Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum
Author(s): Finbarr Barry Flood
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 641-659
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177288
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Between Cult and Culture:
Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum
Finbarr Barry Flood
He turned his head like an old tortoise in the sunlight. "Is it true
that there are many images in the Wonder House of Lahore?" He
repeated the last words as one making sure of an address. "That
is true," said Abdullah. "It is full of heathen bfits. Thou also art an
idolater."
"Never mind him," said Kim. "That is the Government's house
and there is no idolatry in it, but only a Sahib with a white beard.
Come 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 remote, is still recognizable as secularized
ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.Walter
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction"1
There can be little doubt that the recent destruction of the
monumental rock-cut Buddhas at Bamiyan by the former
Taliban government of Afghanistan will define "Islamic iconoclasm"
in the popular imagination for several decades to
come (Figs. 1, 2). To many commentators, the obliteration of
the Buddhas seemed to hark back to a bygone age, reinforcing
the widespread notion that Islamic culture is implacably
hostile to anthropomorphic art. Even those who pointed to
outbursts of image destruction in medieval and early modern
Europe saw these as stages on the road to Western modernity;2
the persistence of the practice in the Islamic world
seemed to offer implicit proof of an essential fixation on
figuration fundamentally at odds with that modernity.
Common to almost all accounts of the Buddhas' demolition
was the assumption that their destruction can be situated
within a long, 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
quote K.A.C. Creswell's telling comment, lie in "the inherent
temperamental dislike of Semitic races for representational
art."3 The iconoclastic outburst of Afghanistan's rulers thus
confirmed the status of that country as out of time with
Western modernity, by reference to an existing discourse
within which image destruction indexed the inherently medieval
nature of Islamic culture.4 As Carl Ernst has noted
recently, the traditional one-dimensional portrait of Muslim
iconoclasm "does not acknowledge its subjects as actors in
historical contexts."5
The conception of a monolithic and pathologically Muslim
response to the image, which substitutes essentialist tropes
for historical analysis, elides the distinction between different
types of cultural practices. It not only obscures any variation,
complexity, or sophistication in Muslim responses to the
image but also a priori precludes the possibility of iconoclastic
"moments" in Islamic history, which might shed light on
those complex responses.6 To use a European analogy, it is as
if the destruction of pagan images by Christians in late antiquity,
the mutilation of icons in ninth-century Byzantium,
the iconoclastic depredations of the Reformation, and the
events of the French Revolution could all be accommodated
under the single rubric Christian iconoclasm.
The methodological problems stemming from the naturalization
of historical acts need hardly be highlighted, and they
are compounded by three further aspects of traditional scholarship
on Islamic iconoclasm. The first is the idea that Islamic
iconoclasm is the product of a specific theological attitude,
with only secondary political and no aesthetic content. 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 most
striking, peculiarity of the existing discourse on iconoclasm
in the medieval Islamic world is that, remarkably for a practice
that concerns the physical transformation of material
objects, such discussions are almost always confined to texts,
making only passing reference to surviving objects, if at all.
Moreover, the dominance of the text has been marked by the
essentialist approach to Islam and the image referred to
previously, with a corresponding failure to interrogate or
problematize the vocabulary of iconoclasm. Despite the
abundant material evidence, there is, as yet, not a single
systematic survey (textual or material) of what precisely was
done in any region of the medieval world to images by
Muslims who objected to them. As a result, rhetorical claims
of image destruction have often been taken at face value,
even when not borne out by archaeological or art historical
evidence.8
In this short paper, which deals with a broad sweep of
material, I want to draw attention to some of the problems
with the traditional paradigms that I have just outlined, to
illustrate some of the many paradoxes that complicate our
notion of Islamic iconoclasm, and to highlight areas for
future investigation. Although there are other facets of the
history and historiography of Islamic iconoclasm that merit
analysis,9 my aim here is twofold. First, I want to undertake a
critique of essentialist conceptions of Muslim iconoclasm that
draws attention to the fact that figuration has been a contested
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. Second, I intend to highlight some
complementary political aspects of what has largely been
conceived of as a theological impulse. Both of these concerns
inform the historical overview of iconoclastic practice in the
first two sections of the essay, which provide the context for
an analysis of the Bamiyan episode that follows in the third
and final section.
The primary focus will be on the iconoclastic practices of
Muslims living in the eastern Islamic world, especially AfghanThis
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642 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
41 ~
1 Large Buddha, 5th-
7th century, before
destruction, Bamiyan
(photo: Richard
Edwards, courtesy of
ACSAA Color Slide
Project, University of
Michigan, #2871)
istan and India. If I ignore the relationship with Byzantium here,
it is primarily to compensate for an ethnocentric bias that has
led to the discourse on figuration in the Islamic world being
dominated by the arts of Christendom and the Mediterranean.
These are, in any case, less relevant to the eastern Islamic world
in the tenth through twenty-first centuries than they are to the
Levant in the eighth.10 The discussion is intended to cons
a context for the final part of the essay, in which the destru
of the Bamiyan Buddhas will be reconsidered. It will be ar
that their obliteration indexed not a timeless response to
ration but a calculated engagement with a culturally speci
discourse of images at a particular historical moment.
I . s
'. . W . ;
-41 _ A
_ es,,
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BAMIYAN, ISIAMIC ICONOCIASM, AND THE MUSEUM 643
.v~ ~ ~ -A
?'4 '- -'
14-*.
2 Large Buddha, after its destruction ..
in 2001, Bamiyan (photo: Corbis.Com) .'. . ? *,'
Proscriptive Texts and Iconoclastic Praxis
The opposition to figuration in Islam is based not on
Qur'anic scripture but on various Traditions of the Prophet,
the Hadith.'1 The two principal objections to figuration in
the prescriptive texts are a concern with not usurping divine
creative powers12 and a fear of shirk, a term that came to
mean polytheism and idolatry but originally meant associating
other gods with God.'13 Both suggest a concern with the
materialism of worship in non-Islamic traditions. While Muslim
polemicists frequently accused those of other faiths of
indulging in polytheism and idolatry, however, it is important
to remember that such accusations were a stock-in-trade of
medieval religious polemics, even monotheist polemics.14
Muslims themselves are often accused of idolatiy in Christian
and Jewish polemical texts, which might compare Muslim
veneration of the Ka'ba and the practices associated with it to
those of the (self-evidently idolatrous) Hindus. '
There is a general consensus in the Hadith forbidding all
representations that have shadows (whose defacement is
obligatory), and some schools of thought go so far as to liken
artists to polytheists.' Such proscriptions were undoubtedly a
factor in both promoting aniconism (the eschewal of figural
imagery) and motivating acts of iconoclasm (the destruction
or mutilation of existing figural imagery), but their impact on
the arts in general varied greatly according to time and
place.17 After initial experiments, the substitution of text for
figural imagery on gold coins in 696-97 (and on silver two
years later) marked a decisive moment in the development of
an official iconography, with the epigraphic issues of the
Umayyad caliphate establishing an enduring precedent for
Islamic numismatics."8 Even after this date, however, variations
in attitudes to figuration existed, for some later Islamic
rulers issued coins bearing figural imagery.'1'
The decoration of early Islamic palaces, lavishly ornamented
with sculpture and paintings containing anthropomorphic elements
(including Christian priests and churches), stands in
. . ?
- 4,
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644 ART BUI..ETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
3 Rosewater sprinkler with anthropomorphizing epigraphy,
eastern Iran or Afghanistan, bronze, ca. 1200. Copenhagen,
The David Collection, inv. no. 65/1998
contrast to the religious architecture of the same period, in
which the ornament is primarily vegetal and epigraphic.20 The
aniconic decoration of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem
(691-92) and of early Islamic mosques points to a distinction
between secular and religious art, which is clearly demonstrated
in the facade of the mid-eighth-century palace of Mshatta in
Jordan, on which the use of figural ornament is interrupted at a
point corresponding to the location of an interior mosque.21
There are, however, anomalies: it was only in 785 that the
figures (tamathil) on a silver Syrian censer donated by the caliph
CUmar (r. 634-44) to the mosque of Medina were rendered
innocuous (probably by decapitation; see below) by the governor
of the city.22 This remedial action falls within the period in
which the earliest traditions regarding images were codified,
according to a recent reevaluation, hinting at further shifts in
attitudes to figuration between the late seventh and late eighth
centuries.23
Detailed studies of figural ornament in medieval Islamic
religious architecture are few and far between (medieval
Anatolia being better represented than most other regions of
the Islamic world in this respect),24 but as a general rule,
figuration continued to be eschewed in the decoration of
medieval mosques and madrasas (religious schools). Occasional
exceptions include pre-Islamic monuments converted
for use as mosques, in which figural ornament was often, but
not always, defaced.25 In those mosques and madrasas where
figural ornament did appear,26 it was generally avoided in the
area around the prayer niche (mihrab), in accordance with
specific injunctions, but even here exceptions exist.27
By contrast, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic images proliferated
in the secular arts. The ubiquity of figural ornament is
especially noticeable in the arts of the eastern Islamic world
from the eleventh century on, where one finds even threedimensional
sculpture produced in a wide range of media.28
Neither abstract ornament nor epigraphy (which assumed some
of the iconographic value of figural ornament) was immune to
the tendency toward figuration, with ambiguous zoomorphic
forms emerging from vegetal scrolls and the stems of letters
inscribed on some medieval objects acquiring heads, eyes, and
other anthropomorphic facial features (Fig. 3).29
There is no evidence to suggest that the divine image was
represented in the Islamic world (despite occasional tendencies
toward anthropomorphism), but in the eastern Islamic
world, depictions of the prophet Muhammad survive from
the thirteenth century on.30 In later paintings the Prophet is
sometimes (but not always) portrayed with his face veiled or
otherwise obscured; this reticence about the face finds a
counterpart in the activities of medieval iconoclasts in the
Islamic world, as we shall see below.
