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In FrontPage this morning I explain why the mujahedin would want to destroy tourist sites in Egypt (news links in the original):
The explosions Monday night in Dahab, an Egyptian resort city, killing at least 30 and wounding many more, was the sixteenth attack on foreign tourists in Egypt since 1992. Egyptian authorities have linked at least some of these attacks to groups that want to establish an Islamic state in Egypt – principally Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Sheikh Omar, of course, is now serving a life term in federal prison in Colorado for his role in masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.These attacks have often been quite bloody. Eighty-eight people were killed in bombings in the tourist resort city Sharm-al-Sheikh in July 2005. Thirty-four were killed at the Taba and Ras Shitan resorts near the Israeli border in October 2004. Jihadists from Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and another Islamic group murdered fifty-eight tourists (along with four Egyptian natives) in Luxor, the site of several ancient temples and more artifacts of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, in November 1997. In April 1996, the mujahedin murdered eighteen Greek tourists who were visiting the Pyramids; the killers thought their victims were Israelis.
Such attacks are high on the jihadist agenda for Egypt. Less than a week ago Egyptian authorities arrested six who were plotting to attack tourist sites. Since many Western analysts continue to insist that the groups opposed to Mubarak, including the Egyptian mujahedin, are essentially nationalist in orientation, this may seem curious: why would nationalists want to make foreign tourists fear to visit Egypt’s many archaeological treasures, and its world-famous resorts? Why would they want to weaken Egypt in this way?
The answer, of course, is because these groups aren’t essentially nationalist at all. They aren’t concerned that their actions will harm one of Egypt’s major industries -- in fact, that’s exactly what they want to do. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his ilk target tourist spots for the same reason they targeted the World Trade Center: to harm their enemy economically. Tourism accounts, directly and indirectly, for over ten percent of Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product; destabilizing the tourist industry could cripple the Egyptian economy as a whole and possibly even topple the government – or at very least lead to a substantial increase in popular support for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which has already recently enjoyed a resurgence at the ballot box.But the enemy of these groups is not just Hosni Mubarak. These attacks allow the mujahedin abundant opportunity to express their hatred for infidels. Among those killed in the various attacks on popular tourist destinations have been citizens of Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Greece, Israel and the United States – as well as Turkey and Egypt itself. In choosing tourist sites as particular foci of their attacks, the jihadists are striking a blow for the pure Egypt they envision: one that is not trodden down by infidel tourists or dependent upon infidel money. To the dour ideologues who perpetrated the attacks in Dahab Monday, resorts such as Dahab represent the worst of infidel decadence: immodest clothing, sport, revelry. One fatwa at the Internet site Islam Q & A put it this way: “Tourism nowadays means wanton display (tabarruj), mixing, alcohol, promiscuous parties, gambling and beaches on which ‘awrahs [private parts] are uncovered. In some countries, in addition to the above, there is visiting the lands of the kuffaar [unbelievers] which we are forbidden to go to and visit unless we are weeping. All of this goes against Islam and comes under the heading of cooperating in sin and transgression, and acquiring haraam [forbidden] earnings.” By making tourists too afraid to come to Egypt, the mujahedin hope to cleanse the land of these evils.
The attacks at the sites of ancient ruins – such as the Luxor attacks of 1997 and the shooting at the Pyramids in 1996 – most likely also have another motivation. Just this month the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, issued a fatwa declaring statues un-Islamic. His ruling was based on statements of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad such as: “Angels do not enter the house in which there is a dog or a statue” (Sahih Muslim bk. 24, no. 5250). Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, recounted: “I never used to leave in the Prophet’s house anything carrying images or crosses but he obliterated it” (Sahih Bukhari, vol. 7, bk. 72, no. 836). To the pious killers who commit terror attacks near the artifacts of Egypt’s pre-Islamic past -- pyramids, sarcophagi, temples -- these treasures are thus all just so much trash: monuments of jahiliyyah, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance, and, in modern times, any society not governed by Islamic law (including Mubarak’s Egypt, with its decadent beaches of revelry). Since in its pre-Islamic era Egypt was a great civilization, it is full of the remnants of jahiliyyah, which were -- at best -- neglected by Egyptian Muslims until the British colonialists arrived and began both to restore them and show the Egyptians how lucrative they could be. But today, the sheer abundance of such artifacts in Egypt makes the tourist sites a nature target for the mujahedin.
