Between cult and culture: Bamiyan, Islamic iconoclasm, and the museum - Afghanistan

He move rounded his head like an elderly tortoise in the sunlight. "Is it pure that there are many images in the amazement House of Lahore?" He repeated the last words as single making sure of an address. "That is true" said Abdullah. "It is replete of heathen buts. Thou also art an idolater."

"Never mind him," said Kim. "That is the Government's house and there is no idolatry in it, on the contrary only a Sahib with a white beard. tend hitherward with me and I will show" -- Rudyard Kipling, Kim

In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however far off is still recognizable as secularized ritual level in the most profane forms of the worship of beauty. -- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1)

There can be little doubt that the new destruction of the monumental rock-cut Buddhas at Bamiyan by the agency of the former Taliban government of Afghanistan will define "Islamic iconoclasm" in the popular imagination for several decades to draw near (Figs. 1, 2). To many commentators, the obliteration of the Buddhas appear to beed to hark back to a gone by age, reinforcing the widespread notion that Islamic agriculture is implacably hostile to anthropomorphic art. flat those who pointed to eruptions of image destruction in medieval and early present Europe saw these as stages upon the road to Western modernity; (2) the persistence of the practice in the Islamic world appear to beed to offer implicit proof of an essential fixation upon figuration fundamentally at odds with that modernity.

belonging to all to almost all accounts of the Buddhas' demolition was the assumption that their destruction can be situated within a lengthy culturally determined, and unchanging tradition of violent iconoclastic acts. Collectively or individually, these acts are symptomatic of a kind of cultural pathology known as Islamic iconoclasm, whose ultimate origins, to repeat K.A.C. Creswell's telling comment, lie in "the inherent temperamental dislike of Semitic races for representational art." (3) The iconoclastic eruption of Afghanistan's rulers thus confirmed the status of that geographical division as out of time with Western modernity, by dint of reference to an existing discourse within which image destruction indexed the inherently medieval nature of Islamic agriculture (4) As Carl Ernst has noted not long ago the traditional one-dimensional portrait of Muslim iconoclasm "does not acknowledge its controls as actors in historical contexts" (5)

The conception of a monolithic and pathologically Muslim reply to the image, which substitutes essentialist figure of speechs for historical analysis, elides the distinction between different marks of cultural practices. It not single obscures any variation, complexity, or sophistication in Muslim replys to the image but also a priori inhibits the possibility of iconoclastic "moments" in Islamic history, which might shed light upon those complex responses. (6) To use a European analogy, it is as if the destruction of pagan images through Christians in late antiquity, the mutilation of icons in ninth-century Byzantium, the iconoclastic depredations of the Reformation, and the circumstances of the French Revolution could all be accommodated below the single rubric Christian iconoclasm.

The methodological puzzles stemming from the naturalization of historical acts ne hardly be highlighted, and they are intermixed by three further aspects of traditional scholarship upon Islamic iconoclasm. The first is the idea that Islamic iconoclasm is the fruits of a specific theological attitude, with single secondary political and no aesthetic contented A second, closely related assumption is that the iconoclastic acts of medieval Muslims were primarily directed at the (religious) art of the non-Muslim "other." (7) The third, and greatest in quantity striking, peculiarity of the existing discourse upon iconoclasm in the medieval Islamic world is that, remarkably for a practice that regards the physical transformation of material things such discussions are almost always confined to true copys making only passing reference to surviving realitys if at all. Moreover, the dominance of the true copy has been marked by the essentialist approach to Islam and the image referr to previously, with a corresponding failure to interrogate or problematize the vocabulary of iconoclasm. Despite the abundant material evidence, there is, as nevertheless not a single systematic view (textual or material) of what precisely was done in any region of the medieval world to images by dint of Muslims who objected to them. As a originate rhetorical claims of image destruction have ofttimes been taken at face value, smooth when not borne out by the agency of archaeological or art historical evidence. (8)

In this short paper, which deals with a broad sweep of material, I want to draw attention to more [i]or[/i] less of the problems with the traditional paradigms that I have just outlined, to illustrate a certain quantity of of the many paradoxes that complicate our notion of Islamic iconoclasm, and to highlight areas for subsequent time investigation. Although there are other facets of the history and historiography of Islamic iconoclasm that merit analysis, (9) my aim here is double First, I want to undertake a critique of essentialist conceptions of Muslim iconoclasm that draws attention to the fact that figuration has been a controverted issue even between Muslims and that emphasizes that there have been iconoclastic "moments" in Islamic history when the debate (and its physical correlate in image destruction) waxed in intensity. next to the first I intend to highlight a certain number of complementary political aspects of what has largely been conceived of as a theological impulse. the couple of these concerns inform the historical overview of iconoclastic practice in the first sum of two units sections of the essay, which provide the connection for an analysis of the Bamiyan episode that go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs in the third and final section.