The profusion of figural ornament in every imaginable
artistic medium attests that the gap between proscription and
practice could be a wide one. Medieval Islamic attitudes to
figuration varied from individual to individual and could
change over time, or with the advent of new political regimes
with different cultural values. Consequently, Muslims opposed
to icons of various sorts, whether the art of previous
Muslim generations or those of the cultures with which Islam
came in contact, developed practical strategies for dealing
with them. Just as rabbinical tradition suggested ways of
neutralizing existing images that satisfied the spirit (if not
always the letter) ofJewish proscriptions on figuration, so the
Hadith afforded some guidance as to what to do with images.31
Two basic alternatives emerge from the various Traditions
dealing with figuration: recontextualization in a manner
that made clear that the images were in no way venerated
(by reusing figural textiles as floor cushions, for example), or
decapitation, so that they became inanimate, that is, devoid
of a soul (rfuh).32 Interestingly, no distinction appears to be
made between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations.
Defacement (or the mutilation of the affective
parts of the face, such as the eyes and nose) often substituted
for decapitation, a practice that finds a precedent in early
accounts of the prophet Muhammad's iconoclastic activities,
such as this passage in the ninth-century Book of Idols:
When on the day he conquered Mecca, the Apostle of God
appeared before the KaCbah, he found the idols arrayed
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 645
around it. Thereupon he started to pierce their eyes with
the point of his arrow, saying, "Truth is come and falsehood
is vanished. Verily, falsehood is a thing that vanisheth
[QurCan 17:81]." He then ordered that they be
knocked down, after which they were taken out and
burned.33
Although the phenomenon has never occasioned serious
study, from medieval Andalusia to Iran one finds all of the
practices outlined above employed by Muslims against images
created by other Muslims.34 Some of this iconoclastic activity
undoubtedly arose from individuals acting on their own initiative.
A good example of such private initiative is described
amid a lively account by the Ottoman writer Evliya Qelebi of
an auction of fine goods held by the pasha of Bitlis in eastern
Anatolia in 1655. Potential bidders apparently were allowed
to peruse the goods in their quarters overnight, for our tale
concerns one individual who showed a penchant for an illustrated
manuscript of the Shah-Nama, the Persian Book of
Kings:
When the witty fellow brought it to his tent and began
leafing through, he saw that it contained miniatures.
Painting being forbidden according to his belief, he took
his Turkish knife and scraped the narcissus eyes of those
depicted, as though he were poking out their eyes, and
thus he poked holes in all the pages. Or else he drew lines
over their throats, claiming that he had throttled them. Or
he rubbed out the faces and garments of the pretty lads
and girls with phlegm and saliva from his mouth. Thus in
a single moment he spoiled with his spit a miniature that
a master painter could not have completed in an entire
month.... When the auctioneer opens the book and sees
that all the miniatures are ruined, he cries, "People of
Muhammed! See what this philistine has done to this
Shah-name.... he poked out the eyes or cut the throats of
all the people in the pictures with his knife, or rubbed out
their faces with a shoe-sponge."35
That the offending iconoclast was eventually lashed and
stoned as his punishment for defacing the manuscript serves
as a reminder of just how contested the issue of figuration
could be, even between Muslims. The drawing of a line across
the throat should be understood (as the auctioneer clearly
understood it) as a symbolic decapitation, which in the case
of other painted images and sculptures often found more
literal expression (Figs. 4, 5). The practice is attested by a
number of surviving manuscripts and miniature paintings,
most famously the thirteenth-century St. Petersburg Maqamat
(Fig. 6).36 Equally, the effacement (or, more correctly, defacement)
of the image and the particular focus on the eyes
are consistently evident in the work of Muslim iconoclasts
from the early Islamic period on (Fig. 7), although by no
means exclusive to them.37
The anecdote cited above illustrates the uneven and sometimes
inconsistent ways in which a lingering unease with
figuration in the Islamic world could serve to inspire the
iconoclastic practices of pious individuals. In addition to such
individual initiatives, it is possible to identify "state-sponsored"
iconoclastic moments whose primary target could be
either the symbols of the "other" or the art produced during
the reigns of Muslim predecessors. The edict against images
issued by the caliph Yazid in 721 is an early example of the
first type, even if recent research suggests that contemporary
alterations of church mosaics are likely to have been undertaken
by local Christian communities rather than knife-wielding
iconoclasts sent by the caliph.38 Whether these changes
resulted from internal scruples about figuration or external
pressure generated by Muslim opposition to images is unclear,
but the central issue, within early Muslim-Christian
polemic, was the veneration of icons rather than the question
of images per se.39 Moreover, as the embodiment of both a
major doctrinal difference between Christianity and Islam
(the resurrection of Christ) and a symbol of Christian hegemony
associated with the Byzantine enemy, the cross was a
more consistent target of iconoclastic polemics than the
icon.40 In this regard, it might be compared to the minbar
(pulpit) in a mosque, which was the place from which the
loyalty of the community to a given ruler was publicly affirmed
in the sermon (khuttba) each Friday. As a symbol of
both religious and political authority, the minbar no less than
the cross was also targeted for desecration or destruction by
those Muslims who rejected the political authority that it
embodied, often for religious reasons.41
An iconoclastic moment of the second type, primarily directed
against the art produced by earlier Muslims (although it
included the destruction of Hindu icons), occurred in Delhi in
the fourteenth century. This was part of a broader reassertion of
orthodoxy by Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq (r. 1351-88), who
records its impact in his apologia:
In former times it had been the custom to wear ornamented
garments, and men received robes as tokens of
honor from kings' courts. Figures and devices were
painted and displayed on saddles, bridles, and collars, on
censers, on goblets and cups, and flagons, on dishes and
ewers, in tents, on curtains and on chairs, and upon all
articles and utensils. Under Divine guidance and favour I
ordered all pictures and portraits to be removed from
these things, and that such articles only should be made as
are approved and recognised by Law [SharC'a]. Those
pictures and portraits which were painted on the doors
and walls of palaces I ordered to be effaced [mahw].42
Archaeological evidence suggests that ceramic vessels with
figural imagery in Firuz Shah's palace were indeed smashed
at this time, while contemporary texts refer to prohibited
images being replaced with depictions of gardens and trees,
in accordance with the proscriptions on figuration.43
As far as we can tell, the practices described by Firuz Shah
Tughluq are similar to those employed against images carved
on the architectural elements from Hindu temples reused in
Indian mosques during the preceding century (Fig. 7). A
considerable investment of energy and resources evidently
went into both undertakings, reminding us that the determinants
of iconoclasm are not just political or religious but also
economic, and that the iconoclastic process can be bureaucratic,
calculated, and protracted.44 The picture is further
complicated by the fact that many instances of Islamic iconoclasm,
including those witnessed in early Indian mosques,
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646 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOIUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
b ...
* 4'
'.4. j.).,
(2 '.'
' (.
I .I. j.
4 (..,) *
* a
*.'.
4 Princely feast, fr
Nizami, Iran, 1574-75, with later
iconoclastic alterations. London, India
Office Libraly ms 1129, fol. 29 (photo:
By permission of The British Library)
appear to be the product of a negotiation between iconoclasts
and iconophiles, with the latter modifying existing
images either for financial remuneration or to prevent more
extensive alterations by those opposed to figuration.4' This
being so, it might be useful to make a distinction here between
instrumental iconoclasm, in which a particular action is
executed in order to achieve a greater goal, and expressive
iconoclasm, in which the desire to express one's beliefs or
give vent to one's feelings is achieved by the act itself.-4
In many cases, the use of decapitation and defacement by
Muslim iconoclasts represents not expressive iconoclasm but
a type of instrumental iconoclasm, for it permitted the licit
sutvival of preexisting images in the prescribed way, albeit in
altered form. Destruction is, by its nature, difficult to confirm,
but all the evidence indicates that iconoclasts in the
medieval Islamic world only rarely destroyed images, in the
sense of physically obliterating them. This is true even for
those textual accounts of expressive iconoclasm that appear
to describe clear-cut cases of image destruction. In 1528, for
example, the Mughal emperor Babur (r. 1526-30) recorded
f
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 647
5 Luster tile, Iran, early 14th century,
with later iconoclastic alterations (the
heads of the birds removed). St.
Petersburg, the State Hermitage
Museum, inv. no. IR-1364
his response to a number of monumental rock-cut Jain
tirthankaras encountered on a visit to a suburb of Gwalior:
"On the southern side is a large idol, approximately 20 yards
tall. They are shown stark naked with all their private parts
exposed.... Urwahi is not a bad place. In fact, it is rather
nice. Its one drawback was the idols, so I ordered them
destroyed."47 An archaeological coda to Babur's tale indicates
that "destruction" did not involve the total obliteration of the
images, which survived minus their heads, and were later
provided with stucco replacements. 4 Evidently, references to
destruction in medieval texts and inscriptions, whether referring
to images or buildings, need to be treated with caution.
