THE BUDDHAS OF BAMIYAN
WONDERS OF THE WORLD
First p ublished in Great Britain in 2012 by
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Copyright © Llewelyn Morgan, 2012
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Map 1: Bamiyan
Map 2: Bamiyan and the surrounding passes
Map 3: Bamiyan and the World
Foreword
CHAPTER 1 Dynamite and Celebrity
CHAPTER 2 Reimagining Bamiyan
CHAPTER 3 Islam Contemplates the Buddhas
CHAPTER 4 On the Trail of Alexander
CHAPTER 5 Bamiyan, Its Future and Its Past
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Index
This is a book about a monument, an astonishing monument, a wonder of the world. But this wonder no longer exists.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan were carved out of a cliff face in Afghanistan 1,400 years ago, and these vast creations, towering over their remote mountain valley, had amazed and mystified countless visitors ever since. Then, in early 2001, the Buddhas were demolished on the instructions of Mullah Muhammad Omar, leader of the Taliban, a movement which combined Islamic fundamentalism with Pashtun nationalism (the Pashtuns being the largest of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups). By 2001 the Taliban had seized control of most of Afghanistan, and had outraged the West by granting sanctuary to Osama bin Laden. Before the end of 2001 the Al-Qa‘ida attacks on 9/11, plotted on Afghan soil, would lead to the toppling of the Taliban regime.
In the following chapters we will discover why these statues were carved in the first place. We will visit the flourishing Buddhist kingdom of Bamiyan, which in the sixth and seventh centuries exploited the commercial advantages of its location, and a period of stability (in this perennially unstable region), to enlarge an established Buddhist community and construct two colossal and elaborately decorated images of the Buddha. By the tenth century Islam had supplanted Buddhism at Bamiyan: we will explore what these statues had meant to the Buddhists who saw and worshipped them in their heyday as objects of religious devotion (from the sixth to ninth centuries), but also the intense interest they continued to provoke in the Islamic world that followed, deeply intrigued as it was by the Indian cultures it encountered on its eastern border. When the dramatic upheavals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (culminating in Genghis Khan’s annihilation of Bamiyan in 1221) brought a new population to the valley, the Buddhas once again found a place in the folk tales of the Hazara people (another of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups), in whose ancestral homeland, the Hazarajat, Bamiyan is located.
Visitors of an entirely different kind arrived in Bamiyan in the nineteenth century, adventurers and spies heading to or from British India, bringing with them a whole new set of cultural assumptions but sharing the same fascination for the Buddhas. The history of Bamiyan is never simple –often, in fact, dizzyingly complex –but the unfailing power of this monument to excite the passionate interest of witnesses –to be regarded as a Wonder, and as such demanding a remarkable explanation of its existence –in the seventh, eleventh or twentieth centuries, by Buddhists, Muslims or Christians, is a common thread we can follow through it. Indeed, the Buddhas of Bamiyan can sometimes seem the only thing left untouched by this valley’s tumultuous past.
They were not allowed to remain untouched for ever, of course. The Bamiyan valley is still today a magnificent place, one of the most beautiful and remarkable sights on the planet. But the Buddhas, properly speaking, are no longer part of it, and the story of these enigmatic statues must begin at the end, with the catastrophic events of February and March 2001.
But that day will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and the blue icecaps on the mountains … We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz … We will not stand on the Buddha’s head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry dock.
Bruce Chatwin
The footage is poor quality –grainy and a peculiar colour. In the distance, a cliff and an indistinct carved figure in a niche surrounded by caves. Then a sudden orange flash, the boom of an explosion, and, as the shockwave jerks the camera, a thick, billowing cloud of dust. There are cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’, ‘God is Great!’ from men out of picture.
