Robert Fisk: An urge to smash history into tiny pieces
The Independent/UK
Published: 08 September 2007
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.