I think most also understand that this was 200 years ago and times have changed dramatically.
Apologies, I was being ironic.
I think you’ll find that they’re classed as a little more than a mere ‘tourist attraction’.
I’m glad this story is bullshit, but just how attached are modern Egyptians to ancient Egypt? Did General Nasser actually care about Abu Simbel or was he like, “the water is going to be here in five years: good luck”?
I have no idea how attached they are as a matter of spiritual or civic pride but when I first read this (and assumed it was true) my first thought is there is waaay too much money in the pyramids and tourism for the public to accept tearing them down.
I suspect Egyptians view ancient Egypt and their ancient religion as, well, ancient. It is a matter of history and the religion of the Pharaohs is long since passed and not a threat to any modern religion.
In the meantime the pyramids are awesome to look at, a matter of civic pride and bring in valuable tourism dollars.
If they want to destroy the only reason anyone has to visit their grim little country, it’s not up to us the stop it. It will be on their heads when this cycle of fanaticism turns and they realize what they’ve done. We may like to think of Egypt as a (relatively) progressive nation, but it’s still a place where a woman can get gang-raped in broad daylight in the middle of an crowded square.
Eh, but there’s a kernel of truth to your joke, though. While invading Iraq, the Yanks didn’t actively set out to destroy ancient sites and monuments – but they also didn’t actively set out to protect them, not in earnest anyway. Depending on how the ensuing destruction was spun in Egyptian media, it’s at least possible that the Americans were presented as culture-destroying barbarian brutes á la Napoleon.
But they don’t.
The whole story was a hoax – as has been made very, very clear in this very thread.
Yep, a whole bunch of comments about something that didn’t and won’t happen, and not one on something that did happen (from the link a few posts up):
As a rule, Muslims don’t care that much about pre-Islamic culture. The Egyptians, though, are the exception to this. They see themselves as the heirs to the Pharaohs, and care quite a lot about their country’s historical heritage.
Not just Egyptians. Iranians, too, tend to be extremely proud of their pre-Islamic history and heritage.
That’s what you get when you just skim over a thread before posting.
Glad to hear this was probably a hoax, but according to an article I read years ago, the Giza Pyramids were very very nearly dismantled in the mid 1800s as a ‘modernism’ move / material mine by Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman Era ruler of Egypt at the time, rather than being motivated by religious zeal, and saved by the intervention of a French Engineerd Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds who had become someone the Pasha listened to.
Below is a copy of the article I first read years ago.
http://history101.multiply.com/journal/item/23?&show_interstitial=1&u=%2Fjournal%2Fitem
(it takes about 10 seconds of waiting, until the article appears)
We could say the west ‘has’ already intervened once, in regard to saving Giza (albeit as an individual’s interest, rather than state intervention). I believe there is a lesson to be learned from the Linant and Ali story. Don’t let things come to logger heads and thereby allow the monument in question to then become a hostage at risk of execution. Do things the way he did it, and use cunning.
One major influence in why the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed was because communication had completely broken down, negotiations had collapsed into a huff on both sides about things like aid, and the Buddhas then became a hostage which was then executed in revenge for sanctions, among other things.
The story given to us back home is that they were destroyed for the hell of it in an example of nonsensical barbarity. Infact, prior to that, the Buddhas had been there a long long time indeed and has survived centuries of Islamic rule (often rule which was far harsher than the Taliban) with only minor damages considering how long they had stood.
Even at the time of the order to destroy them in our time, there were reports of mini mutinys within the Taliban as some saw them as potential tourism income for the country later on. Prior to the Soviet War, the Bamiyan Buddhas had been a popular visit for travellers on the Hippie Trail as such, on the way to India, and had built up a little tourism infrastructure around it in the form of guesthouses, guides and restaraunts.
Based on how many pre-islamic sites I’ve visited in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and elsewhere, the suggestion that anywhere Islam takes hold means any monuments prior to Islam are swiftly automatically going to be mercilessly destroyed is a false one, based on evidence.
Roman Temples, Roman Citys and Ampitheatres, Ancient Egyptian Temples, Zoroastrian Temples and Towers, Nabatean Citys, Christian Churches, many of these can be found today in places like Syria, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere that have seen great upheaval over the centuries and really hard line rule over that time.
Yes plenty of monuments have suffered degrees of damage at the hands of zealots (including Christian ones, as shown by the prevelance of Christian crosses carved onto areas of Egyptian Temples chipped away in the past, or attempts to chip away depictions of erections on temple walls in Egypt) or by the pilfering of building materials for surrounding villages / farms, but none of that is a particularly Islamic trend. It can be found all over the world, from the Great Wall of China to Megaliths in Europe. As for the question - “Should (and would) the West intervene if the Pyramids were in danger?”, I would ask another question in response to that question and ask - “Why should it be the west that must intervene to save Giza in such a theoretical scenario?”.
Nations surounding Egypt have the power and influence to halt such things (including current events in Syria) but have noticed that the west just ‘loves’ to take on the white man’s burden. Nations near Egypt have their own heritage programs today, which restores, secures and maintains pre-Islamic monuments for the country. The Middle East is not wholly a zone of constant utter chaos, as many believe.
