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LONDON: Switzerland’s government has drafted a new law to issue 990 Swiss franc ($990) fines to women wearing burqas in public.
However, the draft law sent to parliament on Wednesday does not mention the burqa by name, and includes several exemptions for wearing face coverings on aircraft, as well as in diplomatic premises and religious sites.
Artistic performances and advertising are also exempt from the ban.
About 5 percent of Switzerland’s population is Muslim, with many originating from Turkey and Balkan states, including Bosnia and Kosovo.
Within Europe, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands and Bulgaria have partial or complete bans on wearing face coverings in public.
The Swiss move was launched by the same political group that oversaw the 2009 ban on new minarets in the country. The proposal to ban face coverings in public was passed in a binding referendum in 2021.
After political consultations this year, the Swiss Cabinet reduced the penalty for breaking the burqa law from a proposed 10,000 Swiss francs.
A Cabinet statement said: “The ban on covering faces aims to ensure public safety and order. Punishment is not the priority.”
JAKARTA: From tropical beaches to vibrant cultures, Indonesia’s Bali is known as one of the world’s most popular destinations for vacation — an experience some of the local operators are trying to enhance with the presence of animals exotic to the island’s fauna: camels.
On Kelan beach, located near Ngurah Rai International Airport, three camels called Bintang, Yulia, and Munaroh have been giving tourists rides by the beach, where sunset views and a glimpse of the fishermen’s lives become part of the experience.
“Tourists will see the fishermen’s fishing boats, how these people living on the shores earn their livelihoods through fishing,” Dewa Gde Yudistira, a veterinarian and co-owner of Bali Camel Adventure, told Arab News.
Yudistira, who started his camel rides in 2017, said tourists will also get to see the 122-meter-tall Garuda Wisnu Kencana statue from afar, or airplanes leaving or reaching the airport, as they ride on the camels.
“The sunset here is also one of the main attractions because there’s nothing like it,” Yudistira said. “It’s been gaining traction lately.”
Though the species is uncommon throughout the archipelago nation and, if at all, only seen at zoos, the animals’ upkeep is “not that difficult,” according to Yudistira. The camels, brought in from Australia, eat mainly grass and are sometimes treated to carrots, bananas and sweet potatoes.
The beachside camel rides have attracted visitors from all over Bali, Indonesian tourists from other parts of the country, and foreign visitors.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Yudistira’s guests included tourists from Japan, Australia, China, and South Korea.
After two years of closures, the business and the whole hospitality sector in Bali are getting back on track.
More than 617,000 international visitors have entered Indonesia through Ngurah Rai as of July 2022, according to Ministry of Tourism data, compared with just 35 foreign tourists during the same period last year.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is planning to increase the number of its flood telemetry stations on rivers and waterways nearly 10 times for precise forecasts and early warning to protect regions vulnerable to flooding, a senior official told Arab News.
The plan comes after monsoon floods battered the country for months, killing at least 1,700 people and wiping out its infrastructure.
The destruction induced by flooding has directly affected over 33 million people, about 15 percent of the country’s population.
As flooding, worsened by climate change, is likely to intensify in the future, a new response plan by the Federal Flood Commission aims to allocate about $69 million to purchase early warning systems from the international market.
“We have made a first-ever national master plan on flood telemetry, and it is composed of 679 stations,” Ahmed Kamal, the commission’s chairman, told Arab News.
“These stations are going to be placed on even the smallest of rivers and streams.”
Currently, the country has only about 70 such automated stations.
Kamal said the country’s Balochistan province — worst hit by the recent floods — as well as parts of Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan, which also suffered huge damages and casualties, were “devoid of the flood telemetry system.”
The flood protection strategy has been in the works for the past few years, but Pakistan had not been able to secure funds for its implementation.
“By the time we were discussing this situation, the 2022 floods arrived,” Kamal said.
“Afterwards, I think there was a much greater realization that perhaps we have not done justice with this very important sector.”
The UN last week revised its flash appeal fivefold, from $160 million to $816 million, to reflect the magnitude of the disaster.
The flood commission will submit the new protection plan to the federal government by the end of the month.
Sites for many of the telemetry stations have already been identified and foreign donors, including the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, are likely to support the project.
“We are very much hopeful that this time it is going to be approved and funding shall be made available,” Kamal said.
“The most important points we must address can be implemented in one year’s time.”
LONDON: From a military perspective, the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, an attempt to disrupt British trade and influence in North Africa and India, was a complete failure. For the world’s understanding of 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, however, it would prove to be an accidental triumph.
An army of 50,000 men under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Alexandria on July 2, 1798, and over the next three years there were a series of victories, and the occasional defeat, for the French troops in Egypt and Syria.
But after the British navy sank Napoleon’s fleet in Aboukir Bay at the Battle of the Nile on July 25, 1799, the dwindling, disease-ravaged French army, harried by Ottoman and British forces, found itself trapped in a hostile, alien land. With no way out, and no chance of reinforcement, the end was inevitable.