It is March 2001, in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and we are witnessing the destruction of the smaller of two colossal Buddhas. Other footage shows the larger Buddha, already demolished from the waist down, as its torso explodes. The images were captured by a journalist from Arabic-language broadcaster Al-Jazeera, Taisir Alluni, who was subsequently, controversially, jailed in Spain for collaboration with Al-Qa‘ida. In Christian Frei’s documentary The Giant Buddhas (2005), Alluni comes across less as a collaborator than a journalist determined at any cost to secure the story. He confesses to some guilt at his participation, but also admits that the scenes were irresistible to a journalist who ‘wanted to get sensational pictures, the big scoop’. Frei presses Alluni for a deeper analysis of the events at Bamiyan. The destruction came after the intensification of UN sanctions against Afghanistan, Alluni answers: the Taliban thought the world had completely abandoned them. They were spitting in the face of a world that did not give a damn about their country, that was more interested in stone sculptures than the thousands of Afghan children who were facing starvation in the winter of 2000/2001. The West had made no attempt to understand the Islamic world in its full, rich complexity, and this was the payback.
These and similar attempts to rationalise the deliberate destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were repeated by commentators across the world in 2001, and have been since –but never very convincingly. In truth, Alluni and Frei and everybody else seemed to be fishing for a satisfactory explanation of an inexplicable turn of events. Even Taliban spokesmen at the time were struggling to account for their leaders’ actions, which, apart from anything else, represented a dramatic shift in policy: in 1997 the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan was insisting that ‘the Supreme Council has refused the destruction of the sculptures because there is no worship of them’. As late as September 2000, Mullah Omar had issued a clear decree to similar effect: ‘The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors. The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but be protected.’ The Taliban leader’s subsequent volte-face was bizarre and shocking: to a senior Taliban commander, Ghulam Muhammad Hutak, ‘Mullah Omar’s actions seemed pure madness.’
The motivation behind the destruction may have been obscure, but its target was not. Bamiyan was Afghanistan’s Stonehenge, the most celebrated archaeological site in the country: two colossal standing images of the Lord Buddha carved from a cliff of reddish conglomerate stone on the north side of a valley high in the Hindu Kush mountains. In their first two centuries of existence, until about 800, the Buddhas were the brightly coloured, flamboyantly decorated centrepieces of a flourishing Buddhist community, as we shall see in the next chapter. By the end of the twentieth century they had endured more than a millennium of natural degradation and human neglect, but they were still exceptionally impressive monuments.
The western, larger Buddha was 55m tall, and its partner 800m to the east, 38m. The larger Buddha, by general consent, was the more photogenic of the two, comparatively better proportioned and less top-heavy: its elegant trefoil niche was also an advance on the rougher niche of the smaller figure. Radiocarbon dating of organic fragments from the statues has recently corroborated suspicions that the larger, more sophisticated figure was also later, constructed around 615, half a century or so after the smaller (c.550). The statues were carved in deep relief, attached to the back wall of their niches from the level of the hem of their clothing up to the backs of their heads, an arrangement which had facilitated the important Buddhist ritual of circumambulation: worshippers could walk around the statues both at ground level, behind their huge bare feet, and behind the tops of their heads. Modern visitors could step out onto their heads. The route around the smaller Buddha’s head was well-defined into modern times and still exists today, despite the destruction of the statue, a nerve-wracking stairway within the fragile western side of the niche leading to head-level, then a more gradual path down through the cliff on the eastern side. There was also a gallery around the larger Buddha’s head, but no equivalent access in the niche wall (which, as we shall see, foxed some early Western visitors). But it is clear enough that this Buddha too originally allowed visitors to reach its crown, by a path high on the cliff that had been lost to erosion: in the twentieth century a new path was constructed.
The soft, crumbly rock of the cliff is not suitable for fine carving, and thus only the core of the statues had been carved from the rock itself. Embellishments such as hair, clothing and hands had originally been represented by means of a painted clay coating, or appendages moulded around wooden beams anchored in the stone, but most of this more fragile material had disappeared by the twentieth century. How the statues might originally have looked we shall investigate later, but traces of their decoration were still visible in 2001. For example there were remnants of the two layers of clay that had been applied to the rough stone cores: a thick, coarse undercoat and a thin, finer finish coat with a very smooth surface to which paint could be applied. Hundreds of small holes on each Buddha pointed to techniques for helping this coating to adhere to the rock. In the case of the smaller Buddha conical holes peppered the statue, visible wherever the clay had fallen off (on his chin the effect was rather like stubble): these had originally been stopped with stones which anchored the clay facing. On the larger Buddha an intricate technology had been employed which both fixed the clay and represented the folds of the Buddha’s samghati or outer cloak. On the smaller Buddha these folds had been carved in the rock, but on the later statue pointed pegs 30–40cm apart were inserted into holes and connected by ropes, over which the ridges of the folds were moulded in clay (see ill. 26). Only between the larger Buddha’s legs were the folds worked in stone.