This is not necessarily because such texts were written to
deceive (although we should consider the claims they make
in relation to the audience that they addressed) but because
"destruction," in Arabic and Persian texts and epigraphs, like
"reconstruction" in Roman texts, "was a general and nondenotative
ideal, the expression of which could take several
forms."49
Just as references to reconstruction in Roman rebuilding
texts may "have been more visually meaningful to the reader
in the context of an improved surface appearance with minimal
structural change,"'51 so "destruction" in medieval Islamic
texts could meaningfully refer to transformations of
buildings and objects that fell far short of physical obliteration.
When motivated by iconoclasm, such transformations
are consistently focused on the head and face; although
Babur was apparently offended by the nudity of the Jain
images, he "destroyed" them by amputating the head rather
than any other body part. This is consistent with iconoclastic
practice elsewhere in South Asia and in other parts of the
Islamic world.5' In some cases, desecration and ritual defilement
were considered sufficient to "destroy" religious icons
by demonstrating their impotence in the face of such an
affront, an intention that also underlies some iconoclastic
practice in medieval Europe.52 Seen in this light, the dichotomy
between creation and destruction that underlies much
writing on iconoclasm offers too reductive a reading of iconoclastic
practice.53 As the Hadith dealing with images stiggest,
and iconoclastic practice in the medieval Islamic world implies,
this was less an attempt to negate the image than to
neutralize it.
Religious "otherness" clearly was not the sole determinant
of Islamic iconoclasm, for, as the examples scattered throughout
this essay indicate, the kinds of iconoclastic practices
associated with the treatment of non-Islamic imagely by medieval
Muslims were indistinguishable from those that Muslim
iconoclasts employed against images made by their coreligionists.
In terms of these practices, Muslim iconoclasts are
themselves indistinguishable from other types of iconoclasts,
for the same focus on the head and face is a feature of
Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine iconoclasm, and the
eyes of fifteenth-century Catholic images were scratched out
by sixteenth-century Protestant reformers, even as French
revolutionaries decapitated the icons of the ancien regime.4
In all of these cases, "The aim is to render images powerless,
to deprive them of those parts which may be considered to
embody their effectiveness. This is why images are very often
mutilated rather than wholly destroyed."3' The undertaking
highlights a fundamental ambiguity regarding the status of
the image, which lies at the heart of much iconoclastic practice.
The destruction of the idol assailed by the prophet
Muhammad in the passage from the Book of Idols cited above
is divided into different moments, which seem to index respectively
a process of neutralization and destruction often
repeated in later Muslim encounters with idols.'() The hiatus
between the two moments is a crucial one, suggesting as it
does that the idol is imbued with a degree of animation or
efficacy, whose source is to be sought perhaps in the supernatural
presences inhabiting some of the idols encountered
in other accounts of the Prophet's iconoclastic activities.'7
The notion that the image is the abode of a malign spirit or
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648 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
_ . 'K,o. _ . -..i,. o. . . ?
PI
'..;' . . :''...: ' '.,: . : '''' . . '' ' ' .- '- .' ".
'"r
- 4 -. J i , ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ l
6 Maqamat of al-Hariri, Iraq, ca. 1240, with later iconoclastic
alterations, fol. 32v. St. Petersburg, the Russian Academy of
Sciences
that it possesses quasimagical powers,'8 which seems to underlie
the concern shown by the Hadith with "deanimating"
existing images by depriving them of a soul (ri.h), contrasts
with the emphasis on the impotence of idols and images in
most writings on the subject within the Old Testament tradition
espoused by Islam. '' The idea that the image is both
inert matter and the potential abode of evil or malevolent
spirits is, however, common to both Zoroastrian and Early
Christian polemics against images.?'o The ambiguities arising
from the dual status of the image are reflected in the practices
of Muslim iconoclasts in South Asia (and undoubtedly
elsewhere), a point well made by Andre Wink:
It was essential to render the image powerless, to remove
them from their consecrated contexts. Selective dilapidation
could be sufficient to that purpose. It is hard to gauge
the depth of religious convictions here. Did fear play a
role in the iconoclastic destruction of the early Muslim
conquerors in India? Were the images destroyed, desecrated
or mutilated because they were potent or impo-
tent?"'
To put the question another way, should the drawing of a line
across the throat be understood as "an effort to indicate the
inanimate and therefore nonreal status of the figures,"('- or as
an attempt to deprive them of the possibility of animation, as
the Hadith seem to imply? One answer lies in the way images
were treated, and the focus on the head, eyes, and nose. This
may have been intended to neutralize images in a manner
determined by Prophetic precedent, but it also accords with
the way in which shame, transgression, or lack of fidelity was
inscribed on the body of contemporaiy living beings. It is
particularly striking that the Hindu icons destroyed as part of
Firuz Shah Tughluq's reassertion of orthodoxy were burned
in a place otherwise reserved for public executions and the
punishment of criminals.'i:
The treatment of anthropomorphic images as if they were
animate beings is a recurring characteristic of pre- and earl),
modern iconoclasm that was already apparent to medieval
observers.';4 In his description of the damage done to Christian
images in the churches of Antioch during the Seljuq
occupation of the city in the late eleventh century, William of
Tyre notes:
The pictures of the revered saints had been erased from
the very walls-symbols which supplied the place of books
and reading to the humble worshippers of God and
aroused devotion in the minds of the simple people, so
praiseworthy for their devout piety. On these the Turks
had spent their rage as if on living persons; they had gouged
out eyes, mutilated noses, and daubed the pictures with
mud and filth."'
If we are to believe recent anthropological and art historical
scholarship on iconoclasm, the "confusion" of signifier and
signified noted here arises from a universal tendency to invest
the image with the capacity for animation to varying degrees.(J(
Visiting vengeance or shame on the image as if on
the body of a living person, iconoclasts engage with the image
as if it were animate. Reports of Taliban officials reproving
the statue of a seminaked bodhisattva in the Kabul Museum
by slapping it across the face suggest how remarkable the
degree of' engagement with the icon can be. I will return to
this episode below.
Bamiyan and Medieval Afghan Iconoclasm
The rock-cut tirthankaras of Gwalior that offended Babur
recall the Bamiyan Buddhas in more than stature or medium;
the latter may also have been the target of medieval iconoclasts.
Even before their destruction in 2001, both Buddhas
were faceless above chin level (Fig. 8).'7 Ironically, many of
those who bemoaned the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas
but were unfamiliar with them assumed that this fate was
illustrated by images of the Buddhas before the Taliban had
attacked them. It has often been stated that the Buddhas
were originally provided with masks of wood or copper, but
little evidence has been adduced for this. It is equally possible
that the upper parts of the faces were deliberately mutilated,
reflecting the activities of medieval iconoclasts, for whom the
face would have been an obvious target.'8 Buddhist monastic
institutions in the Bamiyan Valley suffered iconoclastic damage
even before the advent of Islam: in the fifth or early sixth
century the Hephtalite ("White Hun") ruler Mihirikula, who
had Shaivite leanings and was opposed to Buddhism, is said
to have destroyed the monastic settlement at Bamiyan.(i'
Despite such setbacks, Buddhism continued to flourish here
after the advent of Islam, for there were practicing Buddhists
in the valley as late as the ninth or tenth century, and even in
the eleventh century it was not fully Islamicized.70 The wealth
.,
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCIASM, AND THE MUSEUM 649
7 Reused capital with face removed,
probably at the time of construction,
late 12th or early 13th century. Chaurasi
Khamba Mosque, Kaman, Rajasthan
(photo: the author)
of the Bamiyan monasteries attracted the attention of hostile
rulers, and in 870 the Saffarid ruler Ya'qub ibn Layth (r.
867-79) raided the area, seized a number of precious metal
icons, and is said to have destroyed a temple.7 The removal
of the faces, if the result of iconoclastic activity, might have
been undertaken at this time, for the practice of defacing
pre-Islamic anthropoinorphic images was certainly known in
eastern Iran in the ninth and tenth centuries. In his histoiy of
Bukhara, for example, the tenth-century writer Narshaki describes
pre-Islamic doors reused in the Great Mosque of
Bukhara, which bore the images of "idols" with their faces
erased, but were otherwise intact.72
Any iconoclastic transformations of the Buddhas did little
to dampen their enthusiastic reception by medieval Muslims,
however. Between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, the
Bamiyan Buddhas were often referred to in Arabic and Persian
literature, where (along with remains of Buddhist stupas
and frescoes) they were depicted as marvels and wonders.73
Several writers emphasize that nowhere in the world can one
find anything to equal the Bamiyan Buddhas, popularly
known as Surkh-but (red idol) and Khink-but (gray idol).T
Medieval accotints of the Bamiyan Buddhas often locate
them within discussions of Indian religious practices and
iconolatry, topics that were to increasingly preoccupy Arab
and Persian writers as the cultural contacts between eastern
Iran and India grew between the tenth and twelfth centuries,
8 Small Buddha, Bamiyan, detail of the face before destruction
(photo: Courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld
Institute of Art)
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650 ARI BUL LETIN DECEMBER 2002 \VOLIUME I. XXXI\ N\UMIBER 4
the result of military conquest and trade.75 The idols
(asanam) of Bamiyan were the subject of a lost work by the
celebrated scholar al-Biruni, whose book on India, including
a sophisticated explication of Indian religion and image worship,
has survived.76
Paradoxically, this eleventh-century work was written at the
court of Mahmud of Ghazna, a historical figure who has
assumed a paradigmatic role as the Muslim iconoclast par
excellence in South Asia.77 As was the case in other parts of
the Islamic world, iconoclastic practice in medieval Afghanistan
existed within a spectrum of responses to the image
(religious or otherwise), which also included aesthetic appreciation,
awe, fascination, revulsion, and scholarship. An indication
of the rather complex attitude to figuration that prevailed
at the Ghaznavid court is provided by the ubiquity of
three-dimensional sculpture and anthropomorphic reliefs
and frescoes, which led to admiring comparisons with idol
temples in the work of contemporary poets.78 References to
non-Muslim religious idols (but) and idol temples (but-khane)
appear elsewhere in the poetry of the period as emblems of
physical beauty or indexes of constancy and fidelity to a
beloved.79 Mahmud "the idol-breaker" also issued bilingual
Indian coins with a Sanskrit legend in which Muhammad is
described as the avatar of God, a concept that, while somewhat
unorthodox in an Islamic context, was clearly intended
to frame Islamic doctrine within an Indic paradigm.80 In the
following century, Afghan rulers of India went further, continuing
coin issues featuring the images of Hindu deities,
despite their portrayal in contemporary histories and inscriptions
as bastions of religious orthodoxy. However economically
sensible this numismatic continuity may have been, it
alerts us once again to the divergence between the normative
values underlying textual rhetoric and the pragmatic concerns
that governed actual practice when it came to the issue
of figuration and non-Muslim religious imagery.81
Further paradoxes lie in the fact that the central event of
Islamic iconoclasm in South Asia concerns not, as one might
expect, a precious metal anthropomorphic icon but a linga,
an aniconic stone image of Shiva, brought to Afghanistan.
