2013-05-25T13:41:51-04:00 Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=llewelyn-morgan Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Llewelyn Morgan Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3128737 2013-04-21T18:28:58-04:00 2013-04-23T09:46:09-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ not belonging.

We're talking about a pretty basic herd instinct here, one that's been with us since before we were human, so it's not surprising that the Ancient Greeks were just as subject to it as we are. Historically, the thing that did most to make a motley collection of competitive mini-states into Hellas, "Greece," was an external threat, an on-off conflict with the Persian Empire. This convinced the inhabitants of Greece that they had something in common with each other, and they also coined a word for non-Greeks that we still use today: barbaroi, barbarians. The word came to encompass the Greeks' deepest fears and prejudices about unfamiliar peoples, and their sense of their own natural superiority. The philosopher Aristotle quotes approvingly a line of poetry, "It is fitting that Greeks should rule over barbaroi," on the grounds that the barbarian and the slave were by nature the same.

In the fourth century BC Aristotle's pupil Alexander the Great destroyed the Persian Empire, and advanced with his army as far as India. In the process Alexander led his Greek soldiers to entirely alien territory, as far from their homeland as an ancient mind could conceive. And it played tricks on their minds. Once, when Alexander was having his tent pitched beside the river Oxus (now the northern border of Afghanistan) "a spring of oily and fatty liquid" burst out of the ground, "seeming to differ neither in odour nor flavour from olive oil, and in sheen and lustre quite indistinguishable." Olive oil, the staple of Greek day-to-day existence, coming out of the ground?! It was a great omen, Alexander concluded, and it's easy to see why. This strange, unfamiliar land was offering them the tastes and smells of home, bidding them welcome. Except, of course, it wasn't olive oil: it was petroleum.

One consequence of Alexander's campaigns was that Greeks came to settle permanently in Afghanistan. At Ai Khanum on the river Oxus a Greek city has been excavated, and one of the most exciting finds tells a similar story of Greeks doggedly clinging to Greekness in their new and strange environment. It isn't much to look at, an unprepossessing lump of stone, but it has two inscriptions carved on it, one a piece of wisdom from the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi in central Greece, and the other a little poem which explained how that piece of wisdom had got to Ai Khanum. A man named Clearchus, a philosopher (another pupil of Aristotle, in fact), had copied wise sayings down at Delphi, travelled the 4,000 km to Ai Khanum, and set them up, "shining from afar".

Apollo, the god of Delphi, is a bit like olive oil. He somehow encapsulated what the Greeks felt made them Greek. Apollo embodied what (the Greeks believed) was special about them, their superior understanding of the human condition, their rational civilization. He was also a god of the sun, and the Greek word telauge, "shining from afar", which describes the wisdom that Clearchus brought from Apollo's shrine, combines these ideas: this Greek wisdom is like the sun, giving light and life to everyone it touches. Well, Clearchus obviously felt that the Greeks living in Afghanistan needed reminding they were still Greeks, some home-spun life advice from Delphi, but we find this notion that Greek culture is like sunlight (and life as a non-Greek is scrabbling around in the dark) elsewhere as well. Here's a Greek writer regretting that Alexander had died as young as he did:

"If the god that sent down Alexander's soul into this world of ours had not recalled him quickly, one law would govern all men, and they all would look toward one system of justice as though toward a common source of light. As it is, that part of the world which has not looked upon Alexander has remained without sunlight."

The Greeks hung on in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) for a surprisingly long time, but they never lost their acute sense of "us", the Greeks, and "them", the barbaroi. A Greek king called Euthydemus used a gobstopper of a Greek word to explain what would happen if he didn't prevent "hordes of nomads" encroaching on his kingdom from the north. "The country will certainly be ekbarbarothesesthai, overwhelmed by barbarians."

Given time, those nomads did take over. The Greek kings retreated bit by bit until finally, around the time of Christ, Greek control was reduced to a tiny kingdom near modern Lahore, Pakistan. The coins issued by the beleaguered king Strato II tell us very clearly how dire things got.

So with the Greeks in retreat and barbarians in the ascendant, did darkness fall? Did the whole area collapse into chaos? Not quite. Some of those nomads Euthydemus was so afraid of were buried at Tillya Tepe, an archaeological site which yielded an amazing hoard of gold in the 1970s, the pride of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. A century or so later, and these nomads forged themselves into the Kushan Empire, which presided over an extended period of peace and prosperity in this part of world. One beneficiary of that stability was Buddhism, widespread across Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time, which enjoyed a golden age under the Kushans reflected in the famous Gandharan style of art, a blend of eastern and western artistic influences.

