generalspeaking

Mohammed to the Mountain

Before the turn of this spanking new century, the 21st, we began to hear dark stories coming out of Afghanistan, of a fanatical Islamist government called the Taliban, and what a menacing presence they were. In fact, the Canadian Homemakers magazine meant for Canadian women featured a few articles about the Taliban and their horrendous treatment of Afghan women, alerting women to their dreadful burden under fundamentalist Islam.

Then came 9/11 and everyone knew about the Taliban and what splendid hosts they were to al-Qaeda. And in 2003 the film, "Osama" was in circulation leaving little doubt about the suffering of Afghan women and children under the Taliban. Well before that, though, the Taliban defiantly shocked the world by demonstrating their imperious disdain for anything that was not Islamic. While forcing Afghan women to wear burqas and men beards, they outlawed music and laughter.

Most of all, anything that reflected Western society, or that was symbolic of a religion other than Islam was to be destroyed for the very presence of such talismans or symbols represented an abomination, an insult to Islam. And in Afghanistan existed two fifteen-hundred-year-old Buddhas, carved into the side of a mountain beside caravan trails part of the ancient Silk Road linking China with Western Asia.

These statues pre-dated Islam, there were a thousand Buddhist monks living in ten monasteries carved into the mountainside alongside the niches holding the Buddhas one of which was ten stories in height, the other a third smaller. Travelling in Japan one comes across sites with ancient Buddhas and they are compellingly beautiful to look at, though not as large nor as ancient as those in Bamiyan.

The Taliban issued a statement that they were preparing to destroy the offensive-to-Islam Buddhas. It was generally agreed among Islamic clerics that the destruction of statues dedicated to infidel gods was a duty imposed by the Koran on faithful Muslims. The Taliban Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ordered the matter to proceed.

Pleas to spare the statues from destruction came forward from sources all over the world, including UNESCO, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, China, Japan and Sri Lanka. These denunciations of the Taliban intent only strengthened their resolve, and they proceeded to destroy the two monuments. But the statues resisted destruction.

"This work of destruction is not as simple as people might think. You can't knock down the statues by shelling as both are carved into a cliff; they are firmly attached to the mountain", explained the much-aggrieved Qudratullah Jamal, Taliban information minister.

Undeterred, they engaged engineers from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who drilled holes in the statues to be filled with explosives and finally the destruction was achieved. Monuments that had withstood the tests of time, weather exposure and history were demolished through a wretched act of complete insanity, the hubris of one religion over another.

This isn't entirely unknown in history. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, France, Italy and Britain were responsible for pillaging and ransacking archaeological treasures and artifacts in Egypt. These were colossal monuments built by Ancient Egypt in honour of their kings and their gods, and the amateur archaeologists and plunderers of the day broke them into parts that could be transportable to European museums.

They were motivated by sheer greed of possession, to be able to display the wonders of the ancient world in their own museums. Egypt was in no condition politically and economically to defend its own heritage and possessions. A former circus strongman, the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni famously presented himself as an archaeologist. He explored and discovered the presence of ancient tombs and made a living removing and transporting them to museums that paid well.

In the process of which he did much damage to those sites and their ancient monuments. At that time legitimate archeology with people especially sensitive to what they were handling and dealing with and knowledgeable about the period and the objects were unknown. Belzoni is now credited, despite the huge damage he did to ancient sites, as the first of the Egyptologists.

That was several hundred years ago. The sensibilities and sensitivities of the Taliban are in response to a perceived and fundamental affront to their religion by the presence of artifacts of other religions. They worship only that which has meaning to their religion, considering all other shrines and monuments to be worthless and ripe for destruction. Whereas centuries ago there was a sense of awe and respect for ancient monuments, even while they were being pillaged for profit.

The 'graven images', the monumental statues, the pyramids and all vestiges of ancient civilizations, their societal values and religious beliefs and artifacts raise in us now the fervour of respect and admiration for societies we often think of as primitive but which were in fact adept and advanced in engineering and artistic techniques.

The hateful destructiveness in our modern era by an medieval-minded religiously fanatic group of Islamists determined to carry civilization back to the stone-age, represents a facet of human behaviour that even close study cannot adequately explain.

What it appears as it a collective, sinister dementia of the spirit masquerading as a divine religion.

Labels: Afghanistan, Egypt, Heritage, Religion, Traditions

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, June 26, 2011