According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids—or, in the words of Saudi
Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi‘i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to
cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” and President of National Unity,
Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not.”
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Now, however, as Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sheikhs” observes, and thanks to modern technology, the pyramids can be destroyed. The only question left is whether the Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt is “pious” enough—if he is willing to complete the Islamization process that started under the hands of Egypt’s first Islamic conqueror.
Nor is such a course of action implausible. History is laden with examples of Muslims destroying their own pre-Islamic heritage—starting with Islam’s prophet Muhammad himself, who destroyed Arabia’s Ka‘ba temple, transforming it into a mosque.
Asking “What is it about Islam that so often turns its adherents against their own patrimony?” Daniel Pipes provides
several examples, from Medieval Muslims in India destroying their forefathers’ temples, to contemporary Muslims destroying their non-Islamic heritage in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, and Tunisia.
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Much of this hate for their own pre-Islamic heritage is tied to the fact that, traditionally, Muslims do not identify with this or that nation, culture, heritage, or language, but only with the Islamic nation—the Umma.
Accordingly, while many Egyptians—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—
see themselves as Egyptians, Islamists have no national identity, identifying only with Islam’s “culture,” based on the “sunna” of the prophet and Islam’s language, Arabic. This sentiment was clearly reflected when the former
Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Akef, declared “the hell with Egypt,” indicating that the interests of his country are secondary to Islam’s.
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