The garments of the Buddha were those of a Buddhist monk (of whom the Buddha was the archetype and model), the traditional monastic three-part combination (tricivara) of the uttarasanga, upper garment, antarvasaka, lower garment, and outer cloak, samghati, which covered both shoulders and fell down to the figures’ shins. So meticulous was the presentation of the clothing on the Buddhas that the inner lining of the samghati and folds of the undergarment could be seen where the Buddha’s raised arms lifted up the samghati. On the smaller Buddha the antarvasaka extended down below the lower hem of the samghati. The fabric was represented as fine in texture, formed into regular folds, and clinging so tightly to the Buddha’s body that his anatomy was visible beneath it. In some places traces of the original bold colour schemes of the statues had also survived.
The forearms of both Buddhas (all but the larger Buddha’s left forearm) had originally projected out from the wall, reinforced by beams: in all cases the hands were long gone by the twentieth century, along with their wooden reinforcement, but parts of the lower arms, and the fall of the Buddha’s samghati from them, did survive. Large sections of the legs of the western Buddha were also missing, and the damage to his left shin and thigh was clearly later than the creation of the statue, though the date and cause were unclear. The large parallel holes on his right shin were generally interpreted as evidence of a later repair of damage occurring soon after the statue was first carved.
The most distinctive feature of the Buddhas of Bamiyan was their faces, blank in both cases from the top of the hair to above the lips, a clean vertical slice. For some viewers the absent faces were essential to the impression they made: ‘No statue which has had its face removed can express justice or law or illumination or mercy,’ Peter Levi wrote in 1970, ‘but there is a disturbing presence about these two giants that does express something.’ In actual fact it is a matter of debate whether the faces were removed by medieval Islamic iconoclasts or if this was an original feature of the statues, the prevailing view now being the latter: a trough between the horizontal and vertical planes of the recess on each Buddha’s face has been interpreted as an anchoring point for wooden structures –face masks, effectively –that represented their features. The larger Buddha’s head was still topped by the Buddha’s characteristic cranial protuberance, the usnisa, a representation of his transcendent intelligence, and both Buddhas still had parts at least of their pendulous ears (elongated earlobes were a characteristic appendage of the once princely and bejewelled Buddha), moulded in clay, and traces of hair, realistically moulded in wavy curls that betrayed a slight lingering influence from the Greek-influenced so-called ‘Gandharan’ sculpture which had flourished at the north-western edge of India in the early centuries AD. Even before 2001, it should be said, that description of the Buddhas’ heads would require modification. At the end of 1998 zealous Taliban, who had captured Bamiyan shortly beforehand, blew off the head and part of the shoulders of the smaller Buddha. At around the same time tyres were burned on the ledge above the larger Buddha’s mouth, blackening its ‘face’. At this stage the Taliban leadership had been a restraining influence, and the destruction was not allowed to go any further.