Napoleon knew this, and on the night of Aug. 22, 1799, he abandoned his troops and slipped back to Paris and his ultimate destiny — in 1804, he would be crowned emperor of France.
The remains of his army in Egypt clung on, even after Napoleon’s successor as commander was assassinated, until it finally surrendered to the British at Alexandria on Sept. 2, 1801.
As part of the expedition, Napoleon had ordered the wholesale looting of antiquities to be taken back to France. But, after the French surrender, most of these fell into the hands of the British. Among the spoils shipped back to the British Museum was a block of polished stone engraved with writing in three different languages — ancient Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Discovered in July 1799 by a French army engineer who had been strengthening the defenses of a captured 15th-century Ottoman fort near Rosetta on the west bank of the Nile, the object became known as the Rosetta Stone.
It would prove to be the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Although many European scholars were fluent in ancient Greek, it would be more than two decades before they were able to crack the Rosetta code. When they did, it was a landmark moment in Egyptology, which the British Museum is celebrating this month with a major new exhibition that brings together a collection of more than 240 objects, including the Rosetta Stone.
The exhibition, “Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” coincides with the 200th anniversary of the final breakthrough by French philologist and orientalist Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822.
“Deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone unlocked 3,000 years of Egyptian history,” Ilona Regulski, curator of Egyptian written culture at the British Museum, told Arab News.
“Until then, nobody knew how far back the ancient Egyptian civilization went, or how long it lasted. But after his breakthrough, Champollion was able to translate the names of kings and establish a royal chronology which went back much farther in time than anyone had previously realized.
“Very soon, there also came the understanding that this was a complex civilization that had relationships with its neighbors, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, and step by step we came to understand the society better.
“From the Greek historians, who reported some practices that they saw, we knew that the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. But we didn’t really understand how these people lived and experienced their world.”
Cracking the Rosetta code was a complex business that tested the minds of European academics. Although the stone featured three translations of the same decree, they were not alike word for word.
“Champollion and others started by looking at the Greek text and identifying words that appeared often, for example, the word for temple, or the title basileus (a term for monarch),” said Regulski. “They looked at the demotic text to see if there was a cluster of signs that appeared more or less in the same place.”
It was a reasonable start, but a process frustrated by the fact, not initially appreciated, that neither ancient Egyptian nor demotic were alphabet-based scripts, and that any one word could be spelled in many different ways in the same document.
Eventually, a sign list, a kind of ancient Egyptian dictionary, was created, “but it was not enough to understand the entire text, or to use it to read other inscribed objects,” said Regulski.
It was Champollion who finally figured out that hieroglyphics was a hybrid system.
“There are alphabetic signs, but also single signs that represent two or three letters, or even entire words,” said Regulski. “And some are silent signs, what we call ‘determinatives’ in Egyptology. You don’t read them in any way, but they indicate the meaning of the preceding word, telling you whether it’s a verb or a noun.”
Basically, hieroglyphics “appears to be a very simple, symbol-based language, but it’s much more complicated than that, and much more complex than an alphabetic script, and that took a long time to figure out.”
The script on the Rosetta Stone turned out to be a decree written in 196 B.C. by priests at Memphis, recognizing the authority of the Ptolemaic pharaoh Ptolemy V. It would have been written originally on papyrus, with copies distributed around the kingdom so the text could be engraved on stone slabs, or “stelae,” for display in temples throughout Egypt.
Over the following decades, nine other partial copies of the decree would be discovered at sites across Egypt. But the Rosetta Stone is the most complete and, without it, for example “the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun,” excavated by the British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, “would have looked very different,” said Regulski.
“It would have been difficult for Carter to identify the king, which is quite crucial, and his place in the context of the chronology of the 18th dynasty. We would just have a beautiful tomb with beautiful things.”
By the standards of ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone is not that ancient. “For us as Egyptologists,” said Regulski, “the stone, from about 200 B.C., comes very late in the story of hieroglyphics, a writing system that first came into use in about 3250 B.C.”
And in 200 B.C., hieroglyphics were already on the way out.
“The first really important change in Egypt was the use of Greek as the administrative language,” said Regulski.
“When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 B.C., people were already speaking Greek; the language was already circulating from the eighth century onwards, because of trade and because there were lots of Greek mercenaries who fought in the Egyptian army and settled in the country.
“But from Alexander the Great onward, and especially in the Ptolemaic periods, Greek became the language of administration and slowly pushed Egyptian out.”
Regardless of the historical context of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and its seizure by the British, “for the field of Egyptology, and for Egypt, it is definitely something to celebrate,” said Regulski.
“Today, there are many Egyptologists in the world, including our colleagues in Egypt, and we all work together, a huge community trying to refine our knowledge of ancient Egypt, which all came out of this one venture.”
Regulski, who spent two years working alongside Egyptian colleagues at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, could not be drawn on the vexed subject of whether the Rosetta Stone should be returned to its country of origin.
