Ninety-nine years after opening its doors in 1903, the current structure of the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo shut its doors. Eight years later, after a painstaking restoration costing $14.4 million, it reopened to the public. The museum itself housed 4,000 items from a collection of over 100,000, encompassing the Umayyad, Abbasid, Tulunid, Fatimid, Ayubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods of Egypt, according to Al-Ahram. On the morning of Jan. 24, a car bomb exploded outside the museum, destroying priceless treasures of the largest Islamic museum in the world in an attempt to target a state security bureau. Egypt’s minister of antiquities declared that the museum had been “completely destroyed.”
In August 2013, looters stole or damaged 1,060 of 1,089 objects housed at Egypt’s Mallawi Museum in Minia, killing a security guard. The following month 400 artifacts were recovered. The Arab Spring hasn’t always been bad for the heritage of Egypt and the Arab world. During the 2011 Egyptian uprising, looters broke into the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square that houses over 120,000 artifacts. Incredibly, they were only able to steal 18 objects thanks to vigilant Egyptian citizens. I recall one of the most heartening moments I experienced during my coverage of the Jan. 25 uprising was when reports emerged that Egyptians were forming a human chain to protect the Egyptian Museum from looting. (A tweet I sent out then was retweeted over 1,500 times.)