The linga was housed in one of the most celebrated temples
of medieval India, which stood in the coastal town of Somnath
in Gujarat. In 1025 Mahmud raided Somnath and
looted its temple. According to some renditions of the tale,
the temple Brahmans attempted to ransom the icon, offering
vast amounts for its safety. Mahmud rejected the offer, famously
repudiating the idea that he should be known as a
broker of idols rather than a breaker of them.82 The linga was
subsequently broken, and part of it used to form the threshold
of the entrance to the mosque of Ghazna, a practice for
which there are earlier textual and archaeological parallels,
not just in the Islamic world.83 The remainder was thrown
down in the hippodrome (maydan) of Ghazna, where itjoined
a decapitated bronze image of Vishnu, looted on a previous
Indian expedition.84 According to other accounts, it was set
at the entrance to Mahmud's palace, so that the thresholds of
both palace and mosque were composed of fragments of the
linga.85
The Somnath episode is traditionally seen as pitting a
monolithic South Asian iconophilia against a monolithic
Muslim iconophobia. Just as divergent attitudes to images are
represented simultaneously in the culture of medieval Afghanistan,
however, it is becoming increasingly obvious that
the relationship between figuration and veneration in medieval
South Asia was considerably more complex than has
been acknowledged to date. Images were contested between
different sects and faiths, sometimes leading to the desecration
and destruction of portable icons or the erasure and
mutilation of images in temples and shrines.86 Such events
often occurred at times of military conquest or political
change and may be seen as reflecting the close interrelations
between centers of political and religious authority in medieval
South Asia. The relation between icon and ruler is
particularly well documented for the Shiva linga,87 w
looting, display, and desecration clearly carried a powerful
political message, even if framed within the context of orthodox
conformity.
The looting of portable icons was a common practice in
medieval South Asian warfare even before the advent of the
Muslims in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.88 Ignoring the
lurid idol-bashing rhetoric of the medieval Islamic sources,
therefore, the triumphalism inherent in the seizure and display
of the Somnath linga in the dynastic shrines of Ghazna
was in no way at odds with the rhetoric of contemporary
South Asian kingship. What does distinguish Ghaznavid practice
is the treatment afforded the linga and other looted
Hindu icons brought to Ghazna.89 Although images were
sometimes subjected to destruction in medieval South Asia,
looted icons were usually treated with respect and incorporated
into the victor's pantheon in a subordinate capacity,
often as doorkeepers. While invoking the "Hindu trope by
which defeated enemies were subordinated into door guardians,"
the Somnath linga became the focus of a kind of
performative iconoclasm, recontextualized to be trampled on
in a quotidian repudiation of idolatry by the populace of
Ghazna.90 Although this gesture is usually viewed through the
lens of religious rhetoric, it also represents the literal enactment
of a metaphoric conceit common to medieval Islamic
and South Asian rulers by which a victor claims to have
trampled the defeated underfoot. The idea is enshrined in
the titles of the Ghaznavid sultans, who (along with many
other eastern Islamic dynasts) styled themselves "lords of the
necks of the people," a title that, while politically charged,
was devoid of any sectarian associations.9' The motif of a
victorious ruler trampling a defeated rival was a common
expression of royal victory rhetoric that was often adopted by
iconoclasts; the use of a shoe sponge to erase the painted
faces of book illustrations in the anecdote cited earlier shows
how adaptable the concept was.92 Similar adaptations are
evident in medieval South Asia, where epigraphic claims of
kings to have placed their feet on the necks of defeated rivals
seem to be reflected in a remarkable series of tenth-century
images from eastern India (an area contested between Buddhist
and Hindu sects) that show Buddhist deities trampling
their Hindu equivalents.93
Within an Islamic context, the trampling of the displayed
icon is a necessary condition of its performance in this theatrical
commemoration of victory, for it obviates any accusation
that the icon was venerated, extending a general principle
established in the Hadith (by which an anthropomorphic
image may be tolerated if sat or trampled on) to an aniconic
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 651
image of Shiva.94 Other of the Hindu icons displayed in
Ghazna were decapitated, in accordance with the alternative
mode prescribed for displayed images.
The trampling of the tutelary deities of defeated rulers, no
less than their display within the shrines of the victorious,
highlights the role of such icons as synecdoches, whose treatment
in secondary contexts is directly related to their ability
to articulate the idea of incorporation, however notional.95 In
both Islamic and Indic discourses of looting, the recontextualized
icon, whether desecrated or venerated, affirmed the
center while indexing the shifting periphery. The geographic
dispersal of religious authority and political power in the
medieval Islamic world was often reflected in the treatment
of looted icons. YaCqub ibn Layth dispatched the icons seized
in Bamiyan to the caliph in Baghdad, for example, with a
request that they be forwarded to Mecca, thus situating the
indexes of his territorial expansion within the key centers of
religious and political authority.96 Mahmud's reported dispatch
of fragments from the Somnath icon to Mecca and
Medina provides a more literal reflection of this cultural
fragmentation.97
As a heterotopia dedicated to the collection and display of
defunct and antique icons, Mahmud's mosque at Ghazna has
much in common with the European museum, especially
those museums established to commemorate the work of
European missionaries.98 In both cases selected objects assume
a didactic function as visual cognates of a concept of
progress indexed by the end of idolatry; the recontextualized
idol indexes a bringing into the fold dependent on the
shifting economic, cultural, and military frontier. Within the
European museum, exotic religious icons could also be assimilated
as visually interesting in their own right, and even as
art objects, a transmutation reflected in Mark Twain's description
of nineteenth-century Banaras as "a vast museum of
idols."99 The hegemonic connotations of this shift from cult
to culture came to the fore in surprising ways during the
recent Bamiyan episode.
Mullah Omar and the Museum
As the examples discussed above indicate, Muslim iconoclasts
have historically availed themselves of a number of options
sanctioned by tradition that fall far short of physical obliteration;
the Bamiyan Buddhas may themselves have attested
this, as did the erasure of the faces of figural images in public
places in Kabul after the advent of the Taliban.100 Although
the act invoked the rhetoric of the Islamic past or was represented
as a reversion to medieval practice, by either standard
the destruction of the celebrated Bamiyan Buddhas was
highly anomalous. We may never know for certain why the
Taliban altered their previous policy on pre-Islamic antiquities
in February 2001. The edict that inspired the action and
the various pronouncements that followed suggest, however,
that the Taliban's iconoclastic outburst was a peculiarly modern
phenomenon, an act that, "under the cover of archaic
justifications, functioned according to a very contemporary
logic."101 The timing of the edict, and the fact that it reverses
an earlier undertaking to protect the Buddhist antiquities of
Afghanistan, suggest these events had less to do with an
eternal theology of images than with the Taliban's immediate
relation to the international community, which had recently
imposed sanctions in response to the regime's failure to
expel Osama bin Laden.'02
The Wahhabi version of Islam espoused by the regime's
Saudi guest may have played a role in the events of February
2001, for the destruction of objects and monuments considered
the focus of improper veneration has been a characteristic
of Wahhabism from its inception.103 However, as Dario
Gamboni has pointed out, "often elaborately staged destructions
... of works of art must be considered as means of
communication in their own right, even if the 'material'
make use of is-or was-itself a tool of expression or communication."104
In this case, the eventual transport of Western
journalists to the site to record the void left by the
Buddhas' destruction (Fig. 2) suggests that the intended
audience for this communique was neither divine nor local
but global: for all its recidivist rhetoric, this was a performance
designed for the age of the Internet.
