In the past century, most Canadians thought of the typical Egyptian as a man in a burnoose commuting to work on a camel. That image is forever changed.
The demonstrations which toppled a dictator took place in modern cities and involved passionate and articulate youths, male and female, as well as people displaying the dignity of the aged. The protestors were a cross-section of urban Egypt, joined together by sophisticated wireless messaging.
They became very much like a huge, multi-celled organism, a super-mind. With scarcely a dissenting voice, the uprising is hailed as success. Doom-sayers have yet to point out that the technology used to weld minds together in the Egyptian cities is the same technology which could be used in dictatorial mind control.
The Egyptian Army intervened to bring civil unrest to an end. This isn?t the first time. Horemheb, last king of the 18th Dynasty, was a powerful general who ?cleaned up? the confused scene which followed the reign of the heretic king, Ikhnaton, and his successor, Tutankhamen.
Horemheb was a man of obscure origins but impressive powers. Not born into the line of god-kings, he nevertheless ascended to the Egyptian throne I321 BC.
The most insidious feature of the old Egyptian religion was a cult of the dead. The wealth of the nation was sapped to provide monumental tombs and grave goods for the mummies of dead kings. Embalming, and later tomb-robbing, became major industries An additional requirement of the god-king religion was that the Pharaoh takes as his principal wife a sister, or half-sister.
The wiser religion of Islam began to spread throughout the Arab world around 632 AD. It was later co-opted by the Ottoman Turks. During the Great War, the Allied Powers encouraged the Arab states to rebel against the Turks with promises of them becoming masters in their own houses Instead, the post-war states of North Africa and the Middle East, became protectorates of European powers.
There was another opportunity for a resurgence of Pan-Arab nationalism after the Second World War. It was marred, perhaps beyond remedy, when Britain and France, with American approval, took what had been Arab lands for centuries and turned it into the foreign state of Israel. This is the sense of betrayal that haunts the Arab world. It will not be dispelled anytime soon.
