the Khan Al-Khalili Bombing

I’ve been planning on writing an entry for a couple of days. I wanted to finally write about our trip to the Giza pyramids, and our adventures last weekend in Coptic Cairo, Al-Azhar Park, and the Cairo “Zoo.” However,  I suppose it would be more fitting to discuss the recent terrorist attacks.

Last night, at around 9 p.m. (Egyptian time) two bombs were thrown from a balcony near a cafe in the Khan Al-Khalili market, near the famous Husayn Mosque.  Khan Al-Khalili is a large market/bazaar that is frequented by Egyptians, but is also a huge tourist attraction. As it stands now, one 17 year old French girl was killed, and 20 others were injured (although different media outlets are reporting slightly different numbers). Most of them were French tourists, however there were also a couple Saudis injured as well as a few Egyptians.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened. And in order to understand it, I think it is important to put it into context. One scholar and blogger, Juan Cole, writes it better than I could. Here are some excerpts from his analysis:

“I can remember talking to one of the store owners, the father of a family friend, about what the worst downturns in business were that he had experienced over the years. He frowned. That’s easy. 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982. The Arab-Israeli Wars. It is not, he said, that fewer tourists and customers came in those years. They did not come at all. They were years when the weaker and more extended merchants went under.

The radical Muslim extremists figured this vulnerability out. They thought if they could destroy the tourist trade, they could pull the plug on the government of Hosni Mubarak [the Egyptian "president" who has been in power since the assassination Anwar Sadat in 1981] of , depriving it of revenue from that trade. In the 1980s and 1990s they directly attacked tourists.

…

But it turns out that like most of the brain-dead tactics of the terrorists, this one always backfires on them. So many Egyptians depend on the revenues from the tourist trade that they view attacks on tourists as a death knell for their own jobs and economy. And Egyptian culture has a basic sense of decency and humaneness that they cannot square with killing innocent foreigners. The radicals made themselves political pariahs. The biggest radical group, The Islamic Grouping or Gama’a Islamiyah, once headed by the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman (who spearheaded the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993), was rounded up in the thousands. They became so hated and had so few options that they announced they were giving up on violence (not that they were pacifists, but they decided that as a tactic it was not permitted in most circumstances).

The neo-Gama’a was roundly denounced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the number 2 man in al-Qaeda. But his organization had become little more than a tiny political cult inside Egypt.”

Cole goes on to say that he is guessing that it was this Egyptian Islamic Jihad group that is responsible for the bombings, and cites the recent Gaza massacre as the motivation behind it:

“I’d also guess that the bombing came in response to the Egyptian government’s tacit support for the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza in December and January. The radicals had been repressed, penetrated, tapped, imprisoned, watched. They had made deals. There hadn’t been a bombing in Cairo for some time. But my guess is that for a few of them, Gaza was a deal breaker.”

If anyone is interested in learning more about Gaza, or Egypt’s “role” in the “war,” I’d be happy to post some links or write a blog about it.

Okay, so, what does all of this mean for me, and those of us studying abroad here this semester? In short, I’m not entirely sure. The bombing happened fairly late last night, and I was going to bed just as more detailed reports were coming out. The AUC international office called us to make sure that we weren’t at Khan Al-Khalili, and I’m assumming something will be done/said today about it. Other than that, I think it is important to look at this even in terms of its context in the Middle East. I know that in America, the idea of a bombing like this is so rare that it becomes a life-disrupting ordeal. As far as I have seen, this is not the case here. I am not saying that it is common, because it is not, but more that it has happened before. This is not an indication of war, or some kind of internal outbreak of violence: we are not in Iraq. We are taking precautions, but are trying not to blow it out of proportion. Our plan as of right now is just to avoid tourist areas and cancel any trips to places like Dahab, Luxor, Aswan, etc., in case more attacks are planed, because these places have been targets for terrorist attacks in the past. We live in on an island that is not a tourist area, and our campus is located way out in the desert development of New Cairo. We’re actually in some of the safest places in Cairo. I am not worried that they will target our dorms or our campus: they don’t typically target schools, and their aim is to disrupt the tourist industry. Besides, although it is an American school, the vast majority of the students are Egyptians.

I’ll try to keep this updated if I find out any more information.

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