So what happened to Greekness? Did it disappear, eclipsed for ever as the hordes of Barbary swept through? Not at all, but it was transformed into something else, something rich and strange and beautiful. The way the sculptor has managed to convey the fall of the Buddha's thin cloak in stone would be unthinkable without the influence of Greek art. And that's the thing with wanting to belong, to keep things the way they've always been, to cling to what you know.

It can get in the way of something amazing.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2684533 2013-02-14T17:46:43-05:00 2013-04-16T05:12:01-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ a wholesale destruction of manuscripts by jihadis as they abandoned the city. There were suggestions that as many as 25,000 manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu had been burned, and even that the building itself had been torched.

When the dust cleared the damage, though serious, turned out not to be as dire as feared. As Professor Shamil Jeppie, director of the outstanding Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, makes clear in this interview, the number of lost manuscripts is closer to 2,000--still, as he says, "bad enough". In time, no doubt, the full story will emerge, but at this stage it appears that a lot of manuscripts were hidden or spirited away from Timbuktu to keep them out of reach of the jihadis. What is not in doubt, however, is that a significant number of manuscripts were burned, and were burned by Islamist extremists.

In the blog I posted earlier this week I cited and questioned this statement by Dr Mohamed Mathee, an academic at the University of Johannesburg who describes himself as "a researcher on the Timbuktu manuscripts once part of the UCT-Tombouctou Manuscripts Project", and thus, by implication, an authoritative commentator on events in Timbuktu. His statement begins with some robust but not unjustified criticism of the sensationalist reports in the early stages of the recapture of Timbuktu, but he doesn't stop there, expressing scepticism that any damage has been done to manuscripts at all, and (should any damage prove to have occurred) going so far as to cast doubt on the identity of the perpetrators:

"While it is possible that the Ansar al-Din destroyed things in their hasty retreat, it must not be ruled out that the French created the story to, 1. Give greater legitimacy to their illegal invasion, and 2. That in the case of them destroying mss in Timbuktu (as happened in Iraq), the blame will then fall on the stupid Ansar al-Din. The media (BBC and ilk) as embedded pen mercenaries were all too happy to report on torched buildings and mss."

Later Dr Mathee rather confirms the impression that he regards the French (and their collaborators, the BBC) as a greater threat to Timbuktu's heritage than the jihadis. Citing a destructive invasion of the area in the sixteenth century, he goes on:

"The French invasion (notwithstanding that the takeover by the Ansar al-Din and the Mouvement National de Libération de l'Azawad's (MNLA) was wrong and heinous) is not unlike that of the 1591 invasion of Songhay and the destruction of its State. If anything, it is worse in an age of "equality" between nations; but also, because in the last one and a half decades we have seen the carnage that unilateral invasions cause."

Whatever may be said about the French intervention in Mali, and there are legitimate anxieties, it was not unilateral, and it was not illegal. Even a generally sceptical commentator like Olivier Roy is clear on that point. Furthermore many people, and this seemingly includes the majority of Malians, have welcomed the removal of illegitimate and repressive rule by al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb and their affiliates. By now we are perfectly clear, too, if there was ever any doubt about it, that the French had nothing to do with the destruction of historical manuscripts in the Ahmed Baba Institute. Nevertheless, Dr Mathee's conspiracy theory was widely circulated, and used by certain elements to condemn those sympathetic to the French intervention as ill-informed warmongers. Here, for example, is Mohammed Ansar, a vocal opponent of this intervention based at a computer terminal in Hampshire, citing Dr Mathee's statement to dismiss (with unnecessary rudeness, most people would agree) the concerns of the author Tom Holland.

The basic purpose of this post is to share some important information about the statement on which Mr Ansar based his remarks to Mr Holland. In a personal communication Dr Shamil Jeppie has asked me to communicate that Dr Mathee has no affiliation to the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, and I am delighted to take this opportunity to clarify that Dr Mathee does not speak or write in its name. Whilst Dr Mathee's insinuations about French intentions were quite outrageous, the more significant point to emerge here is that Dr Mathee had no more authority to pronounce on Timbuktu, and dismiss as the reflexes of unreconstructed imperialists valid concerns about radical Islamism, than, well, some random bloke at a computer terminal in Hampshire.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2649159 2013-02-08T19:41:54-05:00 2013-04-10T05:12:01-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/
Yet here I am, harping on Bamiyan again. The reason is Timbuktu, 4,000 miles away from Afghanistan and on another continent, yet as similar to Bamiyan as a town in the grip of desertification could possibly be to a green and fertile (and in winter, snow-covered) valley high in the Afghan mountains. Once upon a time Timbuktu and Bamiyan were both flourishing cities serving trade routes, one across the Sahara Desert (and along the River Niger) and the other through the mountain barrier of the Hindu Kush. Salt, gold and slaves flowed into Timbuktu, and alongside those high-status goods another, the religion of Islam. The story of Bamiyan's conversion from Buddhism to Islam was also, we think, mainly a matter of camel caravans and social climbing. Like Bamiyan, Timbuktu's trade wealth translated into political power, and it became a centre of religious learning, and also a place where trade and scholarship drew diverse ethnicities together.