The great theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), foresaw a titanic struggle between Islam and jahiliyyah: “Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’ah will prevail, or else people’s desires: ‘And if they do not respond to you, then know that they only follow their own lusts. And who is more astray than one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah? Verily! Allah guides not the people who are disobedient’[Qur’an 28:50]; ‘Do they then seek the judgment of (the Days of) Ignorance? And who is better in judgment than Allah for a people who have firm faith’ [Qur’an 5:50]. The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man, with the intention of raising human beings to that high position which Allah has chosen for him.”
That has always been, and remains, the program of the jihad against tourist sites in Egypt.
Posted by Robert at April 25, 2006 5:45 AM
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A smilar situation existed in Gaza where the groups set out to destroy the industrial zones the that the Israelis set up, after Oslo, at crossing points to provide a livelihood for the Palestinians.
The suicide bombings also reduced the tens of thousands working in Israel proper to a mere trickle.
Hamas also used the enforced poverty to keep the people dependent on their touted charity while blaming Israel for the state of affairs and battled with the other groups for the power they now have their grasp.
Maybe with Mubarak's apparent unpopularity they see this as a time to increase the dissent?
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at April 25, 2006 7:07 AM
Re article
Omar Abdel Rahman, Sayyid Qutb, Sado-Islam, etc have their awrahs (heads) uncovered in the article.
Posted by: Frank at April 25, 2006 7:28 AM
Islam simplifies the Universe for the Believers: it reduces the world to Islam and nothing but Islam. The attacks on tourists in Egypt are not merely attacks on Infidels, and Infidel ways. They are also attacks on the Infidel state. Why is the state "Infidel"? Because Mubarak and his Friends-and-Family plan are corrupt. And for Muslims, everything must be reduced to Islamic terms. In India, a corrupt state governor might simply be called "corrupt"' and not "un-Hindu." A corrupt big-city machine in the United States might be called "corrupt" but there would be no need to identify the corrupt politician as "un-Christian." In the world of Islam, everything must be reduced, in the end, to Islamic terms: Islamic and non-Islamic, Believer and Infidel. It is what neatly and simply divides the universe. That is why all rage at government corruption will end up, in Muslim states and for Muslim minds, unfortunately end up being efforts connected to bringing the answer: the answer is even more Islam. And since that Answer of More Islam has terrible consequences for non-Muslims both within the country in question, and without, the effort of Infidels must not be to encourage those who, whatever else they promise, also promise more Islam (and as the Islamic Republic of Iran demonstrates, the clerics can be just as corrupt as the Al-Saud princelings and princelettes, or as the chocolate soldiers of Mubarak's army). Instead, efforts should be made to create conditions in which Islam itself becomes demoralized, divided, discredited, so that an enlightened despot (Ataturk or Bourguiba or the late Shah of Iran) can find enough supoprt to either ignore or systematically limit the power of Islam. Ataturk did this, but the beneficiaries (secular Turks) were outmaneuvered, and in some cases simply did not realize what kind of constant vigilance is necesssary to foil the permanent threat of a renewal of Islam (just look at Turkey now); Bourguiba's Destour Party ruled in Tunisia, where Ben Ali now rules the same kind of quasi-enlightened police-state -- a police-state that is nonetheless freer in many ways than other Muslim Arab states, save possibly for Oman, like Tunisia a place where an enlightened ruler (Sultan Qaboos) is able to keep things reaonsably decent.
In Egypt, these attacks on tourists and tourist sites are attacks on several things at once:
1) Infidel lives are of no value.
2) Infidels bring corruption.
3) Those invovled in serving the needs of Infidel tourists are themselves corrupt and offend against Islam.
4) The corrupt government derives benefits from the tourist trade and so that trade must be diminished.
5) Tourism keeps the minds of Egyptians on the monuments of the pre-Islamic period, monuments which have no value whatsoever -- save that of bringing in mere money. The pyramids, the Sphinx, all those mummies and mastabas, are of no interest.