More than 100,000 artifacts from Egypt’s rich past will be housed in the Grand Egyptian Museum, currently nearing completion at a site west of Cairo, close to the Giza pyramids.
Among them will be the 5,400 treasures entombed with Tutankhamun more than 3,300 years ago, including his iconic death mask, which, after decades of touring the world, will finally come to rest where they belong.
However, the Rosetta Stone, the key to understanding it all, will remain in Britain.
The British general who accompanied the stone back to Britain in 1801 after it was taken from the French, chose to see it and 20 other pieces not as loot, but as “a proud trophy of the arms of Britain — not plundered from defenseless inhabitants, but honorably acquired by the fortune of war.”
The British Museum exhibition will feature the French capitulation document, on loan from the UK’s National Archives and displayed for the first time. This, said a spokesperson for the British Museum, is “the legal agreement which included the transfer of the Rosetta Stone to Britain … as a diplomatic gift … signed by all parties; representatives of the Egyptian, French and British governments.”
Today, an Egyptian government might justifiably take issue with the description of an officer of the Ottoman army as a rightful custodian of Egyptian heritage.
Certainly, at the time, no thought was given to whether the Rosetta Stone and other antiquities ought to remain in Egypt, a question that is becoming ever more acute today, in an era when pressure is mounting on Western institutions such as the British Museum to return the spoils of imperial wars and adventures.
“The only thing I would say is that having worked closely with Egyptian curators at the museum, it’s not a priority for many of them,” said Regulski. “I find it a bit sad that our relationship is framed in this way, about giving back objects or not, because our relationship with our Egyptian colleagues is about so much more than which individual objects went to this place, or that.
“It’s about celebrating ancient Egypt, and there is still so much to do in Egypt, so much to learn, to research and collaborate on, and that is the positive thing to focus on.”
The public fascination with ancient Egypt owes its origins to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the single most visited object in the British Museum, and “to a culture that left behind such a well-preserved, monumental testament to its existence that also has such a powerful visual appeal, which you don’t have in some other ancient cultures.
“I think the general visitor to a museum is drawn to this highly visual, artistic culture, including the writing system itself. If you compare it with cuneiform, for example, you’re going to be drawn more to hieroglyphics, because it’s so beautiful, so visually appealing. I think that’s what hooks people and encourages them to learn more about the culture.”
Certainly, the British Museum expects the exhibition, which will chart the journey to decipher hieroglyphs, from initial efforts by medieval Arab travelers and Renaissance scholars, through to Champollion’s triumph in 1822, to be one of its most popular to date.
‘Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt,’ is at the British Museum from Oct. 13, 2022 to Feb. 19, 2023.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan wants to strengthen and “add value” to its defense ties with Saudi Arabia during next month’s visit of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its defense minister said.
Khawaja Muhammad Asif said Pakistan “immensely” valued its relationship with the Kingdom, and described the forthcoming trip as “very important.”
“His royal highness’s visit will strengthen this relationship further and will add value to this relationship, in both the field of defense and in the field of investment,” he said at this year’s Arab News Pakistan Annual Workshop in Islamabad.
“It has a pivotal role in our foreign policy. They are our brothers and they have helped us in very difficult times over the decades.”
Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rana Sanaullah, said in September that his government was “waiting with love and affection for the day.”
It will be the crown prince’s second official trip to Pakistan. During the first in 2019, the two countries signed investment deals worth $21 billion, including for an oil refinery and agriculture projects.
The Arab News workshop audience included editors, reporters and management from Pakistan, Asia and Riyadh.
ROME: The UAE’s Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak has been awarded Florence’s highest honor for her substantial financial support of a COVID-19 medical facility during the peak of the pandemic.
Sheikha Fatima — president of the General Union of Women, president of the Supreme Council for Maternity and Childhood, and first president of the Foundation for Family Development of the UAE — received the keys of the Italian city from Florence’s Deputy Mayor Alessia Bettini.
The ceremony took place at Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s city hall. Rym Abdulla Al-Falasy, secretary-general of the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood, received the award on her behalf.
The UAE’s Ambassador to Italy Omar Obaid Alshamsi, Fatima Al-Ameri, director of the Rouya Center, and Randa Eid, secretary-general of the Arab Italian Women Association, also attended the event.
Sheikha Fatima made a donation to ASP Firenze Montedomini, the city’s healthcare authority, through AIWA to support the first intermediate care facility for COVID-19-positive elderly patients.
Bettini said the award was “recognition for her constant commitment to support the enhancement and emancipation of women and for activities aimed at encouraging female participation in political and public life.
“But also for her humanitarian commitment and engagement to promote cultural and social development and the growth of civil society in the light of principles of equality, social justice and peace among peoples.”
She also praised “the intense humanitarian activity of Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, and the attachment to those values inspiring her acts of generosity.”
A commemorative plaque has been installed at the ASP Firenze Montedomini headquarters.