One can make a good case that what was at stake here was
not the literal worship of religious idols but their veneration
as cultural icons. In particular, there are reasons for thinking
that the Taliban edict on images represented an onslaught
on cultural fetishism focused on the institution of the museum
as a locus of contemporary iconolatry. The uncritical
reception of a rationale that appeared to confirm Orientalist
constructions of "Islamic iconoclasm" as an essential cultural
value served to obscure a number of paradoxes that hint at
the broader cultural significance of the events.105 To begin
with, there are no Buddhists left in Afghanistan to explain the
curious concern about the worship and respect afforded the
idols in Mullah Omar's edict (see App. below), a fact acknowledged
in the Taliban's paradoxical statement that the
presence of practicing Buddhists in the country would have
guaranteed the continued existence of the images.106 Moreover,
it should be borne in mind that the destruction of
monumental sculpture was part of a broader iconoclastic
program that arguably had its most disastrous effects not on
images still in situ but on those housed in what was left of the
museums of Afghanistan.107 According to one report, the
Bamiyan episode was initiated after Taliban officials, horrified
at being confronted by a seminaked bodhisattva in the
Kabul Museum, slapped it across the chest and face.108
Apocryphal though this story may be, in subsequent statements,
Mullah Omar made clear the perceived relationship
between iconolatry and the museum. Faced with the threat to
destroy the Buddhist icons, Western institutions offered to
purchase the offending items, in effect legitimizing the practice
of looting Afghan antiquities from which some had benefited
in the preceding decades. In an attempt to save some
artifacts, Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, pleaded with the Taliban,
"Let us remove them so that they are in the context of an
art museum, where they are cultural objects, works of art and
not cult images."1'09 The response of Mullah Omar was telling,
although its significance was missed at the time. The
mullah replied on Radio Sharica by posing the rhetorical
question to the international Muslim community: "Do you
prefer to be a breaker of idols or a seller of idols?""0 If the
question sounds familiar, it was intended to, for it self-consciously
invokes the very words attributed to Sultan Mahmud
of Ghazna when confronted with the offer of the Somnath
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652 ART BUILETIN 1ECEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
Brahmans to ransom their icon.11' Although iconoclasm is
often stigmatized as an act stemming from ignorance,112 this
was a gesture that was particularly well informed about its
own historical precedents. The artful mining of the Islamic
past for authoritative precedent recalls Mullah Omar's earlier
"rediscovery" of the celebrated burda (cloak) of the Prophet,
in a Kandahar museum, which made it possible for him to
align himself with a historical chain of caliphs who had
earlier laid claim to this cloak of legitimacy.113
The significance of these events was not lost in India, where
the Somnath episode still resonates politically."14 In contrast
to the dominant Western view that the Bamiyan debacle
evidenced the eternal medievalism of Islam, in India it was
represented as the return of the repressed. Jaswant Singh,
foreign minister of a Hindu nationalist government, told the
Indian parliament that India "has been cautioning the world
against this regression into medieval barbarism."'15 Accordingly,
the traditional tropes of medieval desecration were
invoked in a very modern way, with the radical Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (World Hindu Council) protesting outside the
United Nations headquarters in Delhi threatening to destroy
Indian mosques in response to the destruction of the Buddhas."l6
In turn, a Taliban spokesman in New York weakly
suggested that the actions in Bamiyan were in fact a (much
delayed) response to the destruction of the Babri Mosque at
Ayodhya in 1992, in whose wake large numbers of Indian
citizens perished in sectarian violence.117
The truly global implications of this event derive, however,
from the fact that Mullah Omar's words were directed not
eastward, toward the Hindus of India or the Buddhist communities
beyond, but westward, toward European and American
museum directors seeking to ransom the ill-fated images.
By his careful choice of language, Mullah Omar
appropriated the authority of the Mahmud legend while
transposing the Brahmanical guardians of a religiously idolatrous
past with the museological purveyors of a culturally
idolatrous present. 11
The idea of the museum as the locus of a kind of idolatry
may seem absurd, since the distinction between cult icon and
art object is an ancient one in Western epistemology and,
historically, has tended to be asserted as a defense against
radical acts of iconoclasm.119 Moreover, as a response to
French revolutionary iconoclasm,'20 the institution of the
museum is itself the signifier of a shift from cult to culture
that has indexed the transition to modernity in the West from
at least the eighteenth century on.'12 If this was some idiosyncratic
misreading of Western cultural institutions and values,
however, it finds an uncanny echo in the writing of
Walter Benjamin and others, for whom the original use value
of the artifact continues to inform its reception as an art
object.'22 Although rooted in the "timeless theology of images"
paradigm that I have criticized here, the tension between
Abdullah's reading of the "Wonder House" of Lahore
as the locus of idolatry and Kim's perception of it as a
governmental institution for the dissemination of Western
rationality in my epigraph anticipates a paradox highlighted
in the work of a modern anthropologist such as Alfred Gell:
I cannot tell between religious and aesthetic exaltation;
art-lovers, it seems to me, actually do worship images in
most of the relevant senses, and explain away their de
facto idolatry by rationalizing it as aesthetic awe. Thus, to
write about art at all is, in fact, to write about either
religion, or the substitute for religion which those who
have abandoned the outward forms of received religions
content themselves with.123
As its etymology (and often its architecture) implies, the
museum is a type of secular temple, a "temple of resonance,"
within which modernity is equated with the desacralization
and even "silencing" of inanimate objects by their transmutation
into museological artifacts.'24 The ability of these
muted idols to speak in novel ways is intrinsic to their existence
as art, however. This is clear from one of the foundation
documents of the modern museum, Abbe Gr6goire's
1794 call for an institution to protect French national patrimony
from the depredations of revolutionary iconoclasm: "In
this statue, which is a work of art, the ignorant see only a
piece of crafted stone: let us show them that this piece of
marble breathes, that this canvas is alive, and that this book is
an arsenal with which to defend their rights."125 The work of
David Freedberg and Gell suggests that the animation implied
here is something more than a metaphoric conceit. As
the latter notes, "in the National Gallery, even if we do not
commit full-blown idolatry, we do verge on it all the time," a
point that the 1978 attack on Nicolas Poussin's Adoration of the
Golden Calf was presumably intended to underline.'26 It is in
the museum that what might be crudely termed the secular
and religious discourses of Euro-American iconoclasm coincide.
Given the ways in which the aesthetic, economic, and
institutional aspects of modernity are articulated around the
transmutation of the cult image into cultural icon, it is hardly
surprising that in the modern nation-state, the museum
rather the church is the primary target of "traditional" iconoclastic
behavior. 12 At the other extreme, occasional attempts
to venerate the museological artifact also serve to
highlight the often uneasy relationship between cult image
and cultural icon.128 Both in theory and in practice, it seems
that the distinction underlying Philippe de Montebello's appeal
to the Taliban is far from clear-cut.
As its origins in European religious and revolutionary iconoclasm
imply, the institution of the museum, no less than the
objects it houses, is a culturally constructed artifact, a product of
a particular cultural attitude toward the past. As Gell puts it,
We have neutralized our idols by reclassifying them as art;
but we perform obeisances before them every bit as deep
as those of the most committed idolater before his wooden
god . . . we have to recognize that the "aesthetic attitude"
is a specific historical product of the religious crisis of the
Enlightenment and the rise of Western science, and that it
has no applicability to civilizations which have not internalized
the Enlightenment as we have.129
As a product of the European Enlightenment, the museum
stands among the range of institutions that construct and
project a cultural identity defined in relation to the nationstate.'31'
At a global level, the institution is part of the paradoxical
interplay between structural similarity and cultural
difference that characterizes the "community of nations."
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 653
The objects it houses are central to its role in articulating and
consolidating an idea of a national culture defined in relation
to the cultures of this broader community.'31 As Carol Duncan
notes, "What we see and do not see in our most prestigious
art museums-and on what terms and whose authority
we do or don't see it-involves the much larger questions of
who constitutes the community and who shall exercise the
power to define its identity."132 Historically, the museum has
often served to highlight the hegemonic nature of the "universal"
values underlying the concept of nationhood that it
embodies.133 On the one hand, there is the awkward relation
between the museum, colonization, and modernity.134 On the
other, there are the tensions between the idea of the museum as
a showcase for national patrimony, the idea of art as a universal
human value, and the historical collecting practices of many
Euro-American museums vis-a-vis colonial and postcolonial
states.135 The gap between theory and practice here is often
obscured by the assertion (implicit or explicit) that the inhabitants
of lands such as Afghanistan are incapable of curating
their own patrimony. This argument, a stalwart of the colonial
era that resurfaced again during the Bamiyan episode, is somewhat
ironic given the damage done to many South and Central
Asian archaeological sites in the nineteenth century by European
scholars collecting for museums.136 Moreover, it can be
argued that the shift in signification inherent in the resocialization
of the artifact within the museum, its transmutation from
cult image to cultural icon, has much in common with the
semiotic structure of iconoclasm itself.137
In the destruction of recontextualized museum artifacts,
the literal and metaphoric senses of "iconoclasm," the destruction
of images and an attack on venerated institutions,
coincide.138 It has been suggested that certain acts of iconoclasm
directed against Western museums represent "protests
against exclusion from the cultural 'party game' in which
only a minority of society participates."'39 Similarly, Taliban
iconoclasm can be understood as constituting a form of
protest against exclusion from an international community in
which the de facto hegemony of the elite nations is obscured
by the rhetoric of universal values. As an index of an idea of
community that frequently falls far short of the ideal (and
nowhere more so than in Afghanistan, where superpowers
did battle by proxy), there could be few better targets to make
the point. If the destruction of Afghan antiquities in March
2001 represented an attack on "a separate Afghan identity,"140
this was a concept of identity rooted in the "universal"
values of the nation-state. Just as the linga from Somnath
served to evoke a relationship between Ghazna and the wider
(Indic and Islamic) world, the Buddhas in the Kabul Museum
referenced the incorporation of Afghanistan into a global
community of nations. Their destruction represented the
definitive rejection of that ideal in favor of an equally hegemonic
notion of pan-Islamic homogeneity constituted in opposition
to it.141 This relationship between the art object,
Taliban iconoclasm, and the international community was
noted by Jean Frodon in an insightful article on the Bamiyan
episode, which appeared in Le Monde:
If a transcendence inhabits these objects, if a belief that
the fundamentalists perceive in opposition to their religion
is associated with them, it is this and only this: to be
perceived as art objects (which evidently was not the meaning
that those who sculpted the Bamiyan giants in the fifth
century of our era gave to them). This cultural belief,
elaborated in the West, is today one of the principal ties
uniting what we call the international community (which
is far from containing the global population). It is against
this, against a rapport with a world valorizing a nonreligious
relation with the invisible, that the explosive charges
that annihilated the Buddhas were placed.142
A further irony lies in the fact that the Afghan Buddhas were
ideally suited to play the role assigned to them in the Bamiyan
episode, for they first came to the attention of Western scholarship
as evidence of a classical European influence on the early
medieval art of the region. Indeed, the very idea of representing
the Buddha anthropomorphically was ascribed to the impact of
"the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch."143 Within this
epistemological tradition, the origins of both the Bamiyan Buddhas
and the museum as an institution lie in the same foundational
stratum of classicism on which the universalizing values of
the Enlightenment were constructed.144 It was precisely as a
reaction to the hegemonic cultural, economic, and political
power of this Enlightenment tradition that the destruction of
the Buddhas was undertaken.