In between the two colossal Buddhas were three smaller niches for seated Buddha statues. All remains of images within them were destroyed by the Taliban, but until 2001 one of the three had still contained isolated fragments of its original statue, while another had preserved the whole core of its image, which had evidently been constructed by a technique similar to that used for the larger images: the surface of the figure was studded with holes which presumably anchored the more perishable material from which the visible image was moulded. The cliffs all around the Buddha niches are honeycombed with caves, over 700 in total, also dating back to the Buddhist period when they served as chapels and places of prayer and meditation. In more recent times many of them had served as homes for local people –until the cliffs became an officially designated archaeological site in the twentieth century –and as a result the roofs and walls of a lot of the caves were blackened with smoke. But still in the twentieth century a number of caves and both Buddha niches retained extensive traces of the complex religious painting which had originally covered much of the walls and ceilings. In the soffit of the smaller niche, for example, were paintings of a mysterious figure in a horse-drawn chariot and a series of individually characterised royal donors, represented seated on a balcony adorned with embroidered rugs and making offerings to the Buddha: presumably a representation of the Buddhist dynasty responsible for the carving of the statues. The boldness of conception of the Buddhas, and the obvious commitment of resources their construction entailed, inevitably makes the identity of these men a matter of great interest. But it is not a question we can answer in any detail, since, whoever they were, they left no record of themselves beyond these tantalising images. What we can say is that the construction of the Buddhas and other developments in the Buddhist complex at Bamiyan seem to coincide with the hegemony of a regional power known as the ‘Western Turks’, a multi-ethnic confederation of essentially nomadic tribes which brought a degree of stability (and economic prosperity) to central Asia, including Bamiyan, from the sixth century on. We will explore this shadowy but important historical territory in the next chapter. Many of the paintings in the caves were vandalised during the Taliban occupation of Bamiyan. All of the paintings in the niches, needless to say, were destroyed in the explosions that demolished the statues.
A detailed description like that is all well and good, and only to be expected at the beginning of a book about a monument of this kind, but what it cannot convey is the raw impact that these statues had on visitors for nearly one and a half millennia, the smallest hint of which still comes today from gazing up into the towering, empty niches. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were truly colossal, and the sheer overwhelming scale of these sculptures without fail drew superlatives from viewers even if they did not particularly warm to what they saw. The challenge has always been to convey their size, and the impulse of every visitor has been to attach a measurement to them, whether in Chinese chi, Persian gaz or English foot, while even their most articulate detractors, Goethe and Robert Byron, talked of ‘crazy idols … on a gigantic scale’ and their ‘monstrous flaccid bulk’. What none of us now have the opportunity to do is actually experience the Buddhas of Bamiyan in person, but that makes us much like the British readers of the 6 and 13 November 1886 issues of the Illustrated London News, in which the famous war artist William Simpson had the task of introducing new information about this distant and inaccessible monument collected by British officers of the Afghan Boundary Commission. The Boundary Commission was a group of military surveyors engaged, theoretically at least, in drawing up a stable boundary between the British and Russian spheres of influence: as we shall see, a disproportionate number of British visitors to Bamiyan in the nineteenth century were military surveyors. The theodolites and measuring tapes of these officers in 1886 had now for the first time produced accurate measurements of the statues, respectively 173ft and 120ft (53m and 36.5m), although even these precisely calculated figures had to be adjusted to 55m and 38m in the 1970s when the Archaeological Survey of India led excavations which, among other things, fully exposed the Buddhas’ feet.
To give flesh to these numbers Simpson adopted an inspired journalistic strategy. He imagined that ‘a general meeting of all the colossal statues of the world’ could be called, bringing together the Colossi of Memnon from Luxor in Egypt (‘they are 51ft high, and would be taller if they could stand up out of their seats’); the four statues of Rameses II from Abu Simbel (‘about 50ft high’); the bronze Japanese Buddhas at Kotuku-in (13m; 44ft) and Todai-ji (15m; 49ft); ‘the statue of Athene made by Phidias for the Parthenon, which was 39ft in height; or the Olympian Jupiter, by the same artist, 60ft high, a statue celebrated for its great size, as well as for its perfect workmanship’; and ‘the still greater Colossus of Rhodes, the records of its height varying from 100ft to 120ft’. But if the larger Buddha at Bamiyan were to stroll into this AGM of ancient colossi, ‘what pigmies most of them would then seem!’ ‘The colossal Apollo of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, would lose all pretence to superiority in height as he had to look up 53ft –at the lowest estimate –to the gigantic strangers from Bamian.’ Simpson concludes with a contemporary touch: ‘The new “Liberty” statue at New York is 105ft high, on a pedestal of 83ft, but [with] the raised hand and torch, 137ft.’ Appropriately for the ILN, only London is allowed to claim a monument taller than the larger Buddha: an image accompanying Simpson’s article sets the two Buddhas, sketched with an unprecedented accuracy by one of the surveyors, Captain P. J. Maitland, against a Colossus of Memnon on one side and the 202ft (61m) London Monument (commemorating the Great Fire of 1666) on the other –with a minuscule human figure to scale.
