BY IAN STRAUGHN
In March 2001, Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban destroyed the Buddhas
of Bamiyan, exploding the statues and reducing to rubble some of Afghanistan's
most important cultural relics. That act seemed to epitomize the cultural
intolerance of the Taliban regime but also drew attention to the ways in which
cultural heritage preservation has become used as a measure of civilized
behavior of states in an era of global cosmopolitanism. For those concerned
about the future of the world's antiquities, this week another threat emerged
on the horizon. In an interview with Egyptian Dream TV over the weekend,
Salafist leader Murgan Salem al-Gohary called on Muslims to destroy the Giza
pyramids and the Sphinx as a religiously mandated act of iconoclasm. "The
idols and statutes that fill Egypt must be destroyed. Muslims are tasked with
applying the teachings of Islam and removing these idols, just like we did in
Afghanistan when we smashed the Buddha statues," said Gohary, who claims
to have participated in the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan and was
arrested on several occasions under the Mubarak regime.
Forget for a minute the gross
improbability of Gohary's threat to destroy millions tons of sheer rock and
stone, monuments that have survived foreign invasions, rapacious pillagers, and
environmental threats. It is a move almost guaranteed to draw media attention,
particularly with the high level of anxiety surrounding the new political clout
of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of the Salafist al-Nour party
as a significant force in both the government and the charting of a new
constitution. Fears over how Islamists might fare in post-Mubarak Egypt have
only intensified amid a roiling debate over issues such as the role of women,
the inclusion of minorities, and the country's position toward Western
interests. Amid this debate, Egypt's Pharaonic remains have now become the
latest touchstone for controversy.
At first glance, this latest conflict
might appear to boil down to a clash between conservative and liberal strands
of Islam, but the debate over Egypt's antiquities dates back centuries. Medieval
Islamic scholars worked assiduously to understand the relics, with some
attempting to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions. By the late 19th century,
Egypt's archeological sites were the center of a nationalist struggle that
became crystallized in the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb and how to partition
its treasures between the state and the site's excavators. But that conflict
was but a variation on a theme in Egypt's history. During the era of Egypt's
entanglement with European imperialism following the Napoleonic conquest in
1798, the new field of Egyptology would emerge to dominate the representation
of Egypt and assert control over the country's heritage. That heritage has also
become an important political symbol in Egypt's more recent history -- both
Anwar Sadat and Mubarak were derided as latter-day pharaohs for their
authoritarian tendencies.
In early 2011, demonstrators tried to
protect the Egyptian Museum adjacent to Tahrir Square from criminals who sought
to use the chaos of the protests as a cover for looting its treasures. At the
same time, illicit dealing of Egyptian antiquities continues, despite the tough
rhetoric of the Supreme Council for Antiquities and its longstanding efforts to
repatriate artifacts that found their way into foreign museums in an era when
such transfers were either legally sanctioned or laws restricting their sale
poorly enforced.
But Egypt's archaeological heritage and
the remarkable monuments of the Giza Plateau are no strangers to threats. In
recent decades, the steady encroachment of the urban metropolis of Cairo and
its toxic air has prompted calls for Egypt, its antiquities authorities, and
international organizations to come to the rescue of the country's cultural
heritage. In previous centuries it was the work of largely European and
American antiquarians, adventurers, and tourists who took their toll on these
fabled structures and their potential riches. These early Egyptologists made
important scientific gains and important contributions to knowledge, but those
discoveries must be considered alongside the theft of artifacts and an
insatiable desire to acquire and collect that motivated many who entered the
field.
Even earlier, the limestone casement of
the Pyramids were pillaged and served as a quarry, providing stone for the
construction of the medieval cities of Fustat and its successor Cairo
(al-Qahira in Arabic -- literally "The Victorious One"). Most
recently, in the wake of the Egyptian revolution, the worry was that the most
impending danger to the site would be neglect. During the revolution, tourism
in Egypt came to a standstill and receipts from ticket booths plunged by as
much as 50 percent. During my visit to the pyramids in December 2011, during
what should be the high season for tourist activity, lines were nonexistent and
shopkeepers selling souvenirs and tour guides offering camel rides had become
morose at the prospects facing their small corner of the Egyptian economy.
While most Egyptians recognize and
understand the role that these ruins play in the economy and various state
efforts to represent Egypt as a modern-day heir to one of the world's great
civilizations, there is a palpable discomfort with this promotion and
glorification of a pre-Islamic past. The archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman once
referred to this as an "uneasy inheritance." For some Egyptians, too
much attention is paid to these works of idolatry, whose preservation eat up
resources at the expense of the welfare of an Islamic past, present, and
future. Pharaoh, we might recall, is particularly singled out for approbation
in Quranic scripture, which conservative Muslims have used to challenge any
reverence and respect for the material remnants of this era as a marker of shirk -- the sin of polytheism
or, literally, the partnering of something with God.
This logic has been central in the
justification of various acts of iconoclasm throughout history and in modern
times. Salafists and Wahhabis have long looked to the scholarship of the 13th
century thinker Ibn Taymiyyah for jurisprudential grounding to destroy sites,
particularly tombs and shrines connected to the Sufi tradition and important
figures in Shiism, which served as loci of pilgrimages or acts of ziyara (literally "visitation").
Such acts of destruction have been notable throughout the Arabian Peninsula and
even within the holy precincts of Mecca and Medina.
But the voices of the iconoclasts do not
go unchallenged within the Muslim tradition. Consider the remarks of the 10th
century Muslim traveler in Egypt, al-Masudi, as he describes his own
consternation at the destruction of Pharaonic ruins. He writes to his future
progeny:
"Look, son, what the Pharaohs built
and how it is being destroyed by these idiots. Nothing is more tragic and sad
than the loss of what these ruins offer to those who would regard them and
consider their lessons...What sort of wisdom preaches that these ruins should
be removed from the face of the Earth?"
Masudi sought to find support for these
ruins within the Islamic tradition. For him, they serve to strengthen the
Quranic injunction to search out and contemplate the lessons (‘ibar) which the divine has left for believers in the
landscape. His words make room for an Islamic cosmopolitanism and pluralism
that holds particular urgency for the debates about the future of post-Mubarak
Egypt. Egyptians will continue to argue about what lessons they want to draw
from the past without literally pulling the house down around them, but they
can do so safe in the knowledge that an embrace of ancient Egypt and its
antiquities is not incompatible with Islam.
In the aftermath of attempts to destroy
a series of sites in Saudi Arabia, the well-known Muslim American calligrapher
Muhammad Zakariya commented that those involved propagated a vision of Islam
"unable to accommodate the difficulty and complexity -- the depth and
texture -- of [Islam] and, ultimately, of its essential meaning." He
continued: "Islam is large. Muslims are not mushriks (idolaters)."
Indeed: Islam is large. This debate
within the faith over how to reconcile a non-Muslim past with a fervently
Muslim present speaks to the broader debate within the religion over how to
orient itself after the Arab Spring. While the authoritarian yoke of
Mubarak-era Egypt has now been cast off, the relationship of Islam and
secularism in Egyptian society remains highly unstable. The Muslim Brotherhood
in particular, as it enters the realm of politics, will be forced to navigate
with greater clarity between progressive voices calling for pluralism and
conservatives advocating a more fixed codification of sharia within Egypt's new
constitutional framework. And, the preferences of Murgan Salem al-Gohary
notwithstanding, the chances are good that the brothers will be doing so in the
shade of the pyramids.
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