Qatar rents the Egyptian pyramids

The announcements that Qatar has expressed its desire to rent the Egyptian pyramids caused a violent reaction in the Egyptian society. Egyptians have always been very sensitive to any foreigners owning any part of the Egyptian history.
For example, during the rule of Hosni Mubarak it was decided to sell to a Saudi company the famous store Omar Effendi, which had been deemed outdated and non-profitable. However, public opinion forced the court to cancel the deal made by the former government and the Saudi company.

Today, in Egypt, wrapped in protests and shootings, the political and economic situation is different, which means the result can be different as well, says Ahmed Hassan, an Egyptian journalist at Al-Fajr newspaper, in his interview to the Voice of Russia:

“The financial crisis, corruption, unemployment have reached such tremendous scale that the ‘Brotherhood government’ is trying to find any means to scrape the money to get out of the current dead-end situation at least for a while. Their efforts also include making peace with the businessmen imprisoned for large-scale theft. During his election campaign Morsi promised to take the country out of the vicious circle of poverty and bankruptcy. It has not happened so far.

Currently, the Brotherhood is facing an extremely difficult problem: how to provide bread for 80 million Egyptians and how to get out of the deadlock of the financial and economic crisis. Cities along the Suez Canal are run down; many government structures are working in survival mode. We call it ‘Islamist backwardness’. The Brotherhood came to the power offices from strikes, from prisons and from the underground. They have no experience in running the country. They have no experience other than militant fighting against the ‘unfaithful’ and the ‘unholy’. They are led merely by a hunger for power and the eternal war against those who try to turn away from the ‘righteous path’ that is prescribed.”

In any case, nobody is planning to close down to foreigners the resorts on the Red Sea, despite the fact that nobody there is talking about the Muslim laws. Everybody realizes that this is real money so badly needed by the Egyptian economy. The pyramids also bring in money, although now it is a lot less money due to the tensions in the capital. So, if the pyramids are to be viewed exclusively as a source of revenue, why not just increase that revenue?

In the era of globalization such deals that include rent or sale of what appears to be unsellable don't appear to be something impossible. In the end, even the Harrods, the most famous department store in London and the historic symbol of the British wellbeing, was at some point acquired by the Egyptian businessman Mohammed Al Fayed. A quarter of a century later he sold it to Qatar businessmen for a billion and a half British pounds. And why not have the pyramids rented to Qatar which appears to have no spare cash deficit?

In addition, in the current situation, a change in ownership could help improve the confidence in the future of the monuments themselves. When they came to power, the Egyptian Salafi immediately proclaimed that they “would not tolerate the pagan idols on the land sanctified by Islam”. They threatened to blow up the sphinx, the most ancient of the “sinful creations”. Does it not sound serious? One must recall what the Taliban did to the Buddha statues in Bamiyan. Tourists from all over the world had visited those statues as well.

A saying came to us from the far past: “The Sphinx protects Egypt”. Now is the time to protect the Sphinx itself.