In their heyday Timbuktu and Bamiyan were celebrated places. In time history left them behind, guarding precious survivals of their past glory--mosques and saints' tombs, manuscripts, the giant Buddhas--but both coming to seem almost impossibly remote: Timbuktu turned into a by-word for an exotic, far-flung place, while Bamiyan became a leading candidate for the site of the Garden of Eden. A sign of their one-time prestige is that they almost have in common the great North-African traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited Timbuktu in 1353 (he saw his first hippopotamus in the Niger nearby). Twenty years earlier, as he travelled towards India, Ibn Battuta heard tell of Bamiyan, but he followed a detour over the Hindu Kush that avoided it, most likely because Bamiyan had yet to recover from its obliteration at the hands of Genghis Khan in 1221. All that had survived of the city, according to Ibn Battuta, was the minaret of its main mosque.

Today these places are associated for different reasons. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan has become the automatic point of reference whenever there are threats to cultural artefacts. Whether it's (bogus) reports of plans to demolish the Pyramids of Giza, or destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu or Libya, the chorus is that it's "Bamiyan all over again". But it isn't just the people deploring these acts of vandalism who make the connection. The jihadis who occupied towns in northern Mali, and pursued their intolerant version of Islam by demolishing Sufi shrines and burning manuscripts, are themselves inspired by what happened in Bamiyan. They are sophisticated manipulators of international reaction, perfectly aware how provocative images of cultural destruction are for people who do not share their ideology. Their greatest ambition is to incite an all-encompassing conflict with those they consider the irreconcilable enemies of Islam, which means anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who do not share their fundamentalist strain of Islam. Bamiyan was, from a jihadi perspective, an immense success, simultaneously advertising the cause to potential sympathizers (foreign volunteers to the Taliban and al-Qa'ida reportedly ballooned in the month following the destruction of the Buddhas), and provoking intense antipathy elsewhere.

Let me strain my readers' patience by adding two more points of comparison between Bamiyan and Timbuktu, the two which seem to me most important in February 2013. The first is that in both cases the damage to cultural artefacts, although deplorable, pales into insignificance when set against the brutality visited upon the people of these places. The wider context of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan is too little appreciated; and we've heard appalling things from Mali. The second is a certain moral equivocation that entered discussion of the destruction of the Buddhas and is threatening to do the same in the case of the burning of the Timbuktu manuscripts. It has been claimed by some ever since 2001 that the destruction of the Buddhas was not an act of extremist iconoclasm but a cri de coeur from an Afghan people abandoned by the international community and in the grip of food shortages. That argument doesn't stack up even on its own terms (it was the Taliban that destroyed the Buddhas, and the Taliban displayed precious little concern for starving Afghan children), but in any case it's a travesty of any reasonable notion of moral responsibility. The men responsible for the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were the men who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan: the high leadership of the Taliban and their foreign allies and supporters at the time.

If we turn to Timbuktu, when there emerges from an otherwise reputable source, the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, a wild insinuation that the French might destroy manuscripts to cast the jihadists in a unflattering light (as if there was any necessity for that), and when from others we hear the suggestion that it was French intervention that somehow provoked the jihadis to vandalise the manuscripts, and thus with the West that ultimate responsibility lies, it looks like we have the beginnings of a similar kind of counter-narrative, aimed to excuse, partly or wholly, the obnoxious ideology that lies behind these actions. The international community needs to be very careful in Mali, sensible and proportionate in their treatment of all communities in the country. Above all, they must not react, or overreact, to provocation by what is, in the final analysis, a very small group of extremists, since this is exactly what those extremists want. That said, bad faith is not a good basis for sound policy. We need to be clear what that small rump of jihadis is about, and we aren't going to understand their repellent worldview properly unless we accept--and I know it isn't rocket science-- that the men responsible for destroying religious buildings and manuscripts in Timbuktu are the ones who destroyed them.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2517180 2013-01-20T19:42:39-05:00 2013-03-22T05:12:01-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ a popular book. I haven't managed to shift many copies, to be honest, but it's been a fascinating experience and, generally speaking, a lot of fun. There's a downside to escaping the ivory tower of academia, though. When you write about a topic as controversial as Afghanistan, in particular, the brickbats start to fly. I've found myself being called a Hinduphobe by a self-proclaimed expert on Hindu history, and a racist and Islamophobe by a self-appointed representative of Muslims in the UK (who's also a Huffpost blogger--hiya, Mo!). There I was thinking that I was a pretty common-or-garden liberal, maybe even slightly more attuned to interracial fairness and injustice than average given my Welsh ancestry. Ho hum.

