We display statues so they can be studied and so people can get to know their heritage. This is Egypt’s national heritage. We don’t display them for worship.

—Mohsen Said, employee of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities, referring to the fatwa, or religious opinion, that Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa issued last month. Mufti Ali Gomaa declared that sculptures, including Egypt’s pharonic statues that pre-date Islam and form the backbone of the nation’s tourism industry, are un-Islamic and therefore forbidden.

Although the undeniable resurgence in Islamic attitudes should be taken seriously, it’s unlikely that Egypt will take too literal a reading of such a fatwa and start smashing statues in an iconoclastic smashing spree.  Such a precedent, does, however, exist elsewhere: in 2001 the Afghan Taliban destroyed the two massive statues of the Buddha carved into the cliffs in Bamiyan, which were then the tallest standing statues of the Buddha in the world.  The statues, which were at least 1,500 years old, were deemed “offensive to Islam” and subsequently demolished.  

Mimi Hanaoka