Dan Eaton Quotes & Sayings

A settlement existed here as early as the sixth century BC. The Romans built their fortress later. Known today as "Babylon" by the locals, it formed the foundation for the Coptic quarter and gave it its distinctive character. After the spread of Christianity in Egypt, the area of about one square mile became a Christian stronghold, home to some twenty churches and the world's oldest surviving Christian community. Now, many centuries later, it sat at the heart of a Muslim nation. Only five of the original churches remained, but the enclave was a time warp that also preserved the country's earliest mosque and its oldest synagogue. — Dan Eaton

A man named Vicente Fox was sworn in as president of Mexico, ending seventy-five years of control by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Across the border, the United States Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Bush v. Gore, deciding the 2000 presidential election and ensuring the term "hanging chad" took its place permanently in the English lexicon. Leninist guerrillas launched an attack in Istanbul, and a series of bombs exploded in downtown Manila, killing twenty-two people and injuring dozens more. Cambodia's failed coup slipped from network news bulletins, and the country returned once more to relative international obscurity. — Dan Eaton

The Society of Muslim Brothers was founded in 1928 by a young schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna. As a Sunni Islamic revivalist movement, its establishment followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the subsequent end of the caliphate system of government that had united the Muslims for many hundreds of years. Al-Banna, who was just twenty-two years old, believed Islam was not only a religion but a fully comprehensive way of life, based on the tenets of Wahhabism, a strict and repressive form of the religion better known these days as Islamism and espoused by the Saudis, as well as unsavory characters such as Osama bin Laden. — Dan Eaton