The Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram (or ‘Boko Haramz****’, as my mother insists on calling them) and ISIS have pledged support to one another’s causes from across the seas. Well, Mazel tov! May your unhappy union be as brief as your lifespans.
There is something distinctly macabre about separate evil organizations coming together, like different strains of cancer in a single body. And this is a cancer that has already robbed us of so much.
I read with disgust how ISIS goons purposefully and maliciously attacked the sites of ancient Iraq. They destroyed countless artifacts and relics in the city of Nimrud; they burned manuscripts, some of which included the earliest known texts of humanity; they bulldozed monolithic statues and sledgehammered through indescribably beautiful figures of mythic guardian beings; they desecrated art works that have existed for far longer than Islam. They have, as the UN Secretary General rightly put it, committed war crimes against humanity.
This is not a hyperbolic reaction. It is a statement of fact. We have, all of us, lost a significant portion of human history in the last few weeks and we will never be able to retrieve it. What makes it so much worse are the videos these cowards have uploaded (for some reason they are selective about which parts of Western civilization they abhor. If you don’t like it, why don’t you put down the camera phones?).
I felt the same shock and horror when I saw the destruction of the monolithic Bamiyan sculptures in Afghanistan back in the early 2000s. My horror was a gut reaction, not based on intimate knowledge of archeology or history, but out of universal respect that every human being should have for things that have survived for that long. Later I obtained a degree in Art History, and I do not exaggerate when I say that most of what we saw destroyed in those awful ISIS videos, I had studied as the best examples of Mesopotamian and Near Eastern civilization. To know that some petty, two-bit, no-name, delusional Islamo-fascist with a sledgehammer has managed to destroy forever such things of beauty and significance fills me with a remorse I can hardly articulate.
The destruction got me thinking, obviously, about Mohenjodaro and Harrapa and Taxila. Let’s not mince any words: I believe it’s a matter of time before those too are destroyed. It’s not a question of if, but when. I know your impulse will be to say that it will never happen, and that we are not Iraq or Nigeria. But given the trajectory our country has been following, you and I both know the answer. It will happen because we are not invested in our heritage, and are in fact infested with a pox that actually believes it to be the devil’s work. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people here don’t care for the monuments of our pre-Islamic past. (Make of that what you will.)
Perhaps it is a measure of our insecurity that we think this way, and I don’t just mean the easily vilified Muslim World. Consider India. Maharashtra, a state that houses India’s most cosmopolitan city, has recently banned the sale of beef. Banned it because the ruling Hindu-nationalist government can now impose its fanatical will on an entire province. I find that very odd, especially since Bombay (oops, I mean Mumbai) is always so eager to brand itself as a world capital.
Similarly, a provocative new documentary film on Indian rape culture has been termed an insult to India and is now also banned. In this film we see a sanguine rapist saying that it was the victim’s fault because she was walking around alone at night and then, to compound matters, dared to fight back. That is his defense. The “insult” was that it showed how a vast portion of men actually think about women in South Asia: an ugly, sinister truth that you can’t put on an Incredible India campaign.
We often console ourselves by thinking that acts of intolerance are confined to extremists in far-off places. But this is not true. Extremism of all hues is rising in our region, and behind it is the increasingly destructive impulse to do away with what contradicts us, disturbs us, challenges us, or reminds us that there was and will always be viewpoints different to our own.
And so I go back to mourning the destruction of those statues and manuscripts in Iraq, for in addition to being beautiful, they were mutely testifying to rare moments in our history when freedom, knowledge and peace were all possible.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter
There is something distinctly macabre about separate evil organizations coming together, like different strains of cancer in a single body. And this is a cancer that has already robbed us of so much.
I read with disgust how ISIS goons purposefully and maliciously attacked the sites of ancient Iraq. They destroyed countless artifacts and relics in the city of Nimrud; they burned manuscripts, some of which included the earliest known texts of humanity; they bulldozed monolithic statues and sledgehammered through indescribably beautiful figures of mythic guardian beings; they desecrated art works that have existed for far longer than Islam. They have, as the UN Secretary General rightly put it, committed war crimes against humanity.
This is not a hyperbolic reaction. It is a statement of fact. We have, all of us, lost a significant portion of human history in the last few weeks and we will never be able to retrieve it. What makes it so much worse are the videos these cowards have uploaded (for some reason they are selective about which parts of Western civilization they abhor. If you don’t like it, why don’t you put down the camera phones?).
It's a matter of time before our pre-Islamic heritage sites are willfully destroyed
I felt the same shock and horror when I saw the destruction of the monolithic Bamiyan sculptures in Afghanistan back in the early 2000s. My horror was a gut reaction, not based on intimate knowledge of archeology or history, but out of universal respect that every human being should have for things that have survived for that long. Later I obtained a degree in Art History, and I do not exaggerate when I say that most of what we saw destroyed in those awful ISIS videos, I had studied as the best examples of Mesopotamian and Near Eastern civilization. To know that some petty, two-bit, no-name, delusional Islamo-fascist with a sledgehammer has managed to destroy forever such things of beauty and significance fills me with a remorse I can hardly articulate.
The destruction got me thinking, obviously, about Mohenjodaro and Harrapa and Taxila. Let’s not mince any words: I believe it’s a matter of time before those too are destroyed. It’s not a question of if, but when. I know your impulse will be to say that it will never happen, and that we are not Iraq or Nigeria. But given the trajectory our country has been following, you and I both know the answer. It will happen because we are not invested in our heritage, and are in fact infested with a pox that actually believes it to be the devil’s work. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people here don’t care for the monuments of our pre-Islamic past. (Make of that what you will.)
Perhaps it is a measure of our insecurity that we think this way, and I don’t just mean the easily vilified Muslim World. Consider India. Maharashtra, a state that houses India’s most cosmopolitan city, has recently banned the sale of beef. Banned it because the ruling Hindu-nationalist government can now impose its fanatical will on an entire province. I find that very odd, especially since Bombay (oops, I mean Mumbai) is always so eager to brand itself as a world capital.
Similarly, a provocative new documentary film on Indian rape culture has been termed an insult to India and is now also banned. In this film we see a sanguine rapist saying that it was the victim’s fault because she was walking around alone at night and then, to compound matters, dared to fight back. That is his defense. The “insult” was that it showed how a vast portion of men actually think about women in South Asia: an ugly, sinister truth that you can’t put on an Incredible India campaign.
We often console ourselves by thinking that acts of intolerance are confined to extremists in far-off places. But this is not true. Extremism of all hues is rising in our region, and behind it is the increasingly destructive impulse to do away with what contradicts us, disturbs us, challenges us, or reminds us that there was and will always be viewpoints different to our own.
And so I go back to mourning the destruction of those statues and manuscripts in Iraq, for in addition to being beautiful, they were mutely testifying to rare moments in our history when freedom, knowledge and peace were all possible.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter