One of the most shocking recent news items to me was the burning of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu by the retreating Islamic fighters. I don’t understand this destruction of a culture by its own people. I can understand an invading army rampaging and destroying everything related to the people they have just beaten, but to destroy your own heritage is something else.
A few years ago Dan Cruikshank, art/architectural historian was talking about the loss of historic buildings, and he was almost in tears, apologising for the fact that sometimes he cares more about buildings than people. This sounds utterly callous at first, but I know what he means. People can look after themselves, whereas buildings are completely in our hands. Buildings and art are what we do, what we create to leave a mark on the world, to define who we are and what we believe, so they are things that unite us.
Which is why the Independent’s Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk is so brilliant in explaining how such behaviour has precedents.
Not just in the Taliban’s blowing up of Budhas at Bamian in 2001, and the Saudis bulldozing early Islamic graves, but in the other Abrahamic faiths.
Fisk opened his recent article with “Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust” which is from Deuteronomy 9:21 and has helped justify or inspire the malicious destruction of statues, stained glass, shrines and books in the centuries since.
When Oliver Cromwell’s troops removed the bones of the knights of Kilkenny, they threw them into a mass grave, and hacked the stone heads from their tombs. How can we ever measure the amount of art, literature and architecture that was destroyed in the name of religious puritanism in Europe? By looking to our own past we may come closer to understanding what is happening in the Moslem world at the present.
Fisk writes: “Wahhabism remains the Salafist creed, a Sahara Puritanism that Cromwell’s army could only dream of. Read the first chapter of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and you’ll find the most compelling explanation of this harsh, self-destructive absolutism. Infinitely sad, totally uncompromising, a belief sucked from the colourless sands and the sword-like heat of the desert. God cannot tolerate any partner, any rival, and thus the Arabic shrk – the art of “sharing” – has come to represent iconoclasm which, at its most extreme, means that no bust, no written page, no decorated grave may distract us from the worship/fear/abstraction and anger of God.
The Islamists of northern Mali, many of whom are indeed Malians – with an added cocktail of al-Qa’ida desperadoes to quicken the fury of the West – smash their own cultural history with the same abandon as the Islamists of Nigeria burn churches. for the Salafists, a Muslim shrine signifies a rival to God, as surely as Henry VIII saw the monasteries as a Papa rival of his own supreme leadership of the church of England.”
He continues to list the destruction in recent times, Croatian Catholics destroying the Ottoman bridge of Mostar, with many other Ottoman, hence Moslem shrines and mosques, and the Muslim Azerbaijanis destroying Armenian Christian graves.
He mentions the Taliban hanged televisions from gallows in Afghanistan as well as destroying their own national artefacts, so in a way their rage is more consistent.
Fisk continues “The Taliban recognised their “nation” only as a mini-caliphate, a Saudi funded experiment in Salafi state building, in which humiliation of the West – of our armies, and of our predilection for “heritage” at the expense of human suffering – becomes proof-positive of Islam’s superiority.
How many Muslim institutions have condemned the Timbuktu book-burning or the Sufi shrine-bulldozing? for what is parchment in comparison with the majesty of god – especially when a god belongs only to the most self-regarding, the most irredeemable and most isolated of believers, grinding his rivals to powder as fine as dust?”
I understand that many of the manuscripts survived. Religions literalism has always ended in ugly results.
A few refelections.
Firstly, Oliver Cromwell did not confine his church stripping and whitwashing of walls to Ireland. Furthermore, Catholicism in its turn(s) has got in plenty of retaliation, so “puritanism” – even with a small ‘p’ – doesn’t quite fit.
Secondly – something more philosophical. The very act of culling ancient religious artifacts (and, thus, the ideas they embody) is a little like overhunting a species. The cultural heritage gets reduced to a few accidental survivals which may no longer make sense. It’s as if a great science library were burned down, and all we had left were books up to the 19th Century, with no reference to Quantum Mechanics, the jet engine or DNA. What would an offworld visitor make of that?
Of course (as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy nearly said), “this (may have) already happened”. Remember the Dead Sea Scrolls? (Who DOES decide what is “Apocryphal”?) Recall, too, that we have had an estimated 14% only of Greek drama pass down to us. How accurate an impression can we have of either with what’s left?
Surely people have long known the problem of preserving wisdom. Perhaps the greatest of truths are lodged somwhere that even a Stalin or an Attila cannot expunge them. Perhaps this is realised at a barely conscious level by the Cromwells and the Talibans, and this is what angers them so much – and it is anger as much as cultural contempt that moves them to lash out. There’s always the chance that the other guy may have got it right, and it’s safest not to let anyone see what he thought.
Perhaps, “The Tao which can be spoken/written/described is not the real Tao”
Thanks for the clarification. But many of the works in Timbuktu were unique and put there for safekeeping, so if they are declared lost, they really are lost.
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 12:10 AM, texthistory
Yes; what’s lost physically is lost physically, and for good, and I do not wish to minimise the loss. But, as Grace Slick put it, “Sing a song for the children who are gone”, but keep on living most fully, now.
I am sorry so many churches have only scoured and whitewashed walls. Although not a Christian beleiver, I appreciate the art that was lost, even though it served to uphold divine right, patronage, and feudal class distinctions. Ditto with the Buddhas the Taliban vandals destroyed, and all the rest. But, as Aldous Huxcley describedt it at the end of “Island”, the fact of enlightenment remains, even as the ricochet of the asassin’s bullets echo away, and good men die.
I was edging towards the cliche that you cannot kill an idea. There must have been many Timbuktus over the course of human culture, and yet, “we’re still standing”. I can’t beleive in a Golden Age, and I do not believe today is demonstrably worse than any other time, just more technically advanced, more aware of itself, more open to changes, and so offering more chances, good and bad.
There is a great struggle in our era of rapid mass communication, between aggressive mediaevalism and a progressive outlook. There are people with rifles and infallible books in their hands who want to make me live in 1491 (Columbus -1), and I vote no. And I have one great advantage; you can smash all the sextants and I would still know how navigation is done, and be able to make a new one, with some effort. Ditto with electrical generation and devices, the internal combustion engine, use of paraffin to kill malaria – vectoring mosquitos, etc etc. These are not in any infallible book, but the idea of them is out in the open, for good.
It’s up to the civilised survivors to continue to tell the truth – that enrages the dictators. Just now, we seem to be having an “Orwell season” on BBC – he would have understood that point. It’s such a tempting idea – that you can enslave men through limiting their imagination. But, like the dream that wars can be won with minimal casualties by precision aerial bombing alone, it’s never been done.
ps
I can’t resist a favourite quote from a later part of the Tao – te – Ching:
“When there is already dissension, then there is a call for loyal officers”
Wow. thanks for all this. Unfortunately I have limited internet time, so can’t really respond fully. One thing is a lot of the stuff I raised in my post on Rambling thoughts a few weeks ago, about the links between science, art & happiness. What is common when the economy is in crisis is the soaring rates of depression and suicide – these are really high at the present and unlikely to change. We need to find cheap ways of coping, and the standard response of drugs is not an answer. the other notion is that the planet is seriously overpopulated and running out of resources, which is unique to our present age.
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:53 PM, texthistory