Egypt Fans the Flames
Why Morsi Exploited the Muhammad Film -- and Why that Was a Bad Move
Article Summary and Author Biography
Just as Mubarak played up the controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 in order to improve his domestic standing, so Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's government has stoked popular outrage now. But the flames he has fanned will make life hotter for him as well as the United States.
JYTTE KLAUSEN is Professor of Comparative Politics at Brandeis University. She is author of The Cartoons that Shook the World.
Collection
An essay in images examining what happened during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, and how that incident figures into the broader story of post-revolutionary Libya.
Snapshot
Recent protests in Egypt have unleashed a wave of criticisms aimed at Obama's policy toward Cairo. But such complaints obscure the underlying reality: Obama has deftly handled Washington's response to the Egyptian revolution, and the next occupant of the White House would be well served to heed the example of the past four years.
Click to view an essay in photos about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. (Esam Al-Fetori / Courtesy Reuters)
The storming of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday echoed events following the 2005 Danish publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that led to widespread protest in 2006 and assaults on Danish embassies around the world. Today, Egypt's president, Mohamed Morsi, and his government are playing the same role that his predecessor Hosni Mubarak did then: provoking protest to consolidate power.
The chaos on Tuesday in Benghazi that resulted in the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, was set in motion the Sunday before when Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, spoke out against a film that he condemned as "offensive to all Muslims." He claimed that it was produced by "some extremist Copts" living in the United States. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood-led government followed Gomaa's lead and demanded a public apology and criminal prosecution of the filmmakers. On Tuesday, as events unfolded in Benghazi, 3,000 demonstrators besieged the U.S. embassy in Cairo. An armed mob attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and killed Stevens and three other U.S. officials. It remains unclear who exactly planned the Libya strike, but reports point to Ansar al-Sharia (Supporters of the Islamic Law), a group connected to al Qaeda.
The film in question, it turns out, is little more than an amateur production made up of sophomoric sacrilegious sketches of the Prophet Muhammad taken from the Internet. It remains unclear who produced the dubious film, but it appears not to have been Egyptian Copts living in the United States. A trailer for the production was posted on YouTube in July, but apparently came to the attention of Egyptian authorities only after a murky Twitter campaign promoted it, with backing from a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, Terry Jones, who got everyone's attention in 2010 for his plans to burn copies of the Koran in a bonfire...
