Author: Robert Fisk, Middle East
Correspondent
Publication: The Independent
Date: March 13, 2001
The destruction of the great Buddhist
statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban militia was as predictable
as it was culpable; Saudi Arabia bears ultimate responsibility for
this appalling annihilation of the world's heritage.
For it was Saudi Arabia's rigid
Sunni Wahabi sect that created the Taliban, and it was Saudi Muslim
legal iconoclasm that led directly to the wrecking of the Buddhas.
The ruin of the massive statues
in Bamiyan has tell-tale origins in Saudi Arabia. Back in 1820, the
much-worshipped statues of Dhu Khalasa, dating from the 12th century,
were destroyed by Wahabis.
And 10 years ago, only weeks after
the Lebanese professor Kemal Salibi wrote a book suggesting that
Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia may have constituted
the location of the Bible, the Saudi Sunni authorities sent bulldozers
to destroy the ancient buildings in these hamlets.
Saudi organisations have bulldozed
hundreds of historic buildings in the name of religion in Mecca and
Medina, and former United Nations officials have condemned the destruction
of Ottoman-style buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aidagency that decided
they were "idolatrous".
When the Saudi Sunnis built the
massive Faisal mosque in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad - originally
destined for the Afghan capital of Kabul - its construction was followed
almost at once by the smashing of a large number of early Islamic
figure shrines in the city. Graffiti appeared beside graveyard shrines
saying that they must be destroyed and that "there can be no sainthood
in Islam".
There is, in fact, nothing "Islamic"
in the desecration of the Bamiyan statues. For 1,400 years, as the
writer Emran Qureshi has noted, pious Muslims managed to coexist
with pagan statuary - from the Sphinx in Egypt to the statues of
Iranian Persepolis and the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The latter had survived
centuries of Islamic rule with little damage; the Taliban's decision
to destroy the statues has thus been at odds with Afghanistan's more
tolerant traditions.
In Saudi Arabia,private Christian
worship, even at Christmas, is illegal; Christians caught saying
communal prayers have been deported. Its kings are buried without
even a gravestone.
But no American "demarches" have
been made to the oil-rich princes whose alliance with the United
States is so important and whose dominating Wahabi sect condemned
the Bamiyan statues.
