Every year, the Cairo International Book Fair holds a series of events, and often one of these events and seminars leaves behind a lot of reactions. At the end of the exhibition days, a symposium was held on "Scientific Facts in the Face of Historical Fallacies in the Media" with the participation of Egyptian academics and historians.

The symposium was one of the intensity that made it condemn the state's educational and media policies in the face of attempts by some to undermine the state's identity and national memory, by underestimating the curricula of teaching history in schools and universities, and opening the door wide for amateur historians to go out on the masses through satellite channels and newspapers, which was considered a distortion of history. And his science.

The distortion, according to the description of speakers at the symposium, began with the claim that the builders of the pyramids were "the ones who fell from the sky" and criticized Saladin's wars against the Crusader invasion to the extent that he was described in a television program as "one of the most despicable figures in history" and then went on to describe the July 1952 revolution as a work of the Americans. And ending with describing the wars of Egypt and the Arabs with Israel as "wars of defeat", including the war of attrition and the October 1973 war.

Dr. Gamal Moawad Shakra, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Faculty of Education, Ain Shams University, Dr. Khalaf Abdel-Azim Al-Miri, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Faculty of Girls, Ain Shams University, Dr. Asim El-Desouki, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Faculty of Arts, Helwan University, Dr. Hala Mahmoud Mohamed, participated in the symposium. Behind the professor of ancient history, Faculty of Education, Ain Shams University, and managed by the head of the Egyptian Society for Historical Studies, Dr. Ayman Fouad.

History between politics, religion and drama

Dr. Al-Dasouki opened his speech about the dire consequences of the storming of social media by "amateurs and stakeholders from countries and individuals" to open pages for writing in history, and said that he "leaves history to those with ambitions and intrigues to poison the heart of honey."

He added, “History is a science independent of politics and religion, which employs historical information to serve a specific political idea and serve a belief that lacks objectivity. He enters the incident or personality with a preconceived idea, and selects from the references what serves his idea, and excludes from the information what does not serve the idea.

Al-Dasouki said, "Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi'i is considered the last historian after al-Jabarti, who wrote his diaries according to the events, and we must differentiate between the historian and the researcher in history. The historian's role is to investigate the facts and not judge them. It is not correct to say: the glorious July Revolution, and likewise the person we do not judge him Whether he is a hero or a traitor, we leave the information to judge him.”

Communication sites in the dock

Dr. Hala called for the need to "protect history from erroneous and irresponsible writings, and from this huge amount of clips, videos, pages and websites that carry a lot of precious little dirt on social media, which are pages and websites that carry many fabrications and fallacies about our history."

The lecture enumerated a number of those inaccuracies in ancient Pharaonic history, and described them as inaccuracies intended by people who know everything about antiquities and Pharaonic history. especially".

Dr. Hala warned that the new generations do not know how to read, and that "the mobile phone has become a research tool in our time, and the scientific material has become through the mobile phone, and if I ask the student for information, he will enter the mobile phone and collect information, and by examining it, I find most of it distorted information."

And she gave an example of what she called the fabrications and myths that are still being written about the building and construction of the pyramids, and the claim that they were built by the magic power of the ancient Egyptian, and other myths, and confirmed that "the ancient Egyptian historian was keen to write the events of the day and record them in a way that no one can falsify by engraving it on The stones.

Dr. Hala added, "The truth came with a newly discovered papyrus that recorded all the numbers and how to build, and how they were building and planning, and this document showed that the engineering thought by which the pyramids were built proceeded with an engineering development acceptable to the mind."

"Facebook" historian

For his part, Dr. Al-Miri stated that the fallacies in history expand in order to affect the identity, memory and inheritance of the nation, and he said that we need to pause with ourselves to confront what is happening on the communication sites and pages, which brings us into the field of hobby and professionalism.

And he continued, "We suffer from a skeptical dimension and a deconstructive dimension, with the intention of striking identity in the long term, and what is said about the ancient Egyptian civilization is that it was built by Africans, or others. fragmentation within the same medium.

"False" political notes

As for the writers of memoirs and what they call themselves an aura of greatness, they are not historians, and they are not history researchers. Rather, their role ends so that the history researcher or historian comes and puts it on the research table to extract from it what helps him understand history and write it, according to Dr. Al-Miri.

On the other hand, Dr. Al-Dasouki said, "Political memoirs are considered one of the sources, if their owner does not write them for publication, as in the memoirs of Saad Zaghloul, when he said about himself (that he) was drinking alcohol, and he said that the disease had taken hold of me, and turned my life around. Leader Saad was writing To vent for himself, not to be published, or that he was writing the truth for history after his life. As for the memoirs that their owners write for publication in order to accuse others and exonerate themselves, these memoirs are similar to Abdel Halim Hafez's song: Sweet and Liar.

Dr. Shakra considered that the memoirs of politicians are not history, because they contain very large exaggerations, justifications, and fallacies, and the historian must take them as a source, not all facts. He himself did not write these memoirs, but there are those who wrote them for him.

Dr. Shakra added, "Major General Muhammad Najeeb admitted to me that there are things in the memoirs that he did not mention and did not approve of, and I asked him is it true that the officers killed your son Ali in Germany? He laughed and said: These are exaggerations, and the officers have nothing to do with it."

The lecturer said: There is a crime committed intentionally or unintentionally against the memory of the nation and distorting it, and there is an attack on our Arab and Islamic identity, calling for the need to criminalize those who falsify history, and continued, "If a doctor who commits a medical error kills the life of one person, then the plaintiff of history eliminates the memory And the entire history of a nation, and legislation must be enacted to criminalize those who falsify history.

And he considered that “many lies” were said by President Sadat himself about the organization of the Free Officers, then he contradicted himself by himself between my books “O my son, this is your uncle Gamal” and then “Self-Searching”, according to the expression of the Egyptian academic, who also strongly denied the validity of what the journalist Jalal went to. Kiosk in his famous book "American July Revolution".

Storyteller

And about the storyteller, and they are many in our history, as Dr. Shakra says, “some of them went out to distort the image of the Islamic leader Salah al-Din, and Dr. Ayman Fouad Sayyid and I responded to him, then he attacked the leader Ahmed Orabi and said that Orabi’s revolution was a play, then he comes to distort the history of the war Attrition, at the same time that the Israelis acknowledged the reality of the losses they suffered in this war.

Regarding how to respond to the falsifiers of history, Dr. Shakra considered that there is a trade in history, especially in light of the so-called "trend".

There is a tour guide who reads the facts and then installs them incorrectly for the purpose of Jacob’s soul, denouncing that they have platforms and reap “likes” and “trends” at the expense of truth and history, as he put it.

The lecturer ends by saying, "There must be new mechanisms to explain and show our children what our interest in history means."