As far as I'm concerned I've never maligned any Muslims or hated any Hindus, and I'm not planning to start today. What I am going to do, and do unashamedly, is act like an academic. Because we academics sometimes feel a bit undervalued in contemporary society, but if there's one thing I've learned in this whole process it's the crucial importance of the thing that academics are trained to do above all others, meticulous research.

I can pinpoint the moment when the value of old-fashioned, unglamorous factchecking really came home to me. I was reading 2083--A European Declaration of Independence, the manifesto composed and distributed by Anders Behring Breivik in advance of the atrocities he committed on July 22 2011 in Oslo and on Utøya island. In it Breivik collects together the information necessary for activists engaged in what Breivik was confident would result from his terrorism: a Europe-wide war to expel Islam from the continent.

My book was about the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two gigantic statues carved from a cliff face in central Afghanistan, demolished by the Taliban in 2001. I was reading Breivik, among other reasons, because he's very interested in the Hindu Kush, the band of mountains that sweeps across Afghanistan from the North-East to the West: Bamiyan sits in a valley in the heart of those mountains. The focus of Breivik's interest is a very esoteric question indeed, the origin of the name "Hindu Kush". On the web Breivik had found the argument that "Hindu Kush" means "Hindu Killer", and that the name of the range commemorates the death of thousands of Hindu slaves transported over the high passes by Muslim slavers. Breivik refers repeatedly in his 1,500-word manifesto to a "genocide" of Hindus by Muslims immortalized in the name of the mountain range: the "Hindu Kush, the largest Genocide in the history of man", "Hindu/Buddhist genocides--Hindu Kush, the largest Genocides in the history of man", "the Hindu Kush genocides (80 million massacred Hindus, 100 million enslaved)". For Breivik, "Hindu Kush" becomes shorthand for the brutality he regards as intrinsic to the religion of Islam. That conviction in turn motivated him to commit mass murder.

Let's take a closer look at this idea. First of all, Breivik can only get to the spectacular numbers he throws about by confusing this story of the slave trade over the Hindu Kush with Hindu-Muslim conflicts more generally, and even so he's wildly exaggerating the death toll. But the "Hindu-Killer" theory itself is just as dubious. It goes back to a prolific Hindu-nationalistic blogger named Koenraad Elst, as it happens the man who called me a Hinduphobe over the summer. He in turn had got it from the great Arabic traveller Ibn Battuta, who crossed the Hindu Kush on his way to Delhi way back in the winter of 1333:
"Another reason for our halt was fear of the snow. For upon this road there is a mountain called Hindukush, which means 'the slayer of the Indians', because the slave boys and girls who are brought from the land of India die there in large numbers as a result of the extreme cold and the great quantity of snow. The passage of it extends for a whole day's march."

Now, it's perfectly true that "Hindu Kush" seems to a Persian speaker to mean "Hindu-Killer", on the analogy of a Persian word like ādam-kush, "man-killer, murderer." On the other hand, even if his explanation of the name of the mountains were correct, Ibn Battuta isn't describing anything that can justify the term genocide. But in actual fact Ibn Battuta, a truly remarkable man but no expert in historical linguistics, is obviously just repeating a local folktale he'd heard. Names, even apparently very meaningful names like "Hindu Kush", aren't some kind of magic key to the history of a place. Let's consider a parallel. In the leafy Cotswolds of England there are two picturesque villages called Upper and Lower Slaughter. If I were Koenraad Elst I might speculate that their names commemorated the brutal treatment of my ancestors by the invading Anglo-Saxons, elevated and less elevated sites of Celtic genocide. But if we follow reputable linguistic analysis, rather than relying on folklore, we discover that "Slaughter" is a derivation of Old English *slōhtre, "muddy place": compare "slough" (or "Slough").

The truth is that nobody really knows why the Hindu Kush has the name it does, but the experts are pretty confident that it's nothing to do with anybody getting slaughtered. Anyway, the reality of the conversion of the Hindu Kush to Islam is much more complicated than the bloodbaths Elst and Breivik are so keen to imagine. To take just one solitary example, the most vivid account we have of Buddhist worship at Bamiyan is to be found in a tenth-century Arabic text composed in Baghdad, cultural centre of the Islamic world. In other words, a Muslim witnessed and recorded Buddhist observance at Bamiyan, and other Muslims avidly consumed what he wrote. What Breivik believes, and found evidence in Elst's work to support, was that Islam is an inherently violent religion incapable of tolerating the existence of non-Muslims. The evidence suggests that it was always much more a process of compromise, coexistence and give-and-take.

