Yakabuski: Quebec’s new history museum proposes an ethnocentric vision of the province’s past

2024/05/13 Leave a comment

Of note:

….Truth be told, the term “museum” is a misnomer in this case. To go by his own descriptions, what the Premier seems to have in mind is a pantheon of Québécois heroes, from hockey greats Maurice Richard and Mario Lemieux to artists such as Céline Dion and Ginette Reno – all francophone Québécois, though he did allow that Leonard Cohen might also make the list. How big of him.

Source: Quebec’s new history museum proposes an ethnocentric vision of the province’s past

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Douglas Todd: Anti-stigma campaigns need a complete rethink

2024/05/04 Leave a comment

Social norms often change through stigma as the smoking example illustrates. For the most part, the same phenomenon with overt racism, sexism and the like but as we see south of the border, limits to its effectiveness:

…More importantly, slavish commitment to anti-stigma theory is also out of place when we realize we live in a society, if you think about it for more than a few seconds, that is quite adept at stigmatizing certain behaviours.

Like cigarette smoking.

In the past 50 years North America’s public-health community has used the power of stigma to great effect. It launched anti-smoking advertising campaigns, complete with grisly death data, that eventually rendered smoking uncommon. Something similar happened with drunk driving. And it’s widely agreed that’s been a good thing.

So there is much to learn from the professor whom Bonnie Henry hired as a consultant. In their article in The Atlantic, Caulkins and Humphreys actually highlight B.C.’s policies, because this province has gone further than just about any place in North America in making harm reduction, and anti-stigma, the centre of its drug-response strategy.

B.C. “has decriminalized drugs, offers universal health care, and provides a range of health services to drug users, including clinic-provided heroin and legal provision of powerful opioids for unsupervised use,” write Caulkins and Humphreys.

“And yet its rate of drug-overdose fatalities is nearly identical to that of South Carolina, which relies on criminal punishments to deter use, and provides little in the way of harm-reduction services.”

Caulkins and Humphreys are not trying to suggest there is no place for empathy for those in the clutches of illicit drugs. As they say, when it comes to people who are addicted, it’s worth remembering the teaching, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The problem is the behaviour, not the person.

And to be clear, no single strategy will end today’s scourge of drug deaths. That means there is a role for safer supply and harm reduction. And there is huge space for compassion.

But there is also a time for social deterrence, as there has been with cigarette smoking. There is a time to reinforce the message that “one pill can kill.”

To put it directly, fentanyl and its ilk should be shunned.

Source: Douglas Todd: Anti-stigma campaigns need a complete rethink

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Dave Snow: The federal government is spending millions on equity, diversity, and inclusion research

2024/04/03 Leave a comment

Informative data-based analysis of SSHRC funding for its Race, Diversity and Gender Initiative, revealing an overtly ideological and activist social justice and equity agenda:

…A year before, SSHRC awarded $19.2 million in funding for 46 grants of up to $450,000 for its Race, Diversity, and Gender Initiative to create partnerships to study disadvantaged groups. The program description encouraged projects that seek to “achieve greater justice and equity,” and its list of “possible research topics” included questions such as “How can cisgender and straight masculinity be reinvented for a gender-equitable world?” and “Which mechanisms perpetuate White privilege and how can such privilege best be challenged?” The language used in these new grants denotes the clearest shift yet towards more activist priorities in federal research grant funding.

SSHRC data on EDI

To determine whether the “hard” EDI of social justice activism has had a real effect on the types of projects that received funding for SSHRC grants, I conducted a content analysis of the titles of 680 grants awarded under four programs between 2022-23, the latter two of which are explicitly EDI-focused: 

  1. Insight Grants announced in 2023, which “support research excellence in the social sciences and humanities,” valued between $7,000 and $400,000 over five years. (504 total)
  2. Partnership Engage Grants announced in 2023, which provide short-term support for a partnership with a “single partner organization from the public, private or not-for-profit sector,” valued between $7,000 and $25,000 for one year. (100 total)
  3. Knowledge Synthesis Grants to study “Shifting Dynamics of Privilege and Marginalization” announced in 2023, valued at $30,000 for one year. (30 total)
  4. Race, Gender, and Diversity Initiative grants announced in 2022, which support partnerships “on issues relating to systemic racism and discrimination of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups,” valued at “up to $450,000” over three years. (46 total)

First, I categorized each grant recipient according to whether their project title was clearly adopting a critical activist perspective (if there was any uncertainty, it was categorized as “no”). 