Simpson’s parade of Wonders, we can agree, is a brilliantly creative variation on pure measurement, and gets us closer to grasping the massiveness of these statues. But if there was a competition to convey the sheer impact of the Buddhas, the prize would surely go to Edmund Melzl and his photograph, taken in 1958, of a VW Beetle parked tidily between the feet of the larger Buddha. Melzl, a sculptor by profession, has had a long involvement with Afghanistan, and since 2003 has been engaged in preserving and cataloguing the fragments of the Buddhas left after their demolition. But he first went to Bamiyan with his parents when his father was employed in the construction of a cotton textile plant near Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan: this was a period when strenuous efforts were being made to give the country a modern industrial infrastructure. During their holidays the German workers would head up into the mountains, to Bamiyan and the nearby beauty spot at Band-i Amir, and it is one such whose car was snapped by Melzl.
Forty years later, in altogether darker circumstances, it was the size of the Buddhas of Bamiyan that ensured they were destroyed. On 26 February 2001 Mullah Omar issued the damning edict:
On the basis of consultations between the religious leaders of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, religious judgments of the ulama [senior clergy] and rulings of the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, all statues and non-Islamic shrines located in different parts of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan must be destroyed. These statues have been and remain shrines of unbelievers and these unbelievers continue to worship and respect them. God Almighty is the only real shrine and all fake idols must be destroyed. Therefore, the supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has ordered all the representatives of the Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice and the Ministries of Information to destroy all the statues. As ordered by the ulama and the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan all the statues must be destroyed so that no one can worship or respect them in the future.
Even before Omar’s decree, Taliban had entered the National Museum in Kabul on 12 February and smashed statues; they would return on 17 March, after which they invited international news media to inspect their handiwork. A 15m reclining Buddha discovered by Italian archaeologists at Ghazni was also smashed, but once the Taliban had embarked upon this campaign of destruction, the fate of the Bamiyan Buddhas, by far the most prominent ‘idols’ in the country, was sealed.
In the event, it was a massive operation to demolish the Buddhas, and it took weeks. Twenty foreign journalists were finally flown to Bamiyan to see the empty niches on 26 March, a full month after Mullah Omar’s decree. The details of the process are obscure, for it was witnessed by no Western journalists, but what is clear is that it needed a series of detonations to destroy each of the sculptures. Dynamite, artillery, and anti-aircraft weapons were turned against the statues. We are told that the demolition team ran out of explosives and had to request that more be brought in, and that they were relieved when they found an ammunition store abandoned by the military opponents they had driven out of Bamiyan. One report claims that they were only finally successful when expert Pakistani and Arab engineers were brought in, at which point a professional job was done of drilling holes in the statues and inserting explosives. It is certainly true that local inhabitants, despised on ethnic and religious grounds by the intensely sectarian Taliban (an aggressively Pashtun and Sunni movement, while the people of Bamiyan are predominantly Shi‘a, and from the Hazara ethnic group), were forced to drop down by rope and lay charges in the statues. When archaeologists came to sift the rubble after the fall of the Taliban, there was so much unexploded ordnance still lying around that they had to be preceded by mine clearers. Countless other acts of vandalism took place around the huge Bamiyan complex. For example the core of the seated Buddha which had survived a hundred metres west of the 38m Buddha was blown up, along with some particularly vividly coloured paintings on the ceiling of its niche. But if we can force ourselves to contemplate dispassionately vandalism on such a scale, the most peculiar aspect of it is the massive commitment of resources, in an impoverished country embroiled in an ongoing civil war, to the demolition of what the Taliban foreign minister (Omar’s confidant and one-time official spokesman) dismissed in a press conference on 18 March as ‘some statues of stone’. Some very big statues of stone, big and solid enough to survive the vagaries of history that will fill the rest of this book, well over a millennium of regular earthquakes and brutal winter weather especially. To the French archaeologist Albert Foucher, in 1922, they had seemed as indestructible as the very flanks of the mountain that hosted them. Big and solid enough to make it very hard to bring them down, which only sharpens the question: why?
