Feeding the Belief

I love election years. A former colleague in the US sent a link to my Facebook inbox with a note, “True? Unbelievable.” The link was a pundit piece titled "Calls to Destroy Egypt’s Great Pyramids Begin," by Raymond Ibrahim, a American born to Egyptian parents and and bilingual in Arabic and English. Ibrahim posted his piece for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which purports to "combat the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values," and the link was being disseminated on the Facebook page of a conservative political organization campaigning virulently against US President Barack Obama. Nope, no hidden agendas here. Ibrahim’s piece asserted, “prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids [… as] ‘symbols of paganism’.” It pinged several times in my newsfeed, sparking a brief flurry of panic on a group of mostly foreign Egyptologists. A day after the poorly reasoned post went viral, the Daily News Egypt reported that the ‘destroy the pyramids’ scheme was a hoax started on a parody Twitter account. In his efforts to tar Muslims with the brushes of extremism and ignorance – a recurring theme in his posts – Ibrahim based his primary argument on 140 characters of satire. It is the latest in the game of ‘Islamists gone wild,’ where the media accidentally, negligently or willfully misses the joke and reports absurd rumors as God-given fact. Remember April’s non-existent “farewell sex” law? A made-up quote in a state-run newspaper’s opinion column suggested that Parliament was in the process of passing a law to allow husbands to have a round of "farewell" intercourse with their recently deceased wives. Al-Arabiya took the quote and ran it as news of a proposed law. In its translation to English, the UK tabloid Daily Mail reported it as a passed law. All of this was news to the Islamist-majority Parliament, which had never considered any such proposal. Of course, by then, the story had been reported as fact by relatively respected media such as CNN and the Huffington Post, and an assortment of widely heard conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  Oops. I am constantly exasperated by such foolishness, but I can’t fault the US audience for taking the bait, not if they’ve never experienced Egypt for themselves. Long before the end of the Cold War took the USSR off the menu of US enemies, political Islam burned itself into the American psyche as the bad guy. It wore the heavily bearded, turbaned face of Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iranian revolutionaries who in 1979 took US embassy workers hostage for 444 days. I couldn’t find the Middle East on a map and didn’t know there was a difference between a Persian and an Arab. Heck, I didn’t even know there were any such things as Persians and Arabs — I was 10 years old at the time. All we average Americans knew is these guys are Muslims and they don’t like us. That was more than 20 years before another heavily bearded, turbaned guy named Osama Bin Laden claimed credit for the worst terror attack on US soil since the World War II bombing of Pearl Harbor. And so another generation of average Americans gets to grow up thinking, ‘Hey, these guys are Muslims and they don’t like us.  And don’t look now, but one just got elected president of Egypt.’ We’ll set aside the fact that President Mohamed Morsy is no Osama Bin Laden and does not advocate terrorism. What my concerned friends and family don’t get to see from their side of the Atlantic is that political Islam is just as much a bogeyman for many Egyptians. It’s not just my Christian friends who fear what a government under Morsy, former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, means for their rights. In the past year, many Muslims have told me they don’t want an Islamist government dictating their religion Saudi-style. Some of these people are self-proclaimed liberal activists championing civil rights and a civil state; others are just average Egyptians more concerned with being able to work and live their lives in peace. While these Egyptians are quick to dismiss the really absurd claims like “farewell sex” and “destroy the pyramids,” there is still willingness to believe unsubstantiated rumors of so-called vice committees and other Saudi-style behavior being officially condoned. Not all of these rumors hit the media. Just a couple of weeks ago, a friend claimed a policeman in Sharm El-Sheikh harassed a tourist driver for being alone with a foreign female in the car, because, you know, it’s Morsy’s Egypt now. And there’s the nervous joking. With Ramadan just days away, a colleague and I were talking about the challenges of fasting during summer. Just the thought of it is daunting, I told him, and I don’t even fast. “You should get used to fasting,” he laughed, “now that Morsy is president.” I laughed too, but it got me thinking. One of the things we non-Muslim expats joke about is “non-faster’s guilt,” which has us furtively drinking our coffee in dark corners of the office or discreetly forgoing lunch until everyone else has gone home for the day. It is a completely self-generated guilt: In 12 years I have never had a Muslim criticize or judge me harshly for not fasting. On the contrary, some tell me they earn extra blessings by watching me eat, so please, chow down. My Egyptian friends and neighbors have never expected me to follow their religious traditions just because I live in a predominantly Muslim country. I personally am not a fan of political Islam. I think any country run by a religion is a bad idea, and I don’t really trust politicians in general. But I do trust Egyptians, because my personal experience has shown most of them to be moderate and tolerant. I’m far more concerned about the political power struggle between Morsi and the military than I am about Morsi imposing ultra-conservative religious rule. These recent media stories, where absurd rumors are reported as fact, are all part of these presidential power struggles, not just at home, but abroad as well. In Egypt, stung by Islamist success in recent elections, liberals and the old regime figures are desperately trying to discredit the elected president with the most extreme specters of political Islam. In the US, Republicans hoping for success in the upcoming presidential elections are desperately trying to discredit Obama with the most extreme specters of political Islam. It’s part of human nature to believe the things that confirm our fears, or worse, our prejudices. But if you find yourself asking, “True? Unbelievable,” then you shouldn’t automatically believe it.