I then categorized each grant according to which EDI identity markers the projects covered—Indigenous Peoples, women/gender, LGBTQ+, race, and disability (including mental health). 

As Table 1 shows, the contrast between the two “traditional” grants and the two new EDI-focused grants was striking. Fully one-third of grants in the Race, Gender, and Diversity initiative focused on Indigenous Peoples, and 30 percent mentioned race or racism (compared with 3 percent and 1 percent of the Insight Grants). 

The disparity is especially pronounced when you compare the Race, Gender, and Diversity grants to the Insight Grants, where there was an 11-1 ratio in the proportion of grants awarded on the topic of Indigenous peoples (33 percent versus 3 percent). There was also a 30-1 ratio in the proportion of grants awarded on the topic of race (30 percent versus 1 percent).

Graphic credit: Janice Nelson

It might seem obvious that the two EDI-focused grants produced so many recipients with explicitly activist titles (63 percent compared with 9 percent of traditional grants). Yet it didn’t need to be this way. Examples of non-activist titles of Race, Gender, and Diversity Initiative recipients included “Understanding Race and Racism in Immigration Detention” and “Open-Access Education Resources in Deaf Education Electronic Books as Pedagogy and Curriculum.” One can study marginalized communities without engaging in social justice activism. 

However, most of the EDI-focused grants awarded left no doubt as to the type of research that would be undertaken. Choice titles included:

  • “‘So what do we do now?’: Moving intersectionality from academic theory to recreation-based praxis” ($450,000 grant awarded)
  • “Queering Leadership, Indigenizing Governance: Building Intersectional Pathways for Two Spirit, Trans, and Queer Communities to Lead Social and Institutional Change” ($446,000 grant awarded)
  • “Carceral Intersections of Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and Trans Experience in Confronting Anti-Black Racism and Structural Violence in the Prisoner Reentry Industrial Complex” ($400,075 grant awarded)

In addition to grant titles, I also examined SSHRC’s diversity data on grant recipients from “underrepresented groups” for all major grants in SSHRC’s own EDI dashboard. This included Insight Grants, Insight Development Grants, Partnership Grants, and Connection Grants contained in SSHRCs (diversity data for the two new EDI-focused grants described above were not available). 

Table 2 provides these numbers alongside SSHRC’s equity targets for 2024/2025 and the groups’ proportion of Canadian university faculty as of 2019. Numbers in red show “under-performance” in the applicant-recipient ratio and SSHRC’s own targets.

Graphic credit: Janice Nelson

Four things are notable. First, only one of SSHRC’s four target groups (visible minority applicants) has been underrepresented in terms of the applicant-recipient ratio. Second, while women are the only group who have exceeded SSHRC’s equity target, the percentage of recipients has been growing rapidly for visible minority applicants and persons with a disability. Third, no target group is underrepresented relative to its proportion of university faculty members, with women (56 percent of recipients) especially outperforming their faculty proportion (49 percent). Finally, Indigenous grant recipients (2 percent) are underrepresented relative to their proportion of the overall population (5 percent), but not relative to their proportion of university faculty members.

Damaging the pursuit of truth

The above analysis leads me to three broad conclusions. First, while the language of EDI has permeated SSHRC, the federal agency oscillates between the “soft” EDI of affirmative action and the “hard” EDI of critical social justice activism. Most of the time, SSHRC focuses on achieving “equity targets” and frames EDI as complementary to research excellence. However, SSHRC’s new EDI-themed grants explicitly adopt activist language, and it is little wonder that those awards have been dominated by activist projects.  

