When Ibn Jubayr, the secretary to the Muslim governor of conquered Spain visited the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1182, he described it as a “miraculous construction and wonderful to look upon.” Historian John O’Neill (author of “Holy Warriors”) said the Islamic dignitary was blissfully ignorant as to its builders, believing the ancient structures to be “the tombs of early prophets mentioned in the Koran.” Jubayr lamented, “To be short, none but the Great and Glorious God can know their story.”
You see, by Jubayr’s time, all Greco-Roman historical sources were swept from the Muslim-dominated world … they felt no need to keep the writings of pagan infidels like the Greek traveler and historian Herodotus, or Josephus (a Jew) who claimed the giant structures were built by Hebrew slaves to hold the “wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies and their order.”
That preservation fell to cloistered Medieval European Christian monks.
Of course, the Great Pyramid looked different after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in AD 640. Prior to the invasion, the structure still possessed its white exterior marble casings that, according to legend, reflected the sun’s rays, offering ancient Mediterranean sailors a bright navigational reference point. With Egypt’s conquest, Islam stripped the marble from the structure and used it to construct many of Cairo’s towering Mosques.
Now, according to various news accounts, the Egyptian Salafi Party wants to cover the Great Pyramid’s cyclopsian exterior stones in wax – all 40,745 of them.
And the Assyrian International News Agency says Bahrain’s President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, want’s Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not.”
Oh, yes, Sahabi Amr bin al-As.
He was the Muslim general who destroyed what was left of the Great Library of Alexandria, which proudly held the books of ancient knowledge – like those written by Herodotus and Josephus.
“It’s easier to destroy than to create,” goes the old saying. However, a conquering Islam didn’t have the manpower or know how necessary to dismantle Khufu’s monument to resurrection, and the Muslim general ended up making a monumental al-As out of himself.
Even with today’s engineering technology, it would take years and the resources of a Bechtel or Halliburton Corporation to dismantle the desert wonder of a long dead pharaoh. With that not likely to happen, it falls to Egypt’s faithful to haul away the Great Pyramid’s 2,300,000 stone blocks – weighing an average 2.5 tons each.
If history is any judge, Islam is nothing if not persistent in the ways of destruction.
“Man fears time,” goes an old Arab proverb, “But time fears the pyramids.”
We’ll see.
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