Symbols of Pagan Idolatry

Who can forget the joyous Hosannas, the ringing accolades, the self-congratulatory puffery that emanated out of the DC chattering classes as Middle Eastern tyrants such as Hosni Mubarak and Kaddafi were overthrown in spring of 2011. It was called the Arab Spring, and was set before the American People as proof that President Barack Obama was a foreign policy visionary who would lead the world into a new era of peace and coexistence.

This was all fun and games until the Muslim Brotherhood actually came into power. Then, the façade of niceness went the way of Lara Logan’s safety in Tahrir Square. With Muslim Brotherhood Party Member Mohammed Morsi elected Egypt’s new President, they have now embarked upon a course of barbaric religious “purification” which will take Egypt backwards culturally and economically. It will also endanger everyone who lives in a nation adjacent to the failed state that we formerly knew as Egypt.

One immediate manifestation of this retrograde trend involves the Great Pyramids in the Nile Valley. Modern Islamic clerics see these Egyptian monuments as idolatrous and are demanding their destruction. Raymond Ibrahim reports below.

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 Amr bin al-As could not.”
…While most Western academics argue otherwise, according to early Muslim writers, the great Library of Alexandria itself—deemed a repository of pagan knowledge contradicting the Koran—was destroyed under bin al-As’s reign and in compliance with Caliph Omar’s command.

While the desire to destroy the Great Pyramids reminds us of the aesthetic sensitivity you can expect from a religious reformation, recent social changes also represent a desire on the part of the Islamists to return to what they consider a prior “Golden Era.” Old-fashioned Islamic “Sex-Slave Marriages” have returned to Egypt as well. Raymond Ibrahim writes on this as well.

Last Monday, on the Egyptian TV show Al Haqiqa (“the Truth”), journalist Wael al-Ibrashi began the program by airing a video-clip of a man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, “marrying” his “slave.” Before making the woman, who had a non-Egyptian accent, repeat the Koran’s Surat al-Ikhlas after him, instead of saying the customary “I marry myself to you,” the woman said “I enslave myself to you,” and kissed him in front of an applauding audience.

According to Ibrahim, this was not just one sick individual who found himself a masochist. He describes the current movement among Islamists to bring about the return of sexual slavery below.

While this may be the first sex-slave marriage to take place in Egypt’s recent history, it is certainly not the first call to revive the practice. Earlier, Egyptian Sheikh Huwaini, lamenting that the “good old days” of Islam are over, declared that, in an ideal Muslim society, “when I want a sex-slave [I should be able to go] to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her.” Likewise, a Kuwaiti female politician advocated for reviving the institute of sex-slavery, suggesting that Muslims should bring female captives of war—specifically Russian women from the Chechnya war—and sell them to Muslim men in the markets of Kuwait.

Remember, according to Barack Obama, these people are the good guys. One of his first acts as President was to give a speech in which he apologized for how America had offended these people. David Goldman describes the role Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had in making sure Morsi could rapidly get to work on blasting great pyramids and allowing all those life-affirming sexual slave marriages.

Why, then, is Mohamed Morsi picking a fight with the military? As Jackson Diehl put it in the Washington Post July 8, “Last month the administration leaned heavily on the ruling military council to recognize Morsi’s victory in a runoff election. Lobbying by [US Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta may have prevented the council from handing the presidency to its favored candidate, a former prime minister. But it infuriated the generals, Egyptian Christians and some US supporters of Israel, who fear the Islamists more than the old regime.” With backing from the Obama administration, and enormous pressure from his political base, Morsi has rolled the dice with the military. The result is likely to blow up in his face as well as the Obama administration’s.

By supporting the worst elements of leadership driving the so-called Arab Spring, Barack Obama’s foreign policy has allowed a cabal of ruthless religious thugs to take Egypt backwards to a “Golden Era” of sexual slavery. This will ultimately destroy economies all over Northern Africa and destabilize a region that spans from Morocco to Palestine. Somebody should give this guy a Nobel Prize or something.