Second, when it comes to the “soft” EDI of affirmative action, SSHRC’s policies are clearly having their intended effect for all groups except Indigenous Peoples. The number of grants awarded to women, visible minority applicants, and persons with a disability is rising. Grants are being awarded to members of these three groups at a proportion equal to or greater than their share of university faculty, and in the case of women, well above their share of the overall population. At this rate, it will soon be inaccurate for SSHRC to refer to “underrepresented groups” when it comes to prestigious national grants.

Finally, the “hard” EDI of critical social justice activism poses the biggest threat to SSHRC’s commitment to research excellence. While there are important critiques of the effects of “soft” EDI of affirmative action, it does not necessarily pose the same existential threat to research excellence. But the “hard” EDI of critical social justice activism is utterly incompatible with the objective pursuit of truth. One need only skim the titles of grants awarded under SSHRC’s two new EDI-focused initiatives to see how far they have strayed from the objective, empirical knowledge creation that we expect our national granting agencies to fund. Ironically, the more an award is pitched in terms of “diversity,” the less intellectually diverse the recipients seem to be. Thankfully, such activist research remains primarily confined to the new (and for now temporary) EDI-focused grants. 

If the federal government wants universities to keep the public’s trust, it should avoid any future activist-themed grants and ensure that granting agencies eschew social justice priorities. Federal granting agencies using taxpayer dollars should be explicit that their primary commitment is to promote excellence via the creation and dissemination of objective, falsifiable research knowledge. The university is supposed to function as a system of knowledge production. Policies that openly tie research to activist political ends threaten to undermine that very system.

Source: Dave Snow: The federal government is spending millions on equity, diversity, and inclusion research

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Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90

2024/03/30 Leave a comment

Great fan of his work, and was instrumental in my framing and writing Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias:

…Much of Professor Kahneman’s work is grounded in the notion — which he did not originate but organized and advanced — that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).

Others have personified these mental modes as Econs (rational, analytical people) and Humans (emotional, impulsive and prone to exhibit unconscious mental biases and an unwise reliance on dubious rules of thumb). Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe these rules of thumb. One is the “halo effect,” where in observing a positive attribute of another person one perceives other strengths that aren’t really there.

“Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents,” the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2011. “They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers, and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.”

But Professors Kahneman and Tversky, he went on, “yielded a different vision of human nature.”

As Mr. Brooks described it: “We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness.” He added: “Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.”

The work of Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky, he concluded, “will be remembered hundreds of years from now.”

Source: Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90

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Adams & Parkin: Free trade wasn’t just Mulroney’s key achievement – it is one of the most dramatic public opinion turnarounds in Canada’s history

2024/03/25 Leave a comment

Of note. Of course, another dramatic change was the shift to positive support for immigration, under threat to some extent by concerns over housing, healthcare etc)

….The Mulroney government implemented free trade, but (the 1988 election victory notwithstanding) it left office having lost the support of the majority of the public on the issue. Herein lies the first lesson for those aspiring to political leadership, which is perhaps a strange one for pollsters to point out: don’t pay too much attention to who’s on top of the polls. Free trade was a policy championed by experts – the dour economists and the faceless bureaucrats – that became less popular the longer the government that fought for it remained in office. Mr. Mulroney’s ability to see it through was ultimately due, not to his charm, but to his thick skin.

…

The second lesson that political leaders can draw from this incredible turnaround? Vindication takes time. Mr. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives endured defeat, then watched while Liberal governments reaped the benefits of free trade, championed its expansion globally, and won praise for defending it in response to the election of a maverick U.S. president. Mr. Mulroney played for the longer-term, which may be one of the hardest things to do in modern politics. But by choosing that path, he ensured that today – 40 years after NAFTA – his praises are being sung.

Source: Free trade wasn’t just Mulroney’s key achievement – it is one of the most dramatic public opinion turnarounds in Canada’s history

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Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

2024/02/29 Leave a comment

Believe not unique to political science and his conclusions based on extensive article analysis.

Some of my academic friends, in broad agreement with Snow’s depiction of the shift, point out however that most academics prefer to publish in higher profile international journals given greater weight in tenure and related decisions:

…. I draw three main conclusions. First, Canadian political science scholarship is clearly shifting in important ways. For better or worse, papers published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science reflect the discipline itself. While the discipline has not undergone a wholesale change (as seems to be the case in history), a sizeable proportion of Canada’s flagship political science journal is composed of papers using critical approaches and methodologies that place a greater emphasis on narratives of historical marginalization, particularly with respect to Indigenous Peoples and decolonization. 

