. I can’t fully blame the media, but they do a lot of damage by indiscriminant reporting from the middle east and attention getting fear mongering.
*Consider that coffee, when it was first available was proscribed by fatwa as intoxicating, the same with tobacco. Those fatwas no longer hold and just try to take away a Yemeni’s coffee and cigarette these days. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coffee
“not all fatwas are followed after a while” does not excuse the ideology that produces them, nor those who follow them (at all).
(Since this isn’t a political blog, this ends the political topic).
Here a new discovery about the earliest humans ; it contradicts the darwinian
theory that humanity evolved from monkeys
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19184370
@ MSH, sorry did not know which categories to post this on
see also a new Hobbit or smaller human specie
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6311619.stm
this is pretty old news that has actually changed in details (several times).
more:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12059564