Comments by Islamic legal scholar Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Univ. of Chicago Professor C.M. Naim are among the many that have pointed out the lack of cultural and legal precedent in Islam for the Taliban's destruction of the Buddha statures. But no article I have seen draws the explicit lines of ideological and political influence through which the Taliban have been nurtured and supported. Those lines led to the Wahhabi sect of Saudi Arabia that, due to its being made the state religion of the monarchy, has attained access to enormous wealth and power.
The Wahhabi sect (named after the 18th century warrior-ideology Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab) propounds a version of Islam that sees all Sufism as infidelity, all popular Islam (shrine veneration, local pilgrimages) as idolatry, and has put in a historically unprecedent banning of all Jews and Christian from the "holy land" defined as the entire Arabian peninsula. Wahhabism is an extreme minority in Islam, the vast majority of Muslims being tolerant of Sufism, engaging in popular Islam of some kind, and unconcerned with blowing up Sphinxes, Buddhas, or other alleged idols.
The Saudi ban on defiling the Arabian holy land by non-Muslims has received special exceptions for thousands of exploited Asians working as domestics for wealthy Saudis and for Western oil-workers. The Saudi government offered open, official support for the Taliban until two years ago, when Saudi-businessman and Wahhabi true-believer Osama bin Ladin became infuriated at the new Saudi exception to the banning of impure Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula, as the U.S. troops sent to Desert Storm made no intention of packing up and leaving. Ben Ladin began issuing "fatwas" calling for the Monarchy to be considered infidel according to its own official Saudi ideology and was forced to flee to the Sudan and then to Afghanistan--where he has turned with a vengeance on those who helped create him and his fortune, and where the Taliban who came to power in part with the help of the 12 Billion dollars worth of weapons spread throughout the region by the U.S. aid to the Afghan anti-Soviet Mujahideen, have now, along with Osama, turned against their mentor's mentor, the U.S. as well.
Since being accepted by the Taliban, Ben Ladin has spend months with Shaykh Omar, their absolute leader and self-proclaimed Commander of the Faithful (Amir al-Mu'minin) explaining to them what Islam really is and the Taliban has moved from a South Asian neoFundamentalism known as Deobandism to a Wahhabi fundamentalism that was demonstrated in their destruction of the Buddha.
Although the Saudi government does not give official aid to the Taliban, wealthy Saudis and religious authorities continue to support them and influential Saudis are the only force with any practical influence over the Taliban. Neither the Saudi government nor the Saudi religious establishment joined the rest of the Islamic world in urging the Taliban not to dynamite the Buddhas. The Saudi government may be afraid, but the Wahhabi religious establishment clearly approves of the act.
In Bosnia and Kosovo, under the guise of "reconstruction aid", Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Gulf organizations have bulldozed major monuments that survived attacks by Serb and Croat militias. In other cases, they have gutted them and transformed the classic Balkan Muslim interiors into what one expert has called "hospital white" boxes. For these groups representing a radical Saudi Salafism, a centuries-old mosque complex, library, tomb has been treated as just another idol--even though these monuments were created by Muslims with an Islamic culture and tradition stretching back to the 14th and 15th century long before Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab made his 18th century alliance with the warlord who founded the Saudi dynasty. In some cases, the Wahhabi destruction was completed before the Bosnians or Kosovars knew what was to be done. In other cases, the Saudi-financed groups told the villages and neighborhoods that they would only supply aid for rebuilding houses and infrastructure if they could be put in charge of the re[de]construction of the local Muslim monuments and sacral architecture.
One example is the destruction of the interior of the great Gazi Husrevbeg Mosque (Begova Dzamija) in Sarajevo, one of the jewels of Southeast European architecture. The mosque had been shelled by the Serb military, but the magnificent, classic interior had survived. The Begova was perhaps the single most important surviving Muslim monument in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Part of the interior was damaged in a hasty repair done during the last periods of communist rule and then the inside was fully gutted during Saudi-sponsored work during the mid-1990's.
Click here for an image of the Gazi-Husrevbeg Mosque before these "restorations"
and
Here for an image of the Gazi-Husrevbeg Mosque after these "restorations"
[Update: added April 2, 2003]: In late June of 2002, I visited the Begova and am happy to report that a serious restoration has is now in progress. While there are always controversies over how to restore such an ancient work and many challenges (the calligraphic and tile crafts no longer exist in the same way and artisans need to be retrained now and in a sense a tradition needs to be reconstructed), there is no doubt that the restoration now in progress, unlike that of the late communist period and that of the Saudi-supported period in the mid-1990's, is being carried out with respect for the traditions of Bosnia-Herzegovina. For a photo essay of the new restoration, as it was in the summer of 2002, see
Images of Renewal: The Begova Mosque
The only government that can persuade the Taliban to stop their war on Afghan culture is the Taliban's sponsor and ideological mentor, Saudi Arabia. The only government that can persuade the Saudis to stop supporting the Taliban's repression and destruction is the U.S. government of which Saudi Arabia is a client state.
Below are two small excerpts of reports on some of the other destruction work.
Yugoslavia: Saudi Wahhabi Aid Workers Bulldoze Balkan Monuments By Jolyon Naegele
Last week, construction workers in Kosovo bulldozed the 18th century facade of a library and a 16th century Koran school that Serbian forces damaged during fighting last year. The construction workers were not Serbs, but employees of a Saudi Arabian reconstruction agency, and were armed with official permits rather than Kalashnikovs. As RFE/RL correspondent Jolyon Naegele reports, this was not the first time war-damaged Islamic monuments in the Balkans have been destroye in the name of fraternal Islamic assistance.
Prague, 4 August 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The Saudi bulldozing of some of the most historically valuable architectural monuments in the western Kosovo market town of Djakovica is merely the latest in a series of iconoclastic activities in the Balkans undertaken in the name of reconstruction assistance by Arab aid organizations. War-damaged historic buildings are not repaired, but rather demolished to make way for what the Arab donors consider to be more proper Islamic structures. The destruction is a further blow to Kosovo's architectural heritage, following the destruction by Serbian forces and civilians in 1998 and 1999 of over 200 mosques and other Islamic structures -- about one-third of the total number in the province.
What the Serb militias couldn't finish in their three-year siege and shelling of Sarajevo, Saudi-funded Wahhabi projects are now working to complete.
Michael Sells
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