Conjuring historical events out of thin air like this is batty, but more than that: bad history can exert a very bad influence. Marko Attila Hoare has also studied Breivik's manifesto, and concludes that "Breivik's actions are exceptional, but his views are not." In other words, what Breivik ended up doing was unparalleled, and let's pray it will remain so. But Breivik shares his analysis of the world situation with a terrifyingly large number of people. Breivik's sources have been mapped by Andrew Brown in The Guardian, and centre on a close network of "counter-jihad" sites run by figures such as the American activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. In these circles prejudiced versions of history are common currency, a way of lending a patina of academic authority to their opinions. Now, we cannot blame Geller, Spencer or Elst for Breivik's massacres, but we can ask what lurid historical concoctions like slave transports through the Hindu Kush (not to mention emotive use of the word "genocide") are designed to do, if not provoke fear and anger against Muslims. What is it for otherwise?

The truth about the history of the Hindu Kush is that it has always been a space where different cultures encountered each other. Sometimes there was violence, but that doesn't mean it was a place where cultures simply fought, pillaged and raped, and reinforced their irreconcilable differences. In Bamiyan Iranians followed an Indian religion, Buddhism, and hundreds of years before the Buddhas were carved Greek kings of the Hindu Kush minted coins depicting an elephant, symbol of India, and the staff of the god Hermes, god of communication and interaction. Those Greek kings, successors of Alexander the Great, became patrons of Buddhism. Recent discoveries confirm the existence of a large Jewish community in the area. The Hindu Kush was a crossroads, and an infinitely varied melting pot of religions and ethnicities.

I've made the point before that the (real) Islamophobes like Geller, Spencer and Raymond Ibrahim have a lot in common with Islamic extremists. Both extremes agree that the fundamentalist accounts of Islam from figures like Bin Laden are the true Islam, and that no accommodation is possible between non-Muslim and Muslim cultures. As such, and this is an important point, the "counter-jihadists" are the jihadists' very best friends, working to ensure what jihadists aspire to most, an unbridgeable gulf between Islam and the rest of the world. Of course, the millions of Muslims living in the West give the lie to this, but they are poorly served by many of those who claim to speak for them, in the UK especially. The man who called me an Islamophobe for querying his (uncompromising) formulations of Islam is in his own way contributing to the view, worryingly prevalent among both Muslims and non-Muslims, that the secular systems prevailing in the West are incompatible with a proper observance of Islam.

For the Hindu Kush, at any rate, historical simplifications and black-and-white ideologies, on both sides, have had melancholy consequences. It is a place of stunning natural beauty and archaeological riches, alongside an impoverished people who have suffered more than anyone else in Afghanistan's recent conflicts. The Buddhas of Bamiyan, in the middle of the mountains, were demolished for being monuments incompatible with "true" Islam, and the Hazara people, whose homeland is the highlands of the Hindu Kush, the Hazarajat, have been massacred, and continue to be massacred for being Shi'a, a form of Islam incompatible, according to Sunni purists, with true Islam. The word genocide has been used of the Hazaras' plight, this time with some justice. Meanwhile the mountains around Bamiyan have been transformed by Hindu extremists and their sympathizers into a monument of Islam's alleged inhumanity, the "Hindu-killer".

The academic just repeats the most valuable thing an academic can ever say. History tells a much more nuanced story. Study a thing meticulously and disinterestedly and it's always more complicated than a simple Them versus Us.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1673750 2012-07-16T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-15T05:12:02-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ this, the days of the pyramids are numbered: "According to several reports in the Arabic media," writes Raymond Ibrahim, "prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt's Great Pyramids."

In actual fact, it seems the story originated in a spoof tweet. But hey! It's the easiest thing in the world to find someone somewhere expressing some wacko view or other; and then Mark Steyn repeats it all, and off we go...

Let's be crystal-clear about this right here. The answer to the question in my title is a mile-high, neon "NO". The pyramids of Giza are under no threat whatsoever, and neither is any of the rest of Egypt's glorious archaeological record. This is as radical as the thinking is getting among anyone anywhere near power in Egypt. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ibrahim is scaremongering, and it comes as no surprise when he goes on to offer a deeply misleading account of what has been happening in Timbuktu: "Currently, in what the International Criminal Court is describing as a possible 'war crime,' Islamic fanatics are destroying the ancient heritage of the city of Timbuktu in Mali--all to Islam's triumphant war cry, 'Allahu Akbar!'"