We have already heard some of the favoured explanations from Taisir Alluni, the Al-Jazeera journalist. The Taliban were lashing out after the tightening of sanctions (which were designed to force them to surrender Osama bin Laden), or were reacting to the (alleged) lack of Western concern for the millions of Afghans under threat of starvation. Others have suggested that the Taliban were taking revenge on the Hazara people of Bamiyan, their military opponents and religious and ethnic rivals, or else that they were simply following through the logic of their own narrow religious ideology. Each of these explanations was regularly aired, but none of them ever quite stacked up.
One problem is that Mullah Omar’s movement didn’t care enough about the outside world to be interested in ‘spitting in its face’, as Alluni put it. James Fergusson has drawn an essential distinction between the Taliban and Al-Qa‘ida: ‘Mullah Omar’s movement was filled with Afghan Pashtuns with an exclusively domestic agenda; bin Laden’s was manned by Arabs whose goals were international.’ Nor was the welfare of the Afghan people, as many as five million of whom were under threat of starvation in early 2001, any kind of priority for the Taliban. Had it been, they might have heeded the particularly impassioned pleas on behalf of the Buddhas by Japan, a country which was a major humanitarian donor to Afghanistan; or they might have accepted the money offered by Western institutions to preserve Afghanistan’s antiquities. To the latter approach Mullah Omar’s response on the Voice of Shari‘a (as Radio Kabul had been renamed) was, ‘Do you prefer to be a breaker of idols or a seller of idols?’ –an echo of an archetypal iconoclast, the eleventh-century Mahmud of Ghazni, who was said to have refused a huge ransom for a Hindu image in similar terms. In reality, what typically drove the Taliban’s actions was a messianic determination to impose their primitive idea of Islamic practice, and this motivation seemed to override any other consideration. The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, an expert on modern Afghanistan, describes Taliban measures in 2001:
The Taliban also escalated tensions with the UN and aid agencies, passing new laws that made it virtually impossible for such agencies to continue providing relief to the Afghan population. The Taliban shut down Western-run hospitals, refused to cooperate with a UN-led polio immunisation campaign for children, and imposed even more restrictions on female aid workers, such as preventing them from driving cars. The Taliban arrested eight Westerners and sixteen Afghans belonging to a German aid agency and accused them of trying to promote Christianity, a charge punishable by death.
How far could this religious zeal take them? Far enough to punish the Hazara people of Bamiyan, who were Shi‘a and thus heretics in the eyes of the Taliban? The Taliban did extract increasingly brutal revenge for the resistance put up by the Hazara organisation, Hizb-i Wahdat, whenever they captured or recaptured Bamiyan and adjacent areas. So was the destruction of the Buddhas also part of these campaigns? Again, it doesn’t seem likely. The Buddhas did not occupy such a central role in Hazara culture that their destruction could count as an attack on Hazaras. But if, on the other hand, the actions were a straightforward expression of the Taliban’s extreme notion of piety, as many Taliban insisted, what had made them change their minds about this, when the arguments they had made earlier to preserve the Buddhas remained perfectly valid?
They were certainly left in no doubt that theirs was a minority view among Muslims: Islamic nations were among those that begged them not to proceed with the demolition, and a deputation of eleven senior Islamic clergymen even visited Qandahar in an attempt to persuade Mullah Omar that the proposed action had no basis in Islamic law. Their message was rejected, and the clergymen, some of the foremost authorities in the Islamic world, were personally insulted. One of the leaders of the delegation, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, commented that the Taliban ‘had absolutely no knowledge about Islam. They are so naïve, they really can be influenced.’ It could not have been more clearly stated to the Taliban, and to the world in general, that the destruction of the Buddhas was not an Islamic act.
