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THE
MOST DANGEROUS RELIGION
(Hint: It's not Islam)
By
Jack Miles & Douglas McLennan
Is
international cultural conflict replacing political Cold War
conflict?
Even
before fanatical Muslims dynamited
ancient Buddhist statues [The Telegraph]
in Afghanstan’s Bamiyan Valley, scholar Samuel P. Huntington
suggested that the answer might be yes.
Based
on the most widely discussed article of the decade in Foreign
Affairs, Huntington’s 1997 book, The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of the World predicted that Islam would
prove the most dangerous challenge for the West, because its
people are “convinced of the superiority of their culture
and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”
During
the past decade, as if to confirm Huntington’s thesis, Muslims
have fought (a partial list): Animists in Sudan; Coptic Christians
in Egypt, Ethiopian Christians in Eritrea; Jews in Palestine;
Eastern Orthodox Catholics in Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Cyprus;
Hindus in India; Roman Catholics in East Timor; Hindus, Confucians,
and Christians of various denominations in Indonesia; and
finally, of course, secular Westerners in Iraq.
Each
of these conflicts has had its own history; but to the extent
that Islam’s opponents in all these conflicts belong to an
international, religiously pluralist, Western-dominated cosmopolitanism,
they all may seem, to embattled Muslims, to be a single opponent.
Paradoxically, however, those very embattled Muslims may have
handed globalization a victory in Afghanstan.
The
illicit sale of Afghanstan’s art treasures [International
Herald Tribune], Islamic as well as non-Islamic, has
been steadily increasing for a decade, well before the Taliban
managed to take power five years ago, according to Souren
Melikian, art editor of the International Herald Tribune and
a cultural historian of central Asia.
The
Bamiyan bombings will quite probably turn that already flourishing
market into a raging bull market for the smugglers. “The
‘destroy’ order will provide a convenient smoke screen for
the mass looting of the land, an operation that can be carried
out only with the happy connivance of lower and mid-level
authorities,” Melikian writes.
The
Taliban has delivered a body blow to the already resented
“heritage” movement in the Western art community—the view
that ancient works should remain in their country of origin.
“I
must admit that I begin now to question our policy,[Los
Angeles Times] and those of most museums in the Western
world, to refrain from purchasing any object from the country
of its origins,” writes Marianna Yaldiz, director of the Museum
for Indian Art in Berlin to the editor of the art magazine
Orientations.
It
is in this legitimization of the smuggling, rather than in
Muslim fanaticism, that the larger peril to cultural heritage
may lie.
Whatever
the threat in Afghanstan, there seems to be little similar
danger in other Muslim countries. The
edict of Mullah Muhammad Omar [Globe
& Mail, Canada], leader of Taliban, the ruling
party in Afghanstan, ordering all statues destroyed as idols
because “worshippers might be tempted to pay homage” to them,
has not been widely acclaimed by other Muslim authorities.
The
Organization of Islam Conference has not condemned the bombings
as Iranian President Muhammad Khatami asked it to do, but
neither has it endorsed the edict, and Khatami is a major
figure in his own right.
So
is Abdul Sattar, the foreign minister of Pakistan, who twice
officially urged
that the edict be rescinded [Middle
East Times], the second plea coming while he was in
Mecca for the haj.
Burhanuddin
Rabbani, whose rival Afghan party still holds Afghanstan’s
seat at the United Nations, condemned
the bombings [CNN.com] as
un-Islamic as well as “anti-national and anti-cultural”.
Muslim intellectuals, particularly in the West, have quoted
the Koran against the Taliban [Los
Angeles Times] and invoked the history of Muslim tolerance
for non-Muslim, representative art as proof that the Taliban’s
actions are aberrant in Islamic terms.
Sadly,
the evidence was overwhelming, even before the bombings, that
the most dangerous religion in the world, at least for art,
remains the “religion” of the market. After the fall of the
Najibullah regime in 1992, the victorious mujahedeen (Muslim
holy warriors) went first for the gold in the national museum
and only later discovered that foreigners would also pay for
pots and statuary.
At
that point, “a boom in independent excavations began in the
country. The spoils went [east] through the Khyber Pass to
the Pakistani city of Peshawar, which turned into a center
of underground trafficking in Afghan antiquities. Prices are
reported to have been sharply inflated by tourists from Japan,
where interest in Buddhist culture is very high. According
to Robert Kluyver of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanstan’s
Cultural Heritage, Japanese
collectors are prepared to pay [Itogi-Newsweek/MSNBC].
up to $1 million for a bas-relief depicting Buddha”
Objects
looted in northern Afghanstan
are smuggled into Russia [The Art
Newspaper] “where they are fenced to the ‘new Russian
mafia”. Smuggled Afghan manuscripts have turned up in substantial
numbers in Northern Europe, especially
Scandinavia [Purabudaya].
Plunder from western Afghanstan travels by way of Iran to
Europe, especially to London, where
a single statue can sell [Observer]
for as much as £50,000.
Rather
than a new story, the rape of Afghanstan’s artistic heritage
is an old story in a new place. The
tale of a tomb-robber [The Art Newspaper]
recently published in The Art Newspaper may stand as
proof that the classical heritage of the West remains, year
in and year out, the liveliest commodity of all.
Still,
Afghanstan, because of its remoteness, has remained relatively
virgin smuggling territory, despite the extraordinary artistic
interest of such ancient cultures as that of Gandhara, where
Hellenism and Buddhism inseminated each other. Political turmoil,
creating a desperate hunger for arms and for hard currency
to buy them with, has now changed that.
To
note all this is not really to refute Samuel P. Huntington.
The mujahedeen may have turned to smuggling, but they are
not simple smugglers. They are not in it merely for the money;
at least not all of them are. Some of the same reports that
document the smuggling also document religiously motivated
destruction of objects that could have been, so to speak,
sold for good money. The Bamiyan colossi themselves could
quite literally have been held for ransom.
At
this juncture, what will be required to save the art may be
a prior political and humanitarian effort to save the people.
In Middle Eastern Times, Shiraz Paracha writes: “After
the world’s reaction over the statue issue, many in Afghanstan
might ask whether
the stone statues were more important [Middle
East Times] than millions of starving human beings”.
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered
to buy the imperiled statues [The
Times, London] and other threatened works, but there
has been no comparable international campaign to save those
who, Paracha reports, are “on the verge of death due to war
and famine” in hellish refugee camps.
The
trade in smuggled art from Afghanstan, on balance, is like
the trade in poached ivory from Kenya. It feeds on the same
desperation that fuels religious fanaticism. Rather than
dealing first with the fanaticism, the West may need to deal
first with the desperation. The illicit sale of art is one
problem for which the market is not the solution.
Letters,
opinions, reactions, suggestions?
Send your e-mail to mclennan@artsjournal.com
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Send your e-mail to mclennan@artsjournal.com
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