Julian Barnett
Egypt, Part 2: Islamic Cairo
Summary
The second of four lectures on Egypt, examining the long and colorful history of Cairo and its continuing critical importance as the “true heartbeat of the Arab and Islamic worlds.”
Julian Barnett
Julian Barnett is a teacher, collector, tour guide, and writer with a specialist interest in ultra-orthodoxy within the various faiths. For the last 35 years, he has been investigating and documenting the most extreme sects of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. His experiences and travels were serialized in the Jerusalem Report and also broadcast on BBC Radio Four Religion. Outside of his full-time history teaching post at Southbank International School, Portland Place, London, Julian lectures at numerous venues around the UK and beyond. In 2013 Julian was a joint winner of the National Teacher of the Year Award.
If you think geographically, so we’d go from Egypt to Libya to Algeria, over to Tunisia, over to Morocco, over to Western Sahara. Then let’s go eastward, so we’d go from Egypt, we’d go to Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Iraq and Yemen. And then we go northwards. We’d go to Lebanon and then up to Syria. And then of course there’s all the many smaller Gulf states and the caliphates and the sultanates within the Gulf itself. I’m sure I’ve missed out some, but that gives you an idea. There’s either 21 or 22. I have a mental block, I can never remember if it’s 21 or 22 countries in the Arab world. But Egypt is by far and away the most single populous of them. And as I say, more or less, one in every four and a half Arabs are Egyptian.
It’s a huge question. It recognises Cairo as a key Islamic city in the world. It recognises Cairo as the key Arab city in the world. But there is that Shia-Sunni split. So therefore they have their own path. And their holy sites are Mecca and Medina, of course, and Jerusalem, of course. But then all the rest, most of the rest of their holy sites are in fact in Iraq. The seminal events that really turned Shia Islam into a completely separate schism occurred in what is now called modern day Iraq, rather than Iran. So they recognise Cairo as a great Islamic and Arab city, but they look to their own for guidance. So the ayatollahs are ruling, making Islamic rulings on Islamic questions for the Shia Muslims of the world. The Mufti of Al-Azhar rules for the Sunni Muslims of the world, but that is 85-88% of the Muslims of the world.
My word, huge question. Oil is part of it. It sits on the Gulf is part of it. The fact that it is the pulsating heart of the Shia Muslim world is part of it. The fact that it is a theocracy, I think that gives it a raison d'etre, which isn’t equaled in a lot of other Muslim countries. It is a very ancient culture. Iran and Egypt claim to be the two longest continued countries with unchanged borders, more or less. So you have the ancient culture of Iran, the Zoroastrians. You have the pre-Islamic pagan cultures of Iran. This is an ancient, ancient people that have been Islamized. And of course many people say they’ve been hijacked by Islam because the Iranian people are much, much, much older than Islam. And that’s come out in quite a few of the demonstrations, by the way. Some of the demonstrators recently have been saying, you know, we want to get our Iran back. That sort of sentiment. So all those things together I think make Iran so powerful.