Perhaps the Taliban’s religious zeal is sufficient to explain the events at Bamiyan in 2001, but two things suggest otherwise: the unmotivated change of policy from their earlier unambiguous statements that the Buddhas were under no threat, and the intensely provocative nature of the course of action that was adopted. It was quite obvious that destroying the Buddhas would provoke outrage outside Afghanistan, and as James Fergusson saw, the Taliban’s agenda was essentially domestic: they had no interest in provoking the attention and outrage of the world, and indeed seemed a bit nonplussed at the storm of protest that did follow the destruction. Al-Qaradawi’s suspicion, shared by many others, was that the process was driven by figures other than the naïve Supreme Leader of the Taliban, and that suspicion has hardened in the years since. Jason Burke, in his authoritative book Al-Qaeda, writes that ‘Mullah Omar’s decision to destroy the huge statues of the Buddhas at Bamiyan … appears to have been taken after a concerted lobbying campaign by foreign militants inside Afghanistan supported by a series of fatwas from Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia’. Ahmed Rashid is more specific: it was ‘at the encouragement of bin Laden’ that Mullah Omar ordered the destruction. What is revealed by a close analysis of developments within the Taliban leadership in the run-up to 9/11, such as the scrupulously researched How We Missed the Story by journalist Roy Gutman, is the growing influence over Mullah Omar exerted by Al-Qa‘ida and its leader Osama bin Laden, notwithstanding the quite fundamental differences between the two organisations. At the same time as bin Laden issued ever more aggressive challenges to the US, he was also making himself indispensable, financially, militarily and even psychologically to the Taliban leadership: more than one account of these events have talked of the ‘hijacking’ of the Taliban regime. Arab fighters, logistics and military know-how played a major role in the significant Taliban advances into northern Afghanistan in the second half of 1998, including the capture of Bamiyan, and in 1999 informed analysts were talking of an effective merger of Al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban: in the words of a US ambassador to Pakistan, ‘Omar became a bin Laden convert, a believer in bin Ladenism.’ ‘Increasingly,’ describes Ahmed Rashid, ‘bin Laden’s world view appeared to dominate the thinking of senior Taliban leaders. All-night conversations between bin Laden and the Taliban leaders paid off.’ The influence of ‘the Arabs’ (as the Al-Qa‘ida fighters were known in Afghanistan) was particularly intense in the run-up to the demolition of the Buddhas, reports talking of Taliban making ostentatious visits to the National Museum in Kabul to slap Buddhist images as the Al-Qa‘ida agenda took over. Nilab Rahimi, director of the Kabul public library, has described a group of Taliban removing hundreds of books deemed inappropriate, assisted by an unidentified Arab (that is, an Al-Qa‘ida operative) with a computer. Mullah Omar quoted Mahmud of Ghazni again in a telephone conversation with Mullah Rabbani, the titular head of the Taliban government, who was trying to dissuade him from destroying the Buddhas: ‘I am not the sculpture seller. I am the sculpture destroyer.’ Friends were advising him, Omar told Rabbani: Arabs and two mullahs from Karachi. One of the mullahs was certainly Rashid Ahmad, the founder of the extremist Al-Rashid Trust and publisher of an Urdu-language Islamist newspaper which later produced a celebratory calendar with photographs of the demolition process. Among the Arabs, equally certainly, was bin Laden.
Al-Qa‘ida, as one expert on Afghanistan has put it, ‘has always practised the propaganda of the deed’. ‘Al Qaeda, which has never had roots in social movements, ceases to exist if it isn’t on the front pages and on our television screens.’ Finbarr Barry Flood has pointed out both how an act of iconoclasm like this is characteristic of the hardline Wahhabi branch of Islam espoused by bin Laden, and also how, for all the Taliban rhetoric of a return to pristine Islamic values, the destruction of the Buddhas, followed by the flight of those twenty foreign journalists to the site, ‘was a performance designed for the age of the Internet’. ‘Performance’ is the right word. Al-Qa‘ida atrocities have always had a theatrical quality about them, what the journalist Lawrence Wright has characterised as a perverse kind of artistry, designed ‘not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required’. Wright cites the terrorist’s own reading of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour in October 2000, in which a small fishing skiff loaded with explosives nearly sank an 8,300-ton, billion-dollar American warship: ‘Two men brought the tiny skiff to a halt amidships, smiled and waved, then stood at attention.’ The symbolism and the asymmetry of this moment were exactly what bin Laden had dreamed of. ‘The destroyer represented the capital of the West,’ he said, ‘and the small boat represented Mohammed.’
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