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An urge to smash history into tiny pieces
By Robert Fisk
09/07/07 "The
Independent" -- - What is it about graven
images? Why are we humanoids so prone to destroy our own
faces, smash our own human history, erase the memory of
language? I've covered the rape of Bosnian and Serb and
Croatian culture in ex-Yugoslavia – the deliberate
demolition of churches, libraries, graveyards, even the
wonderful Ottoman Mostar Bridge – and I've heard the
excuses. "There's no place for these old things," the Croat
gunner reportedly said as he fired his artillery battery
towards that graceful Ottoman arch over the Neretva. The
videotape of its collapse was itself an image of cultural
genocide – until the Taliban exploded the giant Buddhas of
Bamian.
And yet there I was earlier this week, staring at another
massive Buddha – this time in the Tajiki capital of
Dushanbe, only a few hundred miles from the Afghan border.
So gently was it sleeping, giant head on spread right hand,
that I tiptoed down its almost 40ft length, talking in
whispers in case I woke this creature with its Modigliani
features, its firmly closed eyes and ski-slope nose. Saved
from the ravages of iconoclasts, I thought, until I realised
that this karma-inducing god had itself been assaulted.
The top of its head, eyes and nose are intact, but the lower
half of its face has been subtly restored by a more modern
hand, its long body, perhaps three-quarters new, where the
undamaged left hand, palm on hip, lies gently on its upper
left leg above the pleats of its original robes. So what
happened to this Buddha? Surely the Taliban never reached
Dushanbe.
A young curator at Dush-ambe's wonderful museum of
antiquities explained in careful, bleak English. "When the
Arabs came, they smashed all these things as idolatrous,"
she said. Ah yes, of course they did. The forces of Islam
arrived in modern-day Tajikistan in around AD645 – the
Taliban of their day, as bearded as their 20th-century
successors, with no television sets to hang, but plenty of
Buddhas to smash. How on earth did the Bamian Buddhas escape
this original depredation?
The Buddhist temple at Vakhsh, east of Qurghonteppa was
itself new (given a hundred years or two) when the Arabs
arrived, and the museum contains the "work" of these idol-smashers
in desperate, carefully preserved profusion. Buddha's throne
appears to have been attacked with swords and the statue of
Shiva and his wife Parvati (sixth to eighth centuries) has
been so severely damaged by these ancient Talibans that only
their feet and the sacred cow beneath them are left.
Originally discovered in 1969 30ft beneath the soil, the
statue of "Buddha in Nirvana" was brought up to Dushanbe as
a direct result of the destruction of the Buddhas in
Afghanistan. Taliban excess, in other words, inspired
post-Soviet preservation. If we can no longer gaze at the
faces of those mighty deities in Bamian because the
Department for the Suppression of Vice and Preservation of
Virtue in Kabul deemed them worthy of annihilation, we can
still look upon this divinity in the posture of the
"sleeping lion" now that it has been freighted up to
Dushanbe by the local inheritors of Stalin's monstrous
empire. A sobering thought.
A certain B A Litvinsky was responsible for this first act
of architectural mercy. Eventually the statue was brought to
the Tajiki capital in 92 parts. Not that long ago, a
fraternal Chinese delegation arrived and asked to take the
sleeping Buddha home with them; they were told that they
could only photograph this masterpiece – which may be the
genesis of the "new" Buddha in the People's Republic.
Needless to say, there are many other fragments – animals,
birds, demons – that made their way from the monastery to
the museum. And I had to reflect that the Arabs behaved no
worse than Henry VIII's lads when they set to work on the
great abbeys of England. Did not even the little church of
East Sutton above the Kentish Weald have a few graven images
desecrated during the great age of English history? Are our
cathedrals not filled with hacked faces, the remaining
witness to our very own brand of Protestant Talibans?
Besides, the arrival of the Arabic script allowed a new
Tajiki poetry to flourish – Ferdowsi was a Tajik and wrote
Shanameh in Arabic – and in Dushanbe, you can see the most
exquisite tomb-markers from the era of King Babar, Arabic
verse carved with Koranic care into the smooth black surface
of the stone. Yet when Stalin absorbed Tajikistan into the
Soviet empire – cruelly handing the historic Tajiki cities
of Tashkent and Samarkand to the new republic of Uzbekistan,
just to keep ethnic hatreds alive – his commissars banned
Arabic. All children would henceforth be taught Russian and,
even if they were writing Tajiki, it must be in Cyrillic,
not in Arabic.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was similarly "modernising" Turkey at
this time by forcing Turks to move from Arabic to Latin
script (which is one reason, I suspect, why modern Turkish
scholars have such difficulty in studying vital Ottoman
texts on the 1915 Armenian Holocaust). Get rid of the
written language and history seems less dangerous. Didn't we
try to do the same thing in Ireland, forcing the Catholic
clergy to become hedge-preachers so that the Irish language
would remain in spoken rather than written form?
And so the Tajiki couples and the children who come to look
at their past in Dushanbe cannot read the Shahnameh as it
was written – and cannot decipher the elegant Persian poetry
carved on those extraordinary tomb-stones. So here is a tiny
victory against iconoclasm, perhaps the first English
translation of one of those ancient stones which few Tajiks
can now understand:
"I heard that mighty Jamshed the King/ Carved on a stone
near a spring of water these words:/ Many – like us – sat
here by this spring/ And left this life in the blink of an
eye./ We captured the whole world through our courage and
strength,/ Yet could take nothing with us to our grave."
Beside that same East Sutton church in Kent, there still
stands an English tombstone which I would read each time I
panted past it in my Sutton Valence school running shorts on
wintry Saturday afternoons. I don't remember whose body it
immortalises, but I remember the carved verse above the
name: "Remember me as you pass by,/ As you are now, so once
was I./ As I am now, so you will be./ Remember Death will
follow thee."
And I do recall, exhausted and frozen into my thin running
clothes, that I came to hate this eternal message so much
that sometimes I wanted to take a hammer and smash the whole
bloody thing to pieces. Yes, somewhere in our dark hearts,
perhaps we are all Talibans.
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