The attack on the museum as an institution enshrining
idolatrous cultural values resonates with a second rationale
offered for the Taliban's iconoclastic edict: that it highlighted
the hypocrisy of Western institutions. These "will give
millions of dollars to save un-Islamic stone statues but not one
cent to save the lives of Afghani men, women and children";
as Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, a Taliban envoy to the
United States, put it, "When your children are dying in front
of you, then you don't care about a piece of art."'45 Here, the
concern with the materiality of non-Islamic worship that we
saw articulated in the Traditions regarding figuration coincides
with a critique of "Western" materialism. The reluctance
of the international community to aid Afghanistan,
even in the face of a major threat of famine, derived from the
earlier imposition of sanctions, an extension to Afghanistan
of a type of collective punishment that had previously been
visited on the civilian population of Iraq, with devastating
effects. It is also worth noting that the destruction of Buddhist
antiquities followed an earlier massacre of the minority
Hazara population of the Bamiyan Valley, which barely merited
a mention in the European and American press, firmly
focused as it was on the issue of the Buddhas.146
In claiming to be drawing attention to a fetishistic privileging
of inanimate icons at the expense of animate beings, the Taliban
find themselves in curious company, for there is a striking
parallel here with one of the most (in)famous acts of modem
European iconoclasm. On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson
slashed Diego Velazquez's celebrated seventeenth-century work
The Rokeby Venus where it hung in the National Gallery, London
(Fig. 9). This action, undertaken as part of a broader
campaign for universal suffrage, was specifically intended
to draw attention to the treatment of the imprisoned Emmeline
Pankhurst. In Richardson's own words,
I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful
woman in mythological history as a protest against the
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654 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOLUME LXXXIV NUMBER 4
A
9 Diego Velazquez, The Rokehy Venus,
dletail, ca. 1640-48, after the
attack by Mary Richardson in 1914
London, The National Gallery
(photo: ? The National Gallery)
government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the
most beautiful character in modern history. ... If there is
an outcry against my deed, let eveiyone remember that
such an outcly is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the
destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautifiul living
women, and that until the public cease to countenance
human destruction the stones cast against me for the
destruction of this picture are each an evidence against
them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and
hypocrisy. '1"
Freedberg has pointed out that iconoclasts seeking publicity
target art objects precisely because
The wNork has been adored and fetishized: the fact that it
hangs in a mtseumi is sufficient testimony to that, just as
the hanging of pictures in churches is testimony to religiotus
forms (or less overtly secular forms) of adoration,
worship, and fetishization. Fturthermore-especially in the
twentieth century-the better the art, the greater the comm(odity
fetishism.'118
As the "idol of the marketplace," the fetishized art object
illustrates the relationship between cultural and financial
capital in a manner that highlights "the problem of the
nonuniversal and social construction of value." 149 Issues of
gender notwithstanding, it was precisely their common role
as fetishes of Western modernity that rendered The Rokeby
Venus and the Bamiyan Btiddhas desirable targets for modern
iconoclasts opposed to the values that they seemed to embody.
"' Such actions reveal the double nature of the fetishized
image or icon, which, as signified, can expose and even
avenge wrongs inflicted on living persons, while as signifier, it
facilitates "the dismissal of moral judgements passed on the
destruction of what 'was only a picture"' in the case of The
Rokeby Venus, 1'l or only stones in the case of the Buddhas. In
doing so the), exploit the potential of the art object and its
associated iconolatly to undermine the subject-object distinction
in which Enlightenment epistemnology is grotunded. As
Igor Kopytoff notes in his discussion of the cultural biography
of things, "To us, a biography of a painting by Renoir that
ends up in an incinerator is as tragic, in its way, as the
biography of a person who is murdered." 152 Similar ironies
tinderlie the central paradox of iconoclasm: visiting vengeance
on the fetishized icon by slapping, slashing, or smashing,
iconoclasts no less than iconophiles engage with the
power (if not the animateness) of the image.1"3
None of this is intended to condone the actions of any of
the players in the events of March 2001, but it is imperative to
recognize that those events have a logic rooted not in the
fictions of an eternal or recurring medievalism but in the
realities of global modernity. The Bamiyan episode demonstrates
the ease with which an index of cultural change rooted
in specific historical circumstances can be ascribed to an
essential cultural pathology. As I emphasized at the outset,
this ahistorical paradigm should be rejected in favor of approaches
that historicize iconoclastic events, acknowledging
the agency of those involved, examining their motivation,
and interrogating the narratives on which we depend for our
information, whether courtly histories, fragmentary artifacts,
or Radio Shari a. In the unfortunate event that the traditional
attitude to "Islamic iconoclasm" were to prevail two
hundred, five hundred, or one thousand years from now and
we came across a reference to the destruction of the Bamiyan
Buddhas, we would invariably assume that this was a typically
Islamic response to the image. In doing so, we would be
overlooking the coexistence between the Buddhas and the
Muslim population that marveled at them for over a millennium
before they were obliterated by the Taliban. To miss the
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 655
political portents in this radical break with tradition on the
part of the ruling regime would be a serious omission, as
subsequent events have demonstrated. Worse still is the fact
that to memorialize these events as just one more example of
"Islamic iconoclasm" would be to valorize the monument to
their own brand of cultural homogeneity that the Taliban
created at Bamiyan.154
Appendix
The Taliban's Edict on Images
This is an unofficial translation of the edict concerning the
destruction of religious images, prepared by the United Nations
staff in Kabul, which was compiled by the Afghanistan
Research Group (ARG) and circulated in an electronic newsletter
as "News from Afghanistan" on March 2, 2001. The
edict was published in Pushtu by the state-run Bakhtar News
Agency and broadcast on Radio ShariCa on February 27, 2001.
It has not proved possible to obtain a transcript of the original
text; the sole transliterated Arabic term was garnered
from among the partial translations given in other sources.
Edict issued by the Islamic State of Afghanistan, in Kandahar
on the 12th of Rabiul-Awwal 1421 (February 26, 2001):
On the basis of consultations between the religious leaders of
the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, religious judgments of
the ulema 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 [taghit] and all fake idols should be destroyed.155
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 ulema 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.
Finbarr Barry Flood is assistant professor in the Department of Fine
Arts at New York University. He has held a number of research
fellowships in Europe and the United States. He is currently completing
his second book, which deals with the looting, gifting, and reuse
of Indian artifacts by Indo-Islamic rulers [Department of Fine Arts,
New York University, New York, N.Y. 10003].
Frequently Cited Sources
Davis, Richard H., Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
Fisher, Philip, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of
Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Flood, Finbarr Barry, Incorporating India: Art and Transculturation in a Medieval
Afghan Polity (forthcoming).
Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of
Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French
Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998).
Grabar, Oleg, "Islam and Iconoclasm," in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975,
ed. Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (Birmingham, Eng.: Centre for
Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977).
Hawting, G. R., The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Melikian-Chirvani, Assadullah Souren, "L'evocation litteraire du Bouddhisme
dans l'Iran musulman," Le Monde Iranien et 17slam, no. 2 (1974): 1-72.
Paret, Rudi, "Textbelege zum islamische Bilderverbot," in Das Werk des Kunstlers:
Studien zur Ikonographie und Formgeschichte Hubert Schrade zum 60. Geburtstag
dargebracht von Kollegen und Schulern (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960),
36-48.
Sachau, Edward C., Alberuni's India, 2 vols. (1910; reprint, New Delhi: Mu
shiram Manoharlal, 1983).
van Reenen, Daan, "The Bilderverbot, a New Survey," Der Islam 67 (1990):
27-77.