Second, the journal’s openness to critical methodologies and identity diversity has been accompanied by a narrowing of its ideological diversity. While authors’ policy recommendations are by no means ideologically homogenous, they generally range from centre-left to far-left. This tilt is most obvious in papers that focus on decolonization, but it is present throughout the entire journal. Of 227 papers published over the last five years, I did not find a single one that provided anything approximating a conservative policy recommendation. By contrast, even the journal’s most empirically rigorous quantitative papers often contain recommendations such as “political parties should recruit and promote more women candidates” and “Policy tools specifically designed to problematize, target and alleviate racial economic inequality also seem needed.” Conservative scholars used to publish mildly conservative policy recommendations in the journal. Those days are now long gone.

Third, the journal editors’ statement is sadly reflective of similar statements made in Canadian higher education regarding equity, diversity, and inclusion, insofar as it refuses to acknowledge any previous progressive change. The Canadian Journal of Political Science had already clearly opened itself up to diverse perspectives and methodologies in recent years. Several papers in a 2017 special issue had already identified some of these changes. Yet this did not stop its new editors from claiming that the discipline was still engaged in “gatekeeping” on behalf of “white androcentric paradigms.” Thankfully, political scientists are well-equipped to use data to test the truth of such speculative arguments.

In spite of the challenges facing our universities, Canadians continue to profess high levels of trust in academics, including those in the social sciences and humanities. To retain such trust, we must demonstrate a commitment to the core purposes of the university: intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of truth. We do ourselves no favours when we abandon these goals in favour of political projects. 

Dave Snow is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Guelph.

Source: Dave Snow: When political scientists get political

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Maple Leafs Tavares Fight Over Tax Issue Raises Immigration Questions

2024/02/29 Leave a comment

Not a problem for most of us!

In the realm of professional sports, where contracts are inked with extravagance and fortunes are amassed overnight, taxation emerges as a critical factor influencing immigration patterns. A case in point is the ongoing legal saga involving Toronto Maple Leafs’ captain, John Tavares, and a $20 million signing bonus he received from the Maple Leafs in 2018.

The Heart Of The Issue

At the heart of the issue lies the structuring of Tavares’ compensation. The Canada Revenue Agency contends that his entire bonus should be categorized as salary, subjecting it to a higher tax rate, rather than being considered a lower-taxed inducement under the Canada-U.S. taxation treaty.

This legal battle spotlights a broader challenge facing Canadian professional sports teams. Over the years, they have grappled with attracting top-tier talent, especially when compared to their U.S. counterparts situated in jurisdictions with lower tax rates. This tax disparity puts Canadian teams at a disadvantage, hampering their ability to secure star players to bring them to Canada and compete on an equal footing.

Broad Implications For This Precedent

As the legal showdown unfolds, its implications extend beyond Tavares’ personal finances to the very core of Canadian competitiveness. The outcome of this case could establish a precedent for future contract negotiations in professional sports, influencing decisions on where elite athletes choose to pursue their careers and the financial viability of Canadian franchises.

Source: Maple Leafs Tavares Fight Over Tax Issue Raises Immigration Questions

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McWhorter: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

2024/02/01 Leave a comment

Always interesting, particularly his discussion of American Descendants of Slavery as legitimate distinction among African Americans (but not linked to anti-immigration activists):

In my last newsletter, I argued that it is unsuitably awkward for the word “plagiarism” to be applied both to the stealing of others’ ideas and the copying, perhaps accidentally, of boilerplate text without citing its source. To the extent that most would consider the former an egregious transgression and the latter more of a lazy misstep, English would benefit from using a different term for it.


It also bears mentioning that the way we use and process the word “plagiarism” teaches a couple of lessons about language and society more broadly. For one, the word can be taken as a reality check against a prominent idea concerning language. Put simply: Yes, specific vocabularies can channel the way that we think, but only to a limited extent.


