At 6:30 a.m. on an unseasonably warm Friday in late January last year [2014], a parked car filled with high explosives detonated outside Cairo’s famed Museum of Islamic Art. The blast blew out the building’s cathedral-like windows, hurled a streetlight through the thick front doors, and pockmarked the façade with cannonball-sized cracks. Inside the cavernous, smoke-filled space, the devastation was even more jarring. After boring a deep crater into the road at the foot of the adjacent police headquarters, the shock waves had torn through the flimsy aluminum shutters and shattered over 250 displays of ceramic art and glasswork.
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