To read that that you'd think that the only Muslims involved in events at Timbuktu were the ones doing the vandalism. But of course it was Islamic buildings that they were attacking. Ansar al-Din, the al-Qaeda-affiliated zealots in northern Mali, consider the traditional Sufi practices of Timbuktu to be heretical. What Ibrahim is doing is treating the most extreme voices of Islam as representative of the whole religion, to the extent of implying that the Sufi Muslims of Timbuktu aren't really proper Muslims at all.

Ibrahim is not alone. I blogged last week about Pamela Geller playing the same game, using Timbuktu as a stick to beat Islam when what Timbuktu was telling us was something entirely different.

Islam is a very broad church, with no central organizing authority (like a Pope, say) to fix doctrine. As in other religions, there's a tendency for different traditions within the religion to claim themselves as the uniquely authentic face of Islam, and al-Qaeda and their allies make that claim in a particularly uncompromising and brutal way. But there's a further point: if Raymond Ibrahim treats the Sufi of Timbuktu as not proper Muslims, he's in effect adopting the viewpoint of al-Qaeda. What a stunning victory for extremists this is, that people across the US and beyond are being encouraged to accept al-Qaeda's distorted ideology as the truth!

The comments under my blog on Timbuktu told a similar story. Someone came in with a link to Ibrahim's article; others encouraged me to read polemics by Hindu nationalists such as Sita Ram Goel's Hindu Temples--What Happened to Them, which seeks to prove that Muslim rulers in India systematically destroyed Hindu shrines. That brought me back to where I started with this whole issue, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. One way that the Taliban and their sympathizers sought to justify the destruction of the Buddhas was to claim it as payback for the demolition of the Baburi Mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu hardliners in 1992.

An intense and polarized debate continues to this day about Ayodhya, what was there before the mosque was built by the Moghul emperor Babur, and what (if anything) happened to Hindu buildings on the site, and it was an issue of great interest to Sita Ram Goel. On the other side, numerous Islamist terrorist attacks on Indians have claimed the destruction of this mosque as their motivation.

Extreme Hindu nationalism, like the ideology of al-Qaeda and the paranoid theories of certain US commentators, is very interested in history, but deals in radical historical simplifications--for example, the idea that Islam is a religion hard-wired to destroy the religious monuments of its opponents. That is simply a false account of what happened, historically, when Islamic peoples encountered non-Islamic.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan survived, and were celebrated, for 1,200 years among Muslims before the Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda destroyed them. I encourage anyone interested in Islamic attitudes to Hindu and Buddhist holy places to read Richard M. Eaton's measured, careful analysis, "Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States", Part 1 and Part 2. He tells a story of Muslim rulers in India who for the most part protected non-Islamic shrines, and on the rare occasions they did otherwise were following a time-honoured tradition within India of destroying your enemies' favourite temples: Hindus had been demolishing other Hindus' places of worship for centuries before Islam arrived. The crucial point, though, is that these Muslim rulers in India were never driven by religious fanaticism. However, in the context of tension between India and Pakistan, extreme simplifications of history thrive: Hindus are superstitious idol-worshippers; Muslims are intolerant idol-smashers. Scrupulous scholars like Richard Eaton prove that it is just not that simple.

But, as I commented at the end of my blog on Timbuktu, "Ideologues in one camp have a habit of creating ideologues in other camps, and the argument goes on and on and on..." That notion was illustrated in glorious technicolor below the line. Get your head around this logic, in one of the comments:

"if Ansar al-Din, the extremists doing the damage in Timbuktu, claim to be the only true Muslims, then we have to accept that claim, and regard what is happening in Timbuktu as Islam attacking non-Muslims."

In other words, we must accept al-Qaeda's analysis of Islam and the world, that they are the only authentic Muslims and all other Muslims must be forced to follow their creed. That strikes me as plain bonkers. What on earth compels us to accept al-Qaeda's view of things? Sufi Muslims are Muslims. Full stop. But credit where credit is due: irrational as it is, that comment does capture something essential about the thinking (for want of a better word) on this issue. Radicals like al-Qaeda want to provoke their opponents to be equally radical, because they want to create unbridgeable divisions between peoples, and an existential conflict which (they fondly suppose) will bring their appalling ideology to world domination. Commentators who define Islam as essentially incompatible with Western values are doing al-Qaeda's job for it.

Sita Ram Goel, Raymond Ibrahim and Ansar al-Din are all, in a peculiar way, speaking the same language, the language of extremes, where religions cannot communicate peacefully with one another, and complex and diverse faiths are reduced to crude caricatures. In the words of the Arab Spring activist Iyad El-Baghdadi, "Islamophobes and extreme Islamists are two peas in a pod. Both invent a radical, extreme sect and call it 'the one & only true Islam'."