The idea that language influences thought is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of its titular proponents, Benjamin Lee Whorf, noted for example that in the Hopi language, the word for the water that you drink is different from the word for water in nature, such as in a lake. To him, this difference suggested that the Hopi process reality differently from English speakers, and that more broadly:


Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.


Psychologists have since shown repeatedly that differences in how languages’ vocabularies label experience do condition very small differences in thought patterns. In Russian, for instance, there is not one word for blue, but two: one for darker blue and one for lighter blue. An experiment has shown that this does make Russians, when presented with a gradation from dark to light blue, a tiny bit more sensitive to the transition point between the two. Having explicit labels for the two shades alerts one a tad more precisely to the difference between them.


But again, these are very small differences in perception. No experiment has demonstrated that differences in language affect our minds so profoundly as to result in significantly different world views. It is culture — i.e., reality — that does that, not the specifics of how narrowly or broadly a word happens to apply.

Our prior discussion of the word “plagiarism” demonstrates this. Just as English having a single word for dark blue and light blue does not prevent us from telling the difference in color between a navy blazer and a robin’s egg, the fact that “plagiarism” covers both idea theft and careless cutting and pasting does not mean that we can’t tell the difference between the two. In fact, we process it quite readily, and our disagreements over that distinction drove much of the debate over plagiarism by the former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

Nonetheless, the past few years have seen an uptick in suggestions that we use new terms to refer to things and, especially, people, the intent being to refashion how we perceive them. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, an extensive set of suggestions is making the rounds among volunteers. One such suggestion is that volunteers say that people “have” a disability rather than that they “suffer” from it. A similar recommendation on a similar list (since taken down) from Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center emphasized person-first language to such a degree that one would have to refer to earthquake victims as people who have experienced an earthquake. In both cases, the idea is to avoid essentializing people as sufferers or victims.


The problem with terminology like this is that because the correspondence between words and reality is only ever approximate, these novel ways of speaking would not affect our understanding of the world. To say that someone “has” a disability hardly distracts us from the fact that the person, inherently, suffers because of it — this is baked into the very concept of disability whether we utter the verb or not. Similarly, saying that someone experienced an earthquake will never change our perception that a person whose home was reduced to rubble is a victim. (Never mind that it is unclear what the benefit would be if it actually did.)


Our discussion of “plagiarism” is also useful, however, in that it demonstrates that there are times when clarity makes the addition of a new word or phrase to our vocabulary useful. For example, there was a time just a few decades back when there were no established terms for “sexual harassment” or “date rape.” People typically understood “rape” and “sexual assault” to be violent attacks by strangers. What we now call date rape was often dismissed by society as “not the real thing.”


The idea was embedded in our language as well as our culture. Any fan of old plays and movies has seen women depicted as warning each other with a click of the tongue about men who are “all hands” or the like. One of the cringiest Broadway songs I know of is in the 1951 Phil Silvers vehicle “Top Banana,” when a woman sings a song, “I Fought Every Step of the Way,” about what we now know as date rape, but brushes it off as something she simply had to endure. It’s far better that we now have clear labels for what happened to that character. (In a cruel irony, the actress who sang the song, Rose Marie, saw it and her other numbers cut from the film version after she refused the producer’s advances.) The subsequent adoption of the terms “date rape” and “sexual harassment” obviously hasn’t made such acts go away. But it has facilitated their discussion, condemnation and prosecution.

A similar example is raised by the acronym ADOS, for American Descendants of Slavery. The movement bearing this name advocates making a distinction between Black people with ancestry within the United States and Black people with ancestry in the Caribbean and Africa but not the United States. Their proposition is that if the government should ever grant reparations for slavery, they should go only to ADOS, rather than to all Americans of African genetic descent. Although I am unenthusiastic about reparations as a concept, I agree with this game plan if they are ever granted, and feel that a new, non-acronym term distinguishing the native-descended subset could be useful — certainly better than on-the-fly hacks like “Black people from here,” “real Black people” and the like.