Notes
The research for this paper was undertaken while I was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce
Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2001. A Smithsonian Senior
Fellowship at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., enabled me
to write it in the spring of 2002. I would like to extend a warm thanks to both
institutions for their support. My thanks are also due to Zoe Strother, Serpil
Bagci, and Massumeh Farhad for bringing various articles and books cited in
the course of this essay to my attention, and to the anonymous reviewers of the
piece for their insightful comments. For his critical insights and perennially
sharp eye, I am particularly grateful to Zahid Chaudhary. Unless otherwise
noted, translations are mine.
1. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 54; and Walter
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 217.
2. Daphne Bezard, "When Europe Also Destroyed Its Images," Art Newspaper
116 (July-Aug. 2001): 28.
3. K.A.C. Creswell, "The Lawfulness of Painting in Islam," Ars Islamica 11-12
(1946): 166. In fact, it is striking how frequently the language of pathology
permeates discussion of the topic. See, for example, Patricia Crone on the
ability of Islam to make "epidemic what had hitherto been merely endemic";
Crone, "Islam, Judeo-Christianity, and Byzantine Iconoclasm," Jerusalem Studies
in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 59.
4. There are a number of paradoxes and tensions in the ways in which
Islamic iconoclasm was portrayed in the course of the Bamiyan episode, the
most obvious being the contradiction between representations of Islamic
culture as timeless and unchanging and the assumption that the actions of the
Taliban indexed an atavistic reversion to medieval practice that is a recurring
feature of Islamic societies; see n. 115 below. Both representations entail a
denial of coevality, which is a common feature of Euro-American discourse on
"others" (Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object
[NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1983], 32-34) and which is particularly
acute in relation to representations of Islamic cultures. As Mahmut Mutman
notes, in Orientalist discourse, "the West constitutes its own history, its time
and itself, among other things, through its difference from the East by
characterizing the latter as lacking in history, civil society," and so forth;
Mahmut Mutman, "Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs. Islam,"
Cultural Critique, winter 1992-93, 175. Thus, Afghanistan was represented as a
land whose inhabitants have "the eyes of the ancient mariner," in which even
indexes of modernity such as the camera become signs of the persistence of
the past, a country the United States is trying to "jolly along" to modernity;
Maureen Dowd, "Brutes and Hunks," New York Times, Nov. 28, 2001; and Tim
Weiner, "Time Out ofJoint in a Ruined Land," New York Times, Nov. 26, 2001.
5. Carl W. Ernst, "Admiring the Works of the Ancients: The Ellora Temples
as Viewed by Indo-Muslim Authors," in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking
Religious Identity in Islamicate South Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce B.
Lawrence (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2000), 116. Similar
issues arise in connection with representations of Jewish iconoclasm, which
(as Creswell's comments suggest) has also been conceived of in essentialist
terms. For good critiques of such representations, see Joseph Gutmann, "The
'Second Commandment' and the Image in Judaism," in No Graven Images:
Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible (New York: Ktav, 1971), 1-14; and Charles
Barber, "The Truth in Painting: Iconoclasm and Identity in Early-Medieval
Art," Speculum 72 (1997): 1022-23.
6. As Oleg Grabar notes, 45, "The most obvious difference between Byzantine
and Islamic iconoclasm is that the former is usually spelled with a capital
'I' and the latter with a small 'i.' This secondary typographical distinction
illustrates first of all the difference between a historical moment (these are
presumably capitalised) and an attitude or mode of behaviour, the latter
being apparently too common to deserve capitalization." For a theoretical
discussion on the supposed roots of this essential attitude, see Marshall G.S.
Hodgson, "Islam and Image," History of Religions 3 (1969): 220-60.
7. See Andr6 Wink, Al Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 2, The
Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest 11th-13th Centuries (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 317, paraphrasing Grabar, 45: "Unlike Christian
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656 ART BtJI.IETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOIUME IXXXIV NtMBE.R 4
iconoclasm, Islamic iconoclasm was virtually always directed against nonMuslim
objects, with the exception of the late defacing of miniatures in
manuscripts by pious librarians."
8. For example, V. L. Menage, "The Serpent Column in Ottoman Sources,"
Anatolian Studies 14 (1964): 169-73.
9. A further important facet of Islamic iconoclasm, not dealt with here,
concerns the general assumption that iconoclastic acts result from a type of
anti-aesthetic impulse. I have argued elsewhere that in certain contexts,
decapitated and defaced figures have a positive aesthetic value and should be
considered as new works generated from those that they supersede; Finbarr
Barry Flood, "Refiguring Iconoclasm: Image Mutilation and Aesthetic Innovation
in the Early Indian Mosque," in Negating the Image: Case Studies of Past
Iconoclasms, ed. Anne MacLanan and Jeffrey Johnson (forthcoming).
10. The relationship between Byzantine iconoclasm and Islamic aniconism
and iconoclasm has been debated in detail in numerous publications: Grabar;
Crone (as in n. 3); G.R.D. King, "Islam, Iconoclasm, and the Declaration of
Doctrine," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 2 (1985):
267-77; Sidney H. Griffith, "Theodore Abtu Qurrah's Arabic Tract on the
Christian Practice of Venerating Images," Journal of the Amesican Oriental Society
105 (1985): 53-73; Terry Allen, Five Essays on Islamic Art (Manchester, Mich.:
Solipsist Press, 1988), 18-22; and Sidney H. Griffith, "Islam, Images and
Christian Icons: A Moment in the Christian/Muslim Encounter in Early
Islamic Times," in La Syrie de Byzance ai lIslam VIIe-17ile siecles, ed. Pierre
Canivet and Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais (Damascus: Institut Fran,cais de Damas,
1992), 121-38. For an interesting assessment of the "internal" determinants of
early Islamic aniconism, see Emiko Terasaki, "The Lack of Human and
Animal Figural Imagery in the Public Art of the Umavyyad Period," M.A. thesis,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1987, 26-56.
11. The Hadith concerning figuration are scattered through a number of
collections of Traditions. The classic studies are those of Rudi Paret: Paret;
idem, "Das islamische Bilderverbot und die Schia," in Festschrift Werner Caskel:
Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag 5. Mlirz 1966 Gewidmet von Freunden und Schtilern, ed.
Erwin Graf (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), 224-32. A more accessible and recent
discussion of the Traditions regarding figuration and their sources can be
found in van Reenen.
12. Paret, 43-44; Crone (as in n. 3), 67; and A.J. Wensinck [T. Fahd], "Sura
1. In Theological and Legal Doctrine," in The Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed.
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960-97), vol. 9, 889.
13. Hawting, 22, 49. Similar concerns are articulated in Early Christian and
Jewish polemics against images; Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Early
Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 43-53; and Barber
(as in n. 5), 1033-34.
14. A. A. Vasiliev, "The Iconoclastic Edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A.D. 721,"
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9-10 (1956): 26; and Hawting, 67-87.
15.John V. Tolan, "Muslims as Pagans and Idolaters in Chronicles of the
First Crusade," in Western Viewos of Islam in Mledieval and Early Modern Europe:
Perception of the Other, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frassetto (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1999), 97-117; and Hawting, 85.
16. Wensinck (as in n. 12), 889-90.
17. Even in the textual tradition a certain ambivalence to figuration
emerges, for after the conquest of Mecca the prophet Muhammad ordered
the paintings of prophets, angels, and trees that decorated the interior of the
Ka'ba to be erased, while sparing an image of Jesus and Mary; Uri Rubin, "The
Ka"ba, Aspects of Its Ritual Function and Position in Pre-Islamic and Early
Islamic Times," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 97-131; and van
Reenen, 40.
18. Sheila S. Blair, "What Is the Date of the Dome of the Rock?" in Bayt
al-Maqdis, 'Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns, pt. 1,
Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
64-67.
19. For example, Helen Mitchell Brown, "Some Reflections on the Figural
Coinage of the Artuqids and Zengids," in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography,
Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. Dickran
Kouymjian (Beirut: American University in Beirut, 1974), 353-58.
20. Terasaki (as in n. 10); Ova Pancaroglu, "'A World unto Himself': The
Rise of a New Human Image in the Late Seljuq Period (1150-1250)," Ph.D.
diss., Harvard University, 2000, 14-23; and Patricia Crone and Shmuel
Moreh, The Book of Strangers: Mediaeval Arabic Graffiti on the 'Theme of Nostalgia
Attributed to Abu'l-Faraj al-I.sfahni (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000), 24.
21. Grabar, 45-47, 49.
22. Abu 'All, Ahmad ibn 'Umar ibn Rusta, Kita-b al-Alaq al-nafisa, ed. M. J.
de Goeje (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1892), 66.
23. Van Reenen, 70.
24. Mehmet Onder, "Konya kal'asi ve figfirli eserlenr," V\. Titrk Tarih Kongresi,
Ankara 20-26 Ekim 1961 (Ankara: Tfirk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1967),
145-69; Jean-Paul Roux, "Mosquees anatoliennes a decor sculpte," Syria 57
(1980): 305-23; and Pancaroglu (as in n. 20).
25. Ahmad b. 'Abd Allah TabarL, The History of al-Taban, vol. 13, The Conquest
of Iraq, Southwestern Persia, and Egypt, trans. and annot. Gautier H. A. Juynboll
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 23, 30; J. Pedersen,
"Masdjid," in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 6 (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1991), 650; and Flood, chap. 7.
26. For example, Arthur Upham Pope, "Representations of Living Forms in
Persiamn Mosques," Bulletin of the Iranian Institute 6, no. 1 (1946): 125-29; and
Rotnx (as in n. 24).