But we must insist that there is another language, a precious but undervalued one. It isn't glamorous, and it requires the kind of laborious hours in the library that Richard M. Eaton put in. It resists seductively black-and-white explanations of events, and the temptation all humans feel to demonise what they do not know. It is never going to inspire young men to pull down a mosque or become suicide bombers. It is fiddly, unexciting, humane--and true. It is called moderation.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1649800 2012-07-08T19:00:00-04:00 2012-09-07T05:12:12-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ Pamela Geller is not someone you naturally go to for balanced coverage of Islamic issues (she has expressed the view that "Islam is the most antisemitic, genocidal ideology in the world", for example), but in a recent tweet (linking to her blog) on the appalling vandalism to mosques and mausolea in Timbuktu, Mali, Geller excelled even herself: "Mali Muslims destroy holy Timbuktu sites: witnesses: It's the same everywhere that Muslims seek to impose Islam..."

What Geller failed to mention was that the "holy Timbuktu sites" under assault were themselves Islamic sites, thus hardly the victims of "Muslims imposing Islam". In reality, what is happening in Timbuktu is one group within the broad spectrum of Islam violently imposing its blinkered ideology on another tradition in Islam with which it disagrees. The group carrying out the destruction, Ansar al-Din ("Defenders of the Faith"), are Salafist or Wahhabi Muslims, drawing their inspiration, like al-Qaeda, from schools particularly influential in the Arabian Peninsula (though currently showing a worrying capacity to seed themselves elsewhere). The traditions of worship in Timbuktu are Sufi, Islamic mysticism considered idolatrous by fundamentalist groups such as Ansar al-Din.

This shouldn't need to be spelled out or repeated, but 11 years after 9/11 it unfortunately still does: al-Qaeda and other extremist forms of Islamism influenced by the Wahhabi or Salafist schools may claim to represent a pure form of Islam, may even be claimed by Pamela Geller to represent Islam in its purest form, but they have as much right to insist that theirs is the only true Islam as the Quran-burning pastor in Florida is to make that claim of his version of Christianity. One of the scariest things about radical, violent Islamism is its ability to persuade some Muslims and some non-Muslims that it is the authentic face of Islam. Take a look at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, investigating the rich scholarly culture of Timbuktu from the thirteenth century onwards, hundreds of years of Islamic life and learning, and that notion will seem as absurd as it deserves to.

An almost automatic reflex when we hear about Timbuktu is to remember Bamiyan in 2001, and the reaction this last week has tended to be, "Oh no, it's Bamiyan all over again." In time we'll hear more about the local factors that influenced events, and then the parallels with what happened a decade ago and 4,000 miles away in Afghanistan will no doubt seem less compelling. But there is some substance to the comparison of Timbuktu and Bamiyan, and while our attention is focused on acts of cultural desecration (not something that can often be said), there are some useful points to be made.

What do Timbuktu and Bamiyan have in common? Well, they're both places with evocative names that we don't know very much about. Historically, they were great medieval trading posts (Timbuktu's speciality was gold), which through their centrality and wealth (both Buddhism and Islam are religions very sympathetic to commerce) turned into centres of religion and scholarship. Something else they share, I'm afraid, is that, in Timbuktu as in Bamiyan, the well-intentioned efforts of the international community may have contributed to the catastrophic turn of events. At Bamiyan the suspicion is that it was precisely the intense international interest in the fate of the Buddhas that encouraged the Taliban's al-Qaeda allies to push for the statues' destruction. As the Afghan expert Olivier Roy has put it, "Al-Qaeda, which has never had roots in social movements, ceases to exist if it isn't on the front pages and on our television screens." Organisations committed to global jihad (and that includes Ansar al-Din and al-Qaeda) actively seek opportunities to outrage and provoke the wider world. International expressions of concern about Timbuktu, culminating in UNESCO declaring Timbuktu a World Heritage Site in Danger on 28 June, may well have brought home to the extremists in Mali how big an impact they could make by doing exactly what the outside world were telling them not to.

But the most important point of similarity between Bamiyan and Timbuktu lies in the nature of the organizations doing the damage. By claiming that their actions represent the only acceptable Islamic way, Ansar al-Din are discounting centuries of Islamic observance in Timbuktu. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were (fairly obviously) Buddhist in origin, but it's rarely appreciated how long the Buddhas of Bamiyan survived under Islam without experiencing any significant damage: about 1,200 years until the Taliban came along. In that time there was apparently no attempt to destroy the Buddhas; on the contrary, the Buddhas became celebrated wonders of the Muslim world.

