FAREWELL TO THE BUDDHAS OF BAMIYAN
Pierre Centlivres
(Neuchâtel, March 2001)
In 356 bce Herostratus set fire to the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in the hope that the enormity of his action would make him immortal. Contrast this with Mullah Omar’s decree ordering the destruction of those other wonders, the statues in the Kabul Museum and the colossi in the cliff face at Bamiyan.
Herostratus’s aim was notoriety, but Mullah Omar is a secretive being, whose face is unknown to non-Muslims. The famous decree, based on a fatwa by a college of ulamas in Kandahar, aims to achieve in the land of Afghanistan a particular vision of the divine order resting on religious law.
The decree, then the actual destruction in March 2001, had an unprecedented resonance throughout a stupefied world. Its universal condemnation is a distant and muffled echo of that which struck Herostratus, who was tortured for his monstrous deed. But in the two cases, beyond the accusations of vandalism, there is a kind of sacrilegious crossover between idol worship (ended by the Taliban) and the iconoclasm of an attack on the human heritage.
Can beauty and perfection so captivate the human mind that it forgets everyday needs or divine law? The destruction of works of art, especially the most beautiful and spectacular among them, would then be a redemptive operation designed to eliminate what distracts men and women from struggling on the path of godliness.
The decree issued by the Commander of the Faithful forcefully asserts the irrevocability of religious law as it emerges (in the Kandahar ulamas’ fundamentalist interpretation) from the Koran and Sharia. The high religious, political and cultural figures who rushed to Kabul received a polite, even courteous, welcome, but the attitude of Mullah Omar and his ministers was unyielding: their implicit message was that the Emirate of Afghanistan was steadfast in accomplishing its mission; that the global outcry against the destruction of the statues, like the sanctions imposed in connection with bin Laden, was of little importance. This interpretation would partly confirm the ‘contextual’ explanation of the destruction as an act of political calculation, whose aim is to compel international political recognition, to cover up the massive theft of archaeological objects, and so on. But it would also define their limits, since Mullah Omar’s decrees rule out any horse-trading and invoke timeless principles rather than contingencies.
The whole affair has prompted numerous commentaries. Here are a few:
One can understand those who are shocked by the universal clamour against the destruction of the Buddhas, at a time when the famished Afghan population is fighting for survival and international aid remains parsimonious. The campaign to destroy works of art that are part of the human heritage is a misfortune of a different kind: it arouses the same unease as any other iconoclasm, whether of Byzantine icons, Gothic church sculptures or African masks and sculptures (burned by missionaries not so long ago); it causes the same anguish as the destruction of books or artworks under totalitarian regimes. Over and above a particular country or category of art, a whole legacy belonging to humanity as a whole is annihilated.
The famous Bamiyan statues were majestic figures: numerous travellers, both ancient and modern, mentioned them with admiration and sometimes awe – from Chinese pilgrims in the fifth and seventh centuries through to Arab explorers and geographers, British agents in the 1830s and 1840s and French and Afghan archaeologists and to envoys working in the last few years for the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage.
Understandably, when certain Islamic stalwarts came face to face with these imposing statues, they were tempted to damage them in some way, if not actually to destroy them. But despite the artillery fire attributed to the troops of Aurangzeb (1618–1707) and Nadir Shah Afshar (1688–1747), the Buddhas resisted surprisingly well the squalls of history and the successive masters of the Bamiyan Valley.
In 1939 Ella Maillart was overcome by Bamiyan’s ‘spirit of smiling rest-fulness’.1 She mentions the reinforcement of the masonry in the part of the cliff housing the ‘small’ Buddha. In order to preserve it, she writes, ‘a sum of sixty thousand afghanis was easily collected’,2 proving the attachment that Afghans, or at least some Afghans, feel for these emblematic figures. But she immediately adds: ‘some years ago the Afghan Government issued a stamp reproducing the Buddha of Bamiyan but it was withdrawn, for too many Muslims were shocked at a representation of the human form’.3 The suspicion that weighed on the ‘idols’ of Bamiyan had not ceased to express itself.
NOTES
1.Ella K. Maillart, The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 174.
2.Ibid.
3.Ibid.