Were the Bamiyan Buddhas worth preserving after 1,500 years? The Taliban did not think so. The Saudi and Pakistani advisers they called in to help deploy the 100,000 pounds of explosives didn't think so. The Muslims who destroyed everything they could of the Greco-Bactrian civilization of Afghanistan over many centuries did not think any of those artifacts, temples, manuscripts, stupas, monuments, were worth preserving. Why should they? The Muslims in India who built their first known mosque right over a Jain temple they destroyed, and then went on to destroy tens of thousands of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sites, did not think that non-Muslim sites were worth preserving. If the odd site has escaped such destruction, that testifies only to local syncretistic conditions, or specific circumstances (as in Indonesia, where the predominately Hindu peoples, and their civilization, conquered not outright by an invading army but through slow penetration, by military colonies established in the wake of trading outposts, and the conversion of important local rulers (and hence of those they ruled.
Of course the indifference, or hostility, to pre-Islamic civilizations in Egypt is modified by the desire for the money that thosee monuments and artifacts bring in. But Muslims never displayed an interest in those artifacts for other reasons. It was Western students of Egypt's past, from the Rosetta Stone to the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, from Champollion through Lepsius to Howard Carter, who created Egyptology. It was Austen Henry Layard and other Westerners, right up to Henry Woolley at Ur, who discovered, and recovered, and collected, and catalogued, and studied, the artifcats from the the pre-Islamic past of Mesopotamia. The museums of Cairo and Baghdad were founded by Westerners (the Cairo Museum by a Frenchman, the museum of Baghdad developed out of Gertrude Bell's Department of Antiquities), and what museological coherence they now possess (as museums, rather than as mere warehouses) is due to Westerners. Those who have taken up the study of pre-Islamic artifacts (in Egypt, in Jordan, in Iraq) would likely have to be largely indifferent to the teachings and attitudes of Islam toward all non-Islamic things. But even these slef-described "secular" or "cultural" Muslims may harbor a loyalty to Islam, either filiopietistic (memories of a pious grandmother or Iftar dinners), or one based on ethnic pride and identification (for the idea of an "Arab" is inextricably linked with the idea of Islam -- something that Arab islamochristians have been made to feel deeply).
Posted by: Hugh at April 25, 2006 9:05 AM
From what I heard, it seems that most of the dead were Egyptians on holiday, imitating the mores of infidels. This tells you what the terrorists think of their fellow Egyptians, and how they see common citizenship or humanity.
Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 9:18 AM
Pictures of the bodies should be shown.
These people are all in deep denial of their hideous deeds in the name of their insane moon rock god.
Posted by: moderationist at April 25, 2006 10:18 AM
The genius of Christianity rests in its alternative to the stark black-and-white Either/Or expressed by Sayyid Qutb (as quoted by Spencer above):
"Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible."
St. Augustine, in his monumental and influential work City of God, recognized and analyzed the state of existence in this life (i.e., during all of history until the Last Day) as neither a state of clearly being in the City of God (purity) nor a state of clearly being in the City of Man (sin), but rather, as a state of what he masterfully called the civitas permixta: the "thoroughly intermixed City", where both "Cities" (of God and of Man) are mixed together, difficult to distinguish or differentiate.
The Muslim mentality, however, is motivated by a lust to have the purity of the eschatological "City" shine triumphantly in this life, in history. But this is not possible, as the patient, humble Christian mentality knows, for life is in a mysterious tension of perfection-imperfection, and there can be no "triumph" in this life. The Muslim mentality leads to intolerance with the resistance this life puts up against his lust for perfection & purity, and so the Muslim goes on a never-ending campaign to hack away at all the obstacles (including human beings) in the way of his obsession with transforming imperfection into perfection -- which of course makes his "perfection" a hideous mirror-opposite.
(Note: This is not to say that the genius of Christianity exemplified in Augustine (and many others) has always been the norm: since that genius is precisely the acceptance of the tension of existence, the cultural organism of which it is the guiding expression will often contain fallibility and flaws.)
Posted by: Television at April 25, 2006 4:05 PM
Television: congratulations for a superb little summary. Just a question: being able to write so intelligently, why did you name yourself for the idiot box?
Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 4:28 PM
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