People who gleefully destroy art works are not only ignorant – they’re dangerous, and not just to art works but to fellow human beings.
Twenty years ago, just months before the terrorist attacks against this country, I saw a newspaper photo that made my blood run cold. In the black-and-white photo was a group of bearded men in turbans and robes laughing gleefully. In the background were tall stone cliffs with giant Buddha statues carved into them – statues those laughing men had just blasted with mortars. The caption under the photo stated the men were Taliban warriors, a name I’d never heard of before. And little did I know at the time that the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden was sheltering in Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban as he plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America.
The destruction of art works happened in a valley of a mountainous area of central Afghanistan known as Bamiyan. The standing Buddhas had been carved 1,500 years ago into giant niches of the cliff’s face – one statue 180 feet tall, the other 130 feet.
According to Islamic law (or so claimed the Taliban) those statues were idolatrous affronts to Muslim law and beliefs – thus they had to be obliterated. Many countries in the world, hearing of the scheme, protested with outrage, some even offering to buy the art and have it removed to safety. But alas, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. It must be noted that many Muslims throughout the world also expressed their appalled reactions to the destruction.
The rampage began, and how hard they worked to destroy those Buddhas! It took a long time: blasting mortar shells at them, drilling holes in the statutes in which to place explosives, using anti-tank mines to weaken the rock. They worked, they sweated, they laughed as they pulverized the art into huge heaps of rubble, leaving empty cliff niches where the Buddhas had been.
These ignorant obliterations of art works, assaults by barbarians against the achievements of civilizations, have happened throughout history – the destruction of the great library in Alexandria, Egypt in 642 A.D., the barbaric violence against cities and people throughout the world in every decade, every century. More recently, in Iraq and Syria, museums and the art works they housed were ripped to pieces, smashed, utterly destroyed by rebel factions, including notorious ISIS.
The twisted rationale is always this: What offends us we destroy or kill.
The very area where those statutes were obliterated was a rare, remarkable place in modern-day Afghanistan. It was the place where the country’s first woman governor took office, the country’s first girls’ cycling team was formed as well as a women’s ski club and the first café operated by a woman. The university there held more women students than men.
Those gains for women will likely soon evaporate. What a catastrophe that the Taliban have re-taken that country after 20 years of the American presence. Women and children (especially girls) are trembling with terror throughout Afghanistan, fearing what will become of them now.
President Joe Biden ordered American troops out of Afghanistan last month, proving once again there is no such thing as a good ending to a bad war. We simply could not stay there forever and ever; we could not impose a “democracy” on that splintered tribal-based country.
The Taliban now claim they will not be retaliatory or harsh in their new rule, and yet their highest ranks include some of the most rigid believers, ruthless rebels – the ones likely to think, “What offends us we destroy or kill.”
The only hope, a slender hope, is that many of the women and girls of that tribal country (many men too) found a measure of peace, freedom and dignity during the past two decades. Let us hope that experience of partial freedom, short but sweet, will help them endure the dark days ahead as they patiently pine for a safer, brighter future.
