Egyptian Fundamentalist Parties: Hey, Let's Blow Up The Great Pyramids Once and For All

Reminders of Egypt's pagan past.

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.”

This is a reference to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s companion, Amr bin al-As and his Arabian tribesmen, who invaded and conquered Egypt circa 641. Under al-As and subsequent Muslim rule, many Egyptian antiquities were destroyed as relics of infidelity. 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.

Don't worry, though -- reason shall prevail. More moderate voices call out for merely covering them in so much wax they'll appear as shapeless blobs.

Meh. Fine. How about you just sell them, so an American investment consortium can move them brick-by-brick to, say, Death Valley or Arizona? (I prefer Arizona so that it turns Steve Martin's King Tut -- "Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona" -- into a sort of prophecy.)

Then we can see the Great Pyramids in relative safety, and let Egypt dine on zero dollars.

Lunacy, of course. And a lunacy that will only be cured by a genuine epochal calamity. I just hope that calamity is mostly restricted to the lunatics, and doesn't bring the too much woe to the non-lunatics.

via @rdbrewer4

posted by Ace at 05:04 PM

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