I should note that some of the ADOS idea’s most fervent supporters have fostered outright divisiveness between the two subsets of Black Americans and have been linked to anti-immigration activists. I cannot walk alongside them. However, if this divisive strain fades and what remains is an explicit term for Black Americans descended from slavery, it will be useful to any number of discussions. I dispute claims that all Black Americans must march under the same label because skin color means experiencing racism regardless of whether one’s roots are in Ghana or Gary, Ind. Racism is an unnecessarily gloomy and unconstructive keystone for a racial self-conception, especially in the 21st century.


The messiness of the term “plagiarism” that we discussed last week, then, shows us that to speak is to be ever aware not only of Webster’s-style definitions, but of the buzzing richness of context. And it also shows that at times it still can be useful to bolster that context by adding additional, helpful labels to our existing stockpile. There is, as always, a world in every word.

Source: When We Do, and Don’t, Need a New Phrase to Describe Reality

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Workplace Wellness Programs Have Little Benefit, Study Finds

2024/01/16 Leave a comment

Of note, similar to some of the questions pertaining to some DEI training:

Employee mental health services have become a billion-dollar industry. New hires, once they have found the restrooms and enrolled in 401(k) plans, are presented with a panoply of digital wellness solutions, mindfulness seminars, massage classes, resilience workshops, coaching sessions and sleep apps.

These programs are a point of pride for forward-thinking human resource departments, evidence that employers care about their workers. But a British researcher who analyzed survey responses from 46,336 workers at companies that offered such programs found that people who participated in them were no better off than colleagues who did not.

The study, published this month in Industrial Relations Journal, considered the outcomes of 90 different interventions and found a single notable exception: Workers who were given the opportunity to do charity or volunteer work did seem to have improved well-being.

Across the study’s large population, none of the other offerings — apps, coaching, relaxation classes, courses in time management or financial health — had any positive effect. Trainings on resilience and stress management actually appeared to have a negative effect.

Source: Workplace Wellness Programs Have Little Benefit, Study Finds

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Will Egypt back off from the demolition of Cairo’s historic Islamic cemeteries? 

2023/09/05 Leave a comment

Memories from my Cairo days in the mid-80s. In this case, the government is “paving paradise to put up” an autoroute:

For the past 10 years, Egyptian researcher Mostafa el-Sadek has been visiting the Islamic cemetery complex City of the Dead in Cairo, always discovering something new about Egyptian heritage from tombs that date back to the arrival of Islam in the seventh century and up to the early 20th century.

But everything has changed since 2020. That’s when the Egyptian government began demolishing hundreds of these historic graves to widen highways to the new administrative capital 50 kilometers east of Cairo.

Sadek’s visits have also changed. He joined volunteers fighting to save the historic area. They work in parallel with the diggers and bulldozers to rescue artifacts amid the rubble of tombs in the Imam al-Shafi’i and Sayyida Nafisa complexes.

“We feel incapable and frustrated. The government that should protect this heritage destroyed it with its bulldozers,” Sadek told Al-Monitor.

First wave in 2020

The City of the Dead, which was first built with the inception of the Islamic capital in 642, covers six areas in the historic northern and southern Cairo, according to the Urban Regeneration Project for Historic Cairo report in 2010-2012.

In July 2020, the first wave of demolition targeted al-Qarafa al-Kobra in historic northern Cairo to link the area with the new administrative capital. Many tombs were demolished that housed famous figures from the 20th century, such as the first president of Cairo University, Ahmed Lutfi El-Sayed; writers Ihsan Abdel Quddous and Mohamed El-Tabii; engineer Abbud Pasha; and Princess Nazli Hanim Halim, Sadek said

The government said in a statement that these tombs were not registered as Islamic or Coptic monuments and were modern graves.

Sadek, who is also an obstetrician at Cairo University, argued, “Yes, it is not registered. But some of these tombs are full of history, architecture and art.”

A few months later, the government embarked on the second wave, which involved al-Qarafa al-Sughra (also called the Qarafa of Imam al-Shafi’i). The plan was to raze 2,760 tombs as part of the Salah Salem Road, to link the mosques and mausoleums that belong to the family of Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Cairo.

On Aug. 8, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated Sayyida Nafisa Mosque as part of the renovation of the Ahl al-Bayt shrines. Speaking at the inauguration, Sisi spoke of “the state’s plan to revamp Historic Cairo.”