All this aside, I just can’t see Egyptian people standing for any attempt to wreck the pyramids. In the time of Muhammad Ali Pasha, tourism was only ‘just’ beginning in the region, with the arrival of wealthy Europeans on an expasion of the Grand Tour. Linant intervened at just the right time because ever since then, these sites have become a local cash cow upon which many locals have thrown all their eggs into one basket in terms of income. If the Salafists ever came marching to Giza with the intention of dismantling the Pyramids (I’d love to see them try btw, they are truly titantic structures) the camel folks and souvenier sellers in nearby Nazlet-El-Samaan might have something to say about that 
I was in Timbuktu a few years ago, and the destruction there just kills me. I was getting kind of moody about it, until I remember, hell. Not that long ago, Europe was busy bombing it’s cultural heritage into dust. The destruction of history that WWII wrought is basically unmatched.
It’s sad to lose world treasures, but it seems to be pretty much the way that things tend to go eventually. And frankly the greatest causes of destruction are pretty mundane- How much of London was torn down to get the neat modern city we have today? This stuff happens all the time, and there really isn’t a ton to be done about it.
That is utter BULLSHIT.
Further to what Boswellia says, the Taliban, contrary to popular belief did not blow the Buddahs sky high the day they took over. It was several years after and it began when there was an article in the newspaper pointing out that the money to be spent on restoration of the statutes was more than what was to be spent on aid in that region.
It does not excuse what the Taliban did in the slightest, but it should raise perspective.
I don’t think he’s completely wrong, but at the very least it’s rather simplistic.
It certainly is true that in many Arab countries, little if any concern is shown amongst the populace for the pre-Islamic history and in many, the history books begin with the coming of Islam to the region.
For example, schoolbooks in Algeria begin not with discussions of the history of the Berbers, of whom most Algerians are descended, but with discussion of the Arab conquest and the Arabs are referred to as “our ancestors” mirroring the way textbooks in colonial Algeria began with the phrase “Our Ancestors, the Gauls”.
Similarly, I’ve met a number of people who’ve visited Egypt who were disturbed by how little concern was shown among average Egyptians for their ancient history in stark contrast to the way the people of Italy feel about Rome.
That said, Iran is one of the largest Muslim nations and there is tremendous pride in the Persian past.
I have no idea what the case is on the Indian sub-continent, but I strongly suspect the same is true there.
Moreover, the lack of concern for the past is hardly confined to some Muslim communities.
Robert Friedman, who is very much a lover of Greece mentioned that one of the things he always found depressing is that once you lived among ordinary Greeks as opposed to those connected to the tourist industry you found that most couldn’t care less about ancient Greece and when they talked about the past were obsessed only with the Byzantine Empire, which of course was Christian.
Alexander the Great was something of an exception to the this.
The examples that you give are not really relevant, as they are caught up with present day politics, as the Algerian French era one was. That is true not only in “Arab” countries but everywhere. Furthermore, most people are too busy living in the present to care about the past.
Agreed. Unfortunately it didn’t put things into perspective. In the early 2000s I travelled independently in Afghanistan and visited Bamiyan along the way, the village and nearby cliffs area where the Buddhas once stood. It was surreal to see the blue sign saying - “this site is an internationally recognized historical site of great importance protected by UNESCO” (or words to that effect), with a pile of rubble behind the signs in the coves where they once stood, but it annoyed me even more to hear already of rumours of rush proposals by nations like Japan to throw obscene amounts of money towards rebuilding the Buddhas as soon as possible.
At the same time as these proposals, there were desperately poor refugees (little kids to middle aged to pensioners) living in the caves that pepper the cliffs, and there was even a struggle to get basic sanitation infrastucture and housing in the village area nearby. The bazzar area had been burned to the ground in an ethnic cleansing attack by the Taliban, and it was in dire need of priority focus on that sort of thing first, before heritage.
As much as I love history I felt focusing on Buddha reconstruction (even if the thinking may have been to get some kind of tourism infrastructure back to help the local economy) this was a serious error of misjudgement by foreigners looking on in comfort from outside the country , and an insult to the people who were scraping out a dire existence nearby in middle ages conditions at that time.
It had echos of what had led to the destruction of the Buddhas in the first place, and the same lack of understanding of prioritiess led to many resources and focus being diverted to Iraq before Afghanistan had been patched up (one of the other reasons why I believe Afghanistan is in such a mess now).
It appears the mindset may have changed a bit since, as the later counter terrorism strategy of people like General Petraeus that he applied later in Afghanistan, understood the need to win the favour of locals by focusing on infrastructure and rebuilding of practical daily things. I believe it has been hard to impliment because much of it is a case of closing the stable door after the horse has already bolted. If this has been applied in the early 2000s, Afghanistan may be a bit more settled than it is today. Instead, a vaccum of years was left,in which a climate of resentment and resurgance of the taliban could flourish.
Starting a war over an old pile of rocks is the worst justification for a war I’ve ever heard. In fact, it’s worse than any justification for a war I could have imagined.
I was paraphrasing something Bernard Lewis said at a lecture of his I was at a few years ago. I’ll see if I can find a cite online.
You may disagree with the man, or with his politics, but he doesn’t have a habit of pulling things out of his ass.