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Egyptians Question Culture-Extremism Link
 Stunned by terror attacks in a Red Sea resort, Egyptians are in a remarkably frank debate about whether mosques and schools â and the government itself â should be blamed for promoting Islamic extremism.
| Why, yes. Why do you ask? Surely you're not thinking of doing anything about it?... Didn't think so. |
Even pro-government media say authorities have created a climate where young people are turning into radicals and suicide bombers. In a country more used to hearing general condemnations of terrorism, critics on Wednesday were angry â and specific â hammering at instances where they say the government let state media and mosque preachers, including many appointed by the government, to promote intolerance.
| Y'see, when the corpses are in Israel, or in Iraq, or in India or Chechnya or on some island in the Philippines where the monkeys are reputed to have no tails, then you can parse words and slice hairs and argue about how many houris can dance on the head of a pin and exactly what the definition of "terrorism" should be. When the deaders are in your own country it's terrorism. You can recognize it right away. |
At one mosque in Cairo, some worshippers objected to prayers for the dead and missing after Saturday's bombings in Sharm el-Sheik because some victims were likely non-Muslims, said the editor of the government weekly Al-Musawwar.
| On the other hand, or the Third Hand, as Kathy would describe it, piles of body parts does make your society choose up sides pretty quick... |
Another columnist pointed to a weekly column in the government Al-Ahram daily by a religious scholar, Zaghloul al-Naggar, who explains science by using the Quran. After December's tsunami in the Indian Ocean, he went on Arab television and called the devastation God's revenge on Westerners engaged in vice.
| ... and the ignorant will be among us even longer than the poor. |
The debate since Sharm has been a deepening of the soul-searching that has gone on across the Arab world in recent years over whether religious interpretations need reform in the face of terror attacks by Muslim radicals. The debate began, hesitantly, after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. And the voices have grown with each act of terrorism â particularly ones in the Middle East. A series of attacks in Saudi Arabia in 2003 forced that country to begin taking action against extremist thought.
| Yet Sheikh Hawali's still doing business at the same old stand, doesn't even have to offer discounts, and not a single holy man's head has been chopped off. As far as I know, not a single snuffy's head has been chopped off, for that matter. |
The 2004 Madrid bombings increased calls for change among Muslims in Europe and the Mideast. After the July 7 suicide bombings in London, Britain's largest Sunni group issued a binding religious edict, known as a fatwa, condemning the attack.
| ... and we can all see how much good that's done. Talk about quick results! |
Egypt has been hit this month by a double blow: the kidnapping and slaying of its top envoy in Iraq by Islamic militants and the bomb blasts that ripped through Sharm, killing as many as 88 people â the vast majority of them Egyptians.
| Egypt's reaction to the murder of its diplomats was to withdraw the remainder of its staff from Iraq, tail between legs. As far as I know, there haven't been any Egyptian hunter-killer teams dispatched to extract the precious Arab Dire Revenge⢠for murder most foul. In a much more primitive age than ours, if, say, the Hittites had bumped off the Egyptian ambassador â and they did exchange diplomatic missions â if would have been cause for bloody war. Today's Egyptians, for all their propensity for occasionally making faces, slaughtering their Christian minority, and blessing krazed killers, don't have the testicular capacity their (Coptic) ancestors had. |
What was unusual about the self-criticism after Sharm was that it came from government media â and even from within the Islamic clerical hierarchy picked by the government. "There is no use denying. ... We incited the crime of Sharm el-Sheik," ran a bold red headline of a lead editorial Wednesday by Al-Musawwar's editor in chief, Abdel-Qader Shohaib. The bombers "didn't just conjure up in our midst suddenly, they are a product of a society that produces extremist fossilized minds that are easy to be controlled," Shohaib wrote. "They became extremists through continuous incitement for extremism which we have allowed to exist in our societies. Regrettably, the incitement is coming from mosque pulpits, newspapers, and TV screens, and radio microphones," which are all state-run, Shohaib said.
| There's a bit more left in the article, though it doesn't add much. Read it if you want. |
Posted by: Fred 2005-07-28 |