But Sisi’s plan has stirred public outcry and criticism from heritage researchers, archaeologists and architects. Distinguished architect Tarek el-Murri filed a lawsuit  to stop the demolition of cemeteries, with the court set to decide the case on Sept. 21.

“The removal and demolition operations are a disdain to a part of Egypt’s history and represent a danger to a significant area back to the seventh century A.D.,” Murri told Al-Monitor.

In contrast, Sisi ordered that a committee be formed to “assess the situation and consider available alternatives” for the relocation of the Sayyida Nafissa and Imam Shafi’i cemeteries, even as the government implements its development plan in the two areas. He also directed that a cemetery be established to bury remnants of the great figures of Egypt. The cemetery would also include a museum for artifacts found in the current cemeteries.

“We had felt optimistic after the president’s order, especially since the committee recommended to stop the demolition and [that there was] no need to build new roads in that heritage area,” Sadek said.

Prominent tombs destroyed

A week after Sisi inaugurated the Sayyida Nafisa Mosque on Aug. 18, as part of the second wave bulldozers were at the Qarafa of Imam al-Shafi’i to demolish the aforementioned 2,760 tombs, including those of prominent Egyptians in the fields of culture, politics, religion and art, as well as members of the royal family.

“I had never been shocked like this time. The demolition was more violent and indiscriminate,” Sadek said. “Even workers on bulldozers in the site felt sorry about that.” He said workers helped rescue the artifacts from the tomb of Prince Ibrahim-Hilmy, son of Ismail, the Khedive of Egypt (1860-1927).

“The situation is so catastrophic,” said Hossam Abdel-Azeem, founder of Egypt’s Shawahid Misr initiative, which is tasked with preserving Egypt’s lost heritage. Since December 2021, the initiative has rescued 25 artifacts and antiquities from the tombs, including tombstones dating from the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century.

“All these landmarks are not registered under antiquities laws,” Abdel-Azeem told Al-Monitor. But “the funeral monuments are a major factor in Egypt’s history from ancient Egyptians to Islamic ages and modern history.”

On Aug. 29, the Cairo governorate rejected reports that the tombs of poet Ahmed Shawqi and of Imam Warsh had been destroyed.

However, Sadek said that he did find debris close to poet Shawqi’s tomb, and six graves of his family were destroyed.

Parliament member Maha Abdel Nasser sent several questions to Prime Minister Mustafa Madbouly on the development plans in 2020, but she hasn’t received any answers. She told Al-Monitor that five members pulled out of the Sisi’s presidential committee of experts over the government’s determination to demolish the graves.

“It is not clear what’s behind the project and the government’s determination to demolish the graves,” she said. Murri said that the government’s plan will replace these cemeteries with skyscrapers and green areas by 2030.

In a rare objection, Ayman Wanas, a government official who headed the Committee for the Survey of Buildings and Facilities of Distinguished Architectural Style, resigned on Thursday to protest the destruction of Cairo’s historic tombs.

Wanas posted his handwritten resignation on Facebook: “The ongoing demolition of the heritage cemeteries is not only a loss of the historical cemetery buildings but a loss of a historical urban fabric of unique value in the world and an important part of the world heritage.”

World heritage site

Historic Cairo has been considered a world heritage site by UNESCO since 1979. “We sent letters to the organization, but it hasn’t replied yet,” Sadek said.

In 2021, UNESCO said that “no information on this project was sent beforehand to the World Heritage Center for evaluation. … The World Heritage Center sent a letter in July 2020 to the Egyptian authorities requesting confirmation of this information and the provision of any relevant information, but neither of these has yet been provided,” UNESCO said.

The organization added, “While these demolished tombs and mausolea may not have been protected/registered monuments, they are nevertheless important parts of the historic urban fabric, and the roads could channel yet more traffic into the property.”

“Even UNESCO can’t halt this mess,” Murri said. Murri and Sadek still have a glimmer of hope that popular support might push the government to back off through talks, petitions, exhibitions and social media.

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/09/will-egypt-back-demolition-cairos-historic-islamic-cemeteries#ixzz8C9EOSJK3

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