The local Hazara people of Bamiyan incorporated the Buddhas into their folklore. One marvellous story tells how the Buddhas were sculpted by the survivors emerging from Noah's ark. As the Flood receded, it left the ground still a little damp and malleable, so they took the opportunity to mould the statues in thanks to God for their deliverance. Another Muslim writer, from the twelfth century, explained that the Buddhas were a gift from Allah to mankind, describing how the Buddhas were attuned to nature: pigeons nested in their noses and both Buddhas smiled when the sun rose. "This smile should not be thought strange, for whatever the sun shines on, cheerfulness and joviality appear in it, and that thing inclines towards the sun."

The people of Bamiyan are deeply pious Muslims, albeit Shia and thus (like the Sufi of Timbuktu) heretics in the eyes of Salafists. The Hazara people suffered terribly at the hands of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces largely as a consequence of being Shia. The piety of that 12th Century writer is also as plain as day. The ideologues of Ansar al-Din have not the slightest right to claim precedence for their own narrow interpretation of the faith. But it's equally important for non-Muslims not to confuse extremist caricatures of Islam for the real thing. Ideologues in one camp have a habit of creating ideologues in other camps, and the argument goes on and on and on...]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1558520 2012-06-03T19:00:00-04:00 2012-08-03T05:12:17-04:00

Llewelyn Morgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/llewelyn-morgan/ The Buddhas of Bamiyan, and - let's be honest - when you'd quite like to flog a copy or two, all the recent talk about reconstructing one of the colossal statues demolished by the Taliban can seem heaven-sent. Those 18 months were spent discovering that places don't come any more historically significant than Bamiyan.

In AD 629 the Buddhas were visited by Xuanzang, the great Chinese traveller sometimes described as the Marco Polo of the East: he left a precious account of their original, brightly-coloured decoration. Later they were celebrated wonders of the Islamic world, monuments of which it was said that there were "no equals in this world."

At the end of the 18th century an eccentric but influential British author proposed that Bamiyan was the Garden of Eden: a string of dropouts, spies, and Christian missionaries visited Bamiyan from British India in his wake, and though all of them found a place of breathtaking natural beauty, the earthly paradise proved more elusive. Even the destruction of the Buddhas in 2001 was connected in murky ways to the greatest historical turning-point of recent times, in New York later the same year.

So yes, by all means let's investigate the feasibility of reconstructing the smaller (38 m.) Buddha - what remains of the bigger (55 m.) statue is just too fragmentary for it to be an option there. If it can be done well, if the daunting technical obstacles can be overcome, and if the cost (which will be exorbitant) can be justified by the benefits it will bring to a renascent tourist industry, who could possibly object? It's certainly what the local population want, and leaving empty the niche of the larger Buddha would even satisfy the purists who see the space where the Buddhas once were as a powerful memorial in itself. In all sorts of ways, a profoundly apt gesture.

But gestures are tricky things, all too easily misread. In particular, the way proponents of reconstruction have tied it to the departure of international forces in 2014 is unhelpful, partly because that makes the timeframe for such an intricate operation far too tight, but mainly because Afghanistan in general, and Afghan archaeology in particular, need more than gestures.

The bottom line is that Bamiyan may be the most famous archaeological site in Afghanistan, but it's not the only one. In fact the country is an archaeological treasure trove, a legacy of its long, turbulent history at the heart of Asian geopolitics. One example of archaeological wealth that has to be seen to be believed is Chehel Burj, in the mountains west of Bamiyan, a conical hill surmounted by massive medieval fortifications. The decay of its mud-brick buildings has left it looking rather like a fairytale castle in the process of dissolving - the world's biggest sandcastle. The structure itself is Ghorid, twelfth/thirteenth century, but around it are much older historical remains. The threats faced by Afghanistan's archaeological record are manifold, but they're not for the most part the kind that happens in the glare of the international media.

Give it time, and illicit treasure hunting, earthquakes and old-fashioned freeze-thaw action will destroy more than the most single-minded iconoclast could ever dream of.

What good will it do to resurrect one of the Buddhas of Bamiyan if Chehel Burj is allowed to melt away? That's not symbolism but tokenism, the guilty parting gesture of Western powers that know they haven't really done the job. Reconstruction can only make sense as part of a bigger commitment to preserve what is still there in Afghanistan. Before anything else we should build a museum at Bamiyan, which will house among other things the leaf from the tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, part of a 1500-year old offering found in the rubble of the smaller Buddha in 2006. Furthermore, this commitment must not evaporate in 2014. If the departure of the major troop deployments in 2014 means a complete disengagement from Afghanistan, then it's the 1990s all over again, when the world abandoned Afghanistan - and that wasn't good for anyone, not for archaeologists, not for Afghans, and not for a lot of people a very long way from Afghanistan.]]>