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What Respect Have Wahhabis Shown To Muslim Monuments?
BY MELIK KAYLANTwo weekends ago, a certain identifiable swatch of world community worthies--United Nations and European Union dignitaries, Muslim princes and ambassadors, NGO officials--came together in Bosnia to celebrate the reopening of the famous Mostar Bridge. It had been destroyed by Bosnian Croats in 1993, during the Bosnian War, to expunge a symbol of cosmopolitan Islam dating from 16th-century Ottoman times. Its destruction caused an uproar, and rightly so. Simultaneously, Bosnian Serbs were busy obliterating some 70% of the local Muslims' historic monuments. The Serbs then moved on to similar deeds in Kosovo. The bridge's reopening had been a belated triumph. Under the aegis of Unesco, countries such as Turkey, Italy and Croatia contributed to the project for a decade along with town residents. At the same time, the town's old buildings underwent renovation funded by the Aga Khan and World Monuments Fund. The Mostar Bridge offers a corrective to all those clichés about American disregard and ignorance of world culture, about American unilateralism (bad) vs. international consensus (good), about America's much-bruited crusade against Islam--all so beloved of the Euro-U.N./Al Jazeera opinion bloc. Posted by: ed 2004-08-04 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=39737 |