New York Times: It's
bunk. That is, the "crazed Muslim extremists call for demolishing Egypt's Great Pyramids" in FreeThought Nation (see
Original Post).
Contrary to Gossip, Pyramids Have No Date With the Wrecking BallBy ROD NORDLAND and MAYY EL SHEIKH
Published: July 23, 2012
CAIRO — What’s this? Egypt’s new Islamist leaders want to raze the Great Pyramids, scratch away the images on the death masks of the pharaohs, maybe even wipe the grin off what is left of the face of the Sphinx?
Someone who reads a lot of right-wing blogs in the United States these days might be forgiven for thinking so, though there is no sign here that any such Islamist clamor to destroy the monuments of ancient Egypt has actually arisen.
The fear that it has, though, is a textbook example of how a rumor, especially about a place as tumultuous as Egypt these days, can take on a life of its own — fed by a kernel of fact, a dash of Twitter, and a convenient coincidence or two.
The claim that radical Islamists had, in the name of the Muslim aversion to artifacts of paganism, asked President Mohamed Morsi to have the pyramids torn down apparently began with a June 30 item in Rose el-Youssef, an Egyptian magazine that for years was a mouthpiece for Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Morsi’s ousted predecessor.
The magazine quoted a prominent Bahraini sheik, Abdellatif al-Mahmoud, as demanding in a Twitter posting on June 24 that Mr. Morsi “accomplish what the Sahabi Amir bin al-As could not” and destroy the “idolatrous” pyramids. The allusion was to a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who went on to conquer Egypt, although scholars of Islam say he never even tried to take down the pyramids.
By July 12, someone claiming to be the Bahraini sheik had repudiated the Twitter posting as a hoax, saying that a faked screen shot had been published to make it look as if the sheik had posted the message. “This tweet hasn’t been written by me, and the traitors have fabricated it through Photoshop to distort my image,” said Sheik Mahmoud — or at least, said the user @amahmood2011 professing to be Sheik Mahmoud.
However, if @amahmood2011 really is Bahrain’s leading Sunni cleric, some of his Twitter postings are a bit peculiar, like the one suggesting that he had seen the Prophet in a dream and was given permission to shake women’s hands.
The biographical description accompanying that Twitter feed notes, in Arabic, that it is the sheik’s “Official Barody Account,” which sounds like a faulty transliteration of the English word parody.
The real Sheik Mahmoud could not be reached for comment.
None of that nebulous sourcing did anything to tamp down the steam sizzling from online reports that began appearing this month, most of them quoting one another rather than an original source, warning that the Islamists wanted to finally finish the job that the Islamic conqueror of Egypt had started (although he hadn’t), and that President Morsi was doing nothing about it (which he wasn’t).
“The things Americans say show us they are crazy,” Abdel Halim Nur el-Din, an Egyptian professor of antiquities and former chairman of the country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in an interview.
One posting on a blog called American Thinker said, “It should surprise no one that the fanatics want to blow up 5,500-year-old monuments to the genius of man,” thus introducing high explosives into the narrative.
The magazine Commentary was more restrained, but worried, “That such a fringe and wacky idea gains any voice in Arabic media or on Islamist Web sites should be cause for concern, given precedent.”
The obvious antecedent was the recent destruction of ancient monuments in Timbuktu by extremist Islamists who had taken over northern Mali and deemed them un-Islamic. The Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha carved into a cliff in central Afghanistan was also brought to mind. But for the most part, the pyramid story gained traction only in a relatively few outlets.
There was an Egyptian television talk show that mentioned it, but only to denounce a Saudi sheik, Ali Al Rabieei, who had been quoted in an early report as a would-be destroyer of pyramids. The sheik not only repudiated the remarks attributed to him, but also offered a reward to anyone who could tell him who had made the remarks in his name, using what he said were two phony Twitter accounts.
“These stories are cheap acts aimed at hurting Egypt and its image, and Mr. Morsi as well,” said Mr. Nur el-Din, the antiquities professor. He said Mr. Morsi had reassured Egypt’s tourism officials that the country’s antiquities were in no danger from the new government.
Still, the flames were fanned by intemperate statements from some Salafis, as Egypt’s hard-line Islamists are called. The Salafis have shown considerable political muscle: their candidates won 25 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections and they backed Mr. Morsi, the candidate supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, in the presidential runoff. They are much more conservative in their views than the Brotherhood, and scorn all works of art representing the human form because such works suggest an alternative to the perfection of God.
In January 2011, the spokesman for the Salafi Preaching Movement, Sheik Abdel Moneim el-Shahat, said the question of Egypt’s antiquities was simply a theological problem, and he suggested a compromise: Cover the heads of ancient Egyptian statues in wax. This would leave them visible, but would technically “obliterate” the faces. “I’ll do something that combines religious adherence and leaving antiquities as historic monuments,” he said on a television program.
Then last August, Sheik Shahat was asked to explain the difference between his plan and the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas, which he pointedly refrained from criticizing.
“The Taliban was in power at the time,” he said, whereas the Salafis in Egypt are not. A video of that exchange was posted on YouTube.
Younis Makhyon, a senior member of the Salafi Nour Party, said that no one from the group had ever suggested pyramidicide. “These allegations have no foundation whatsoever and no basis in reality,” Mr. Makhyon said. “They are part of an attempt to turn Islamists into scarecrows and frighten the world about them.”
On July 20, the story gained life with a commentary on Newsday’s Web site by Joel Brinkley, a professor at Stanford University and a former correspondent for The New York Times.
“Morsi has been Egypt’s president for less than a month, and already senior clerics in his country and around the Islamic world are loudly calling for the demolition of the pyramids,” Mr. Brinkley wrote.
“Morsi has had nothing to say about this, not a word,” he added.
Ahmed Sobeai, a spokesman for the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, responded, “Dr. Morsi cannot respond to something that hasn’t happened.” Mr. Sobeai called the whole affair “an attempt to fabricate a crisis from an illusion.”
The pyramids, he said, are safe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012...e-proves-flimsy.html