27. Rudi Paret, "Die Entstehungszeit des Islamischen Bilderverbots," Kunst
des Orients 11, nos. 1-2 (1976-77): 230. It has been suggested, to my mind not
entirely convincingly, that reused animal capitals around the mihrab of the
Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in its early 8th-century incarnation were left
unaltered and only later defaced; John Wilkinson, "Coltumn Capitals in the
Haram al-Sharif," in Bayt al-Maqdis, 'Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby
and Jeremy Johns, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, 9 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 134-38. More convincing is the documented appearance of
figural scrolls on the 13th-century, capitals flanking the mihrab of the Jami"
al-Nuri in Hama, Syria; Ernst Herzfeld, "Damascus: Studies in Architecture,
II," Ars Islamica 10 (1943): 45. For another possible mihrab with figural
ornament, see Tariq Jawad al-Janabi, Studies in Mediaeval Iraqi Architecture
(Baghdad: Republic of Iraq Ministry of Cultture and Information, 1982),
175-76, pl. 164.
28. Ernst J. Grube, "Islamic Sculptures: Ceramic Figurines," Oriental Art,
n.s., 12 (1966); Eva Baer, "The Human Figure in Early Islamic Art: Some
Preliminary Remarks," Muqarnas 16 (1999): 32-41; and Pancaroglu (as in n.
20). In addition, pre-Islamic three-dimensional sctulpture was reused in bathhouses
(Henri Peres, La poesie andalouse en arabe classique au XIe siecle [Paris:
Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953], 331-33), on city walls (Robert Irwin, Islamic Art
in Context: Art, Architecture and the Literary World [New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1997], 211), and apparently, in one case, a mosque (Crone [as in n. 3], 68 n.
37). Sutch classical or late antique sculptures might be described as idols, but,
as with their counterparts in Constantinople (see n. 119 below), they were
valued for both their aesthetic and talismanic properties. I hope to explore
the apotropaic or talismanic reuse of pre-Islamic figural sculpture in a future
essay.
29. This is particularly true of the arts of eastern Iran in the 12th and 13th
centuries; Adolf Grohmann, "Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Letters in
the History of Arabic Writing," Bulletin de lInstitut d'Egypte 38 (1955-56):
117-22; Anthony Welch, "Epigraphs as Icons: The Role of the Written Word
in Islamic Art," in The Image and the Word: Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, ed. Joseph Gutmann (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977),
63-74; Erica Cruikshank Dodd and Shereen Khairallah, The Image of the Word:
A Study of Quranic Verses in Islamic Art, 2 vols. (Beirut: American University in
Beirut, 1981); Raya Shani, A Monumental Manifestation of the Shi C ite Faith in Late
Twelfth-Century Iran: The Case of the Gunbad-i 'Alawiyan, Hamadan, Oxford
Studies in Islamic Art, 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), fig. 98e;
and Robert Hillenbrand, "The Ghurid Tomb at Herat," in Cairo to Kabul:
Afghan and Islamic Studies Presented to Ralph Pinder-Wilson, ed. Warwick Ball and
Leonard Harrow (London: Melisende, 2002), 142-43, fig. 12.6.
30. Priscilla P. Soucek, "The Life of the Prophet: Illustrated Versions," in
Content and Context of 'Visual Arts in the Islamic World (University Park, Pa.: Penn
State University Press, 1988), 193-217; and Robert Hillenbrand, "Images of
Muhammad in al-Biruni's Chronology of Ancient Nations," in Persian Painting
from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honour of Basil W. Robinson (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2000), 129-46.
31. E. E. Urbach, "The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Secomnd and Third
Centuries in the Light of Archaeological and Historical Facts," Israel Exploration
Journal 9 (1959): 232-33.
32. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6 vols. (Cairo, 1313/1895), vol. 2, 305, 308,
390, 478; Paret, 46-47; and idem (as in n. 27), 158, 176. For an extensive list
of the various collections of Hadith in which this Tradition appears, see van
Reenen, 33, 54. A precedent for it can be found in some Jewish traditions on
figuration, which held that while sculpture vwas unacceptable, floor mosaics
were permissible, since they were trodden on; Urbach (as in n. 31), 237 n. 89.
Conversely, it was precisely this fact that later led Christian aulthorities to
forbid the use of sacred images on pavements and floors; Carole Evelyn
Voelker, "Charles Borromeo's Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae,"
Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1977, 230.
33. Nabih Amin Faris, The Book of Idols (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1952), 27. On the pre-Islamic idols of Mecca, see G.R.D. King, "The
Sculptures of the Pre-Islamic Haram at Makka," in Ball and Harrow (as in n.
29), 144-50. Note, however, that Hawting disputes, largely on historiographic
grounds, the evidential basis of such attempts to reconstrumct the Meccan
pantheon.
34. Pope (as in n. 26), 129; Jerrilynin D. Dodds, ed., Al-Andalus, the Art of
Islamic Spain (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), no. 40; and Mikhail B.
Piotrovsky and John Vrieze, Art of Islam: Heavenly Art, Earthly, Beauty (Amsterdam:
Lund Humphries, 1999), 34, no. 188.
35. Robert Dankoff, Evliya (elebi in Bitlis (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 294-97.
36. Yuri A. Petrosyan et al., Pages of Perfection: Islamic Paintings and Calligraphy
from the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg: Electa, 1995), 144-55;
and Irmin (as in n. 28), 82.
37. Griffith, 1992 (as in n. 10), 130; Gy6ngi T6r6k, "Bildersturme durch die
Tiirken," in L 'ort et les revolutions, section 4: Les iconoclasmnes, ed. Sergiusz
Michalski, Actes du XXVIIe Congres International d'Histoire de l'Art, Strasbourg
1-7 septembre 1989 (Strasbourg: Societe Alsacienne pour le Developpement
de l'Histoire de l'Art, 1992), 260-74, fig. 4.
38. Vasiliev (as in n. 14); Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine
from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study, Studies in
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 657
Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 2 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), 218-19;
and Barber (as in n. 5), 1022.
39. King (as in n. 10), 270; and Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 86.
40. King (as in n. 10), 269-73; Griffith, 1985 (as in n. 10), 60-65; and
Hawting, 82-83.
41.Janina M. Safran, The Second Umayyad Caliphate (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 40; and Finbarr Barry Flood, "The Medieval
Trophy as an Art Historical Trope: Coptic and Byzantine 'Altars' in Islamic
Contexts," Muqarnas 18 (2001): 55-56.
42. Abdur Rashid and M. A. Mokhdoomi, Futuhat-i-Firoz Shahi (Aligarh:
Aligarh Muslim University, 1949), 14; translation from H. M. Elliott andJohn
Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (reprint, Delhi: Low
Cost Publications, 1990), vol. 3, 382. Despite such assertions of orthodoxy, the
same sultan erected a celebrated if enigmatic monument next to the Great
Mosque of his capital, Firuzabad, in which was incorporated an antique
Buddhist pillar guarded at each of the four corners of the monument by a
single monumental stone lion; Anthony Welch, "Architectural Patronage and
the Past: The Tughluq Sultans of Delhi," Muqarnas 10 (1993): 317.
43. Ellen S. Smart, "Fourteenth Century Chinese Porcelain from a Tughlaq
Palace in Delhi," Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 41 (1975-77): 201;
B. N. Goswamy, "In the Sultan's Shadow: Pre-Mughal Painting in and around
Delhi," in Delhi through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society, ed.
R. E. Frykenberg (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 133; and van Reenen,
46.
44. See, by way of comparison, the involvement of the state bureaucracy in
the iconoclastic activities of Assyrian rulers; Zainab Bahrani, "Assault and
Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East," Art History
18, no. 3 (1995): 367.
45. Schick (as in n. 38), 218-19; Flood (as in n. 9).
46. I owe this useful distinction to Andrew P. Gregory, " 'Powerful Image':
Responses to Portraits and the Political Uses of Images in Rome," Journal of
Roman Archaeology 7 (1994): 89.
47. Ernst (as in n. 5), 115. Taken out of context, this account might be seen
as attesting an implacable aversion to figuration, but as Ernst points out, in
the entry for the following day Babur describes a visit to a group of temples,
which he compares to Muslim religious schools (madrasas), mentioning, without
comment, the presence of stone-carved icons.
48. Alexander Cunningham, Four Reports Made during the Years 1862-63-
64-65, Archaeological Survey of India Reports, vol. 2 (reprint, Delhi: Indological
Book House, 1972), 365.
49. Edmund Thomas and Christian Witschel, "Constructing Reconstruction:
Claim and Reality of Roman Rebuilding Inscriptions from the Latin
West," Papers of the British School at Rome 60 (1992): 137. For a general
discussion of the problems associated with textual reports of monument
destruction in medieval South Asia, see Alka A. Patel, "Islamic Architecture of
Western India (Mid 12th-14th Centuries): Continuities and Interpretations,"
Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000, 319-20.
50. Thomas and Witschel (as in n. 49), 139.
51. Zehava Jacoby, "Ideological and Pragmatic Aspects of Muslim Iconoclasm
after the Crusader Advent in the Holy Land," in Michalski (as in n. 37),
17-18.
52. S. M. Yusuf, "The Early Contacts between Islam and Buddhism," University
of Ceylon Review 13, no. 1 (1955): 12, 17; and Hans Belting, Likeness and
Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 279, originally published as Bild
und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1990). This could be achