The Bamiyan Buddhas were the biggest Buddhas in the world, carved into a cliff face, with the largest one a standing figure nearly 175 feet tall. They were 1,500 years old, but because they were recessed into the cliff, which protected them from the alternating boiling hot, freezing cold weather, they were almost perfectly preserved. The draperies of the robes looked as if they had been cut out of the rock the previous week. And now they’re rubble.
I can’t get inside the mind of someone who would have them destroyed, but I know whose mind it is. Mullah Omar, the reclusive charlatan who leads the fanatical Taliban which controls most of Afghanistan, claims he knows the Muslim Holy Book, the Koran, better than any other Muslim today. Never mind that he seems to know it in a way no other Muslim but he and his illiterate followers know it. That he alone among contemporary Muslim leaders has laid waste his country’s pre-Islamic heritage when virtually all other Muslim countries go to great lengths to preserve theirs.
If other Muslims followed the Omar principle, there would be no Sphinx or Tutankhamen’s golden statuary in Egypt, none of the exquisite–and historically important–sculpture of Persepolis in Iran, nor of Babylon and Nineveh in Iraq, none of the myriad antiquities in Turkey, no Borobudur, the vast Buddhist temple in Indonesia. For me, one of the real ironies is that possibly the greatest artistic treasure in Pakistan is the astonishing emaciated Buddha in the Lahore museum. The highly polished stone sculpture is of the seated, fasting Buddha. It is older than the Bamiyan Buddhas, and features in much of the country’s tourist literature. Pakistan is the Taliban’s major arms-supplier and supporter–without its wholehearted support, the Taliban will crumble. Yet Pakistan backs these vandals, whose poisonous influence in northern Pakistan is spreading southwards, and imposing its mad rules on the already underprivileged women of that country.
The museums of Pakistan are filled with beautiful Buddhist sculpture from the Gandhara period. You watch the spread of Taliban inspired fundamentalism and ask yourself why Pakistan is doing this to itself. Does its illustrious Buddhist past have any future?
And does Mullah Omar know his Koran? The Prophet Mohammed preached tolerance, and historically Islam has a far better record of tolerance to other religions than its competitors. When Christian medieval Europe persecuted its Jews, it was to the Islamic world, from North Africa to Turkey, that they fled and established themselves. Many of the greatest texts of ancient Greece were preserved not in Christian Europe, which banished them as pagan, but in the Islamic world.
Mullah Omar of course is not a tolerant man–as the crumbled ruins of Bamiyan now attest, but it is hard to see how he could misinterpret the Koranic precept on religious diversity, as handed down by the Prophet, “To you be your way. And to me, mine.”
Anyway, enough of the man who has just expelled the BBC from Kabul because they dared to call the Taliban “primitive.” In the course of world’s history he is a minor vandal. There’s hardly any stained glass left in England because Protestant fanatics, using much the same argument about idolatry, smashed most of it. There are virtually no ancient synagogues in Europe, hardly any metalwork and manuscripts from pre-Colombian America (blame the Catholic Spaniards), just a little bit of Dresden, not much of Hawaii’s rich religious art (blame missionaries), and of course, every day we pay obeisance to one of the great vandal nations of the twentieth century, China.
I was in Tibet a a couple of years ago. A country which once had six thousand monasteries, all of them richly painted with murals dating back a thousand years, hung with magnificent banners, filled with some of Asia’s greatest metal sculpture, is now virtually in ruins. There are maybe six hundred functioning monasteries left, there’s broken sculpture by the roadside, the shattered walls of great religious buildings are sinking back into the earth, and Tibetan refugees tell of great religious images being melted down by the ton. The persecution of Tibet and the destruction of its culture goes on today–but hey, the Chinese aren’t the Taliban. We get our cheap underpants and watches and radios and computers from China, so we can’t call them primitive.
I’m lucky. I saw the Bamiyan Buddhas. You sat, say, half a mile from the cliff face, looking across a garden landscape dotted with poplar trees. In the early morning, the Buddhas would be lost in their dark recesses, but as the sun rose and moved across the sky they gradually lit up, and it seemed they were actually moving out of the shadow into the light. A wondrous and deeply moving spectacle–but for Mullah Omar, they were only stones.
