Correction: The Original Lady Liberty was Muslim

Correction: The Original Lady Liberty Was Muslim

HT: JM

Trump may look at the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States as a “tremendous success and tremendous victory for the American people…and our Constitution.”   

It’s not.

But it is likely he has little or no idea that the original design for the Greco-Roman, 305 - foot statue in New York harbor was originally an Arab peasant woman or fellahin traditional Muslim garb.

She was.

According to historians like Edward Berenson at New York University, “The statue was originally modeled after an Egyptian Muslim woman during the 1860’s to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal.”

The statue's designer, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, was enamored with Egyptian pyramids and monumental sculpture. According to historian Edward Berenson, in the 1860s, Bartholdi decided to build a monument to commemorate the opening of Egypt's Suez Canal.

“When the Egyptian government sought proposals in 1869 to build a lighthouse for the Suez Canal, Bartholdi designed a huge statue of a robed woman holding a torch, which he called 'Egypt (or Progress) Brings Light to Asia.'” 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3342140/Statue-Liberty-inspired-Arab-woman-researchers-say.html

In the original design, she stands at the southern opening of the Suez Canal, holding a torch and wearing a hijab.   After the Bartholdi’s start on the statue, the president of Egypt fell into bankruptcy and could not afford to pay the commissions for the icon. 

Later, Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel utilized the statue to instead commemorate the centennial of the birth of the United States.  He and other artists in France had decided to find some way to also commemorate the centennial of America’s Revolution, and they realized the advantages of re-purposing the original statue to serve the need.  Thus, they began to reconstruct the original concept of an Arab peasant woman into a Greco-Roman version representing Liberty.  

Bartholdi often commented that his original design was based upon his mother’s image, Charlotte Beyser Batholdi; however, such an attribution seems possibly apocryphal from a truly loving son and artist.  In 1870, Bartholdi began designing the statue based on his previous design. The final product, representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, was inaugurated in 1886 for the country's centennial. 

“’While there is certainly a connection between Bartholdi's initial design for the Suez Canal and the woman he designed to usher in immigrants to America,’ Berenson told Fox News that it's a 'serious oversimplification' to say Lady Liberty is a Muslim. “

'’There's a relationship between the Egyptian statue that Bartholdi first conceived in the late 1860s,' Berenson said. 'But that statue changed as it migrated to the United States. The original version of the statue made sense for Egyptian society. It wouldn't have made sense for America.'”

Nor anymore than the inscription inside the building platform would make for Trump.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus

Pity the “poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in our current constitutionally-fractured climate.  Instead of lamps, cages.  

And more ironical, the original design for the Statue of Liberty was for the holding aloft of a torch in one hand and the swinging of a broken chain and handcuff in the other, not the tablet she now holds.  Bartholdi’s original design also incorporated the historical commemoration of the abolition of slavery.  But in the end, powers determined that enough time had passed since the Civil War, and it would be more acceptable to have the Lady holding a tablet of Law marked with the date July 4, 1776.

I remember my brother and I approaching the Statue of Liberty on our way into New York harbor one afternoon.  It was a clear and windy day, and she was beautiful to behold, forcing us back into the imagination of our own log-dead forefathers clinging to whatever they could bring from a broken land.  

What we could not see because of the angle of her height was what lay on the top of the building’s base:  broken chains curled about her feet as she stands to welcome those who enter into Freedom.

Happy July 4^th, and Paz, Shalom, Salam, and Peace.