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| Arabia |
| What Respect Have Wahhabis Shown To Muslim Monuments? |
| 2004-08-04 |
| BY MELIK KAYLAN Two 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 |
| #1 To hell with desecrating the monuments. Wahhabi clerics are desecrating every single mosque they preach in. By advocating violent jihad, Wahhabists are inviting and actively precipitating the complete and total destruction of Islam as a whole. It's hard to desecrate one's own religion any more than that. When one considers the incredible beauty of some mosques, like the Haga Sophia, the concept of Wahhabis "redecorating" such a world heritage site is simply an abomination. Most amazing of all is Islam's total state of denial over what Wahhabism holds for the future. Fused glass figures prominently in the very near term unless Muslims figure out some way to divest themselves of Wahhabism's destructive hammerlock. Saudi Arabia has essentially disfigured and maimed Islam as a whole and Muslims don't seem to care. How shocked will they then be to then discover that no one else in the non-Islamic global community will give a sh!t when Moslem countries come under subsequent nuclear attack for continuing Wahhabist atrocities? |
| Posted by: Zenster 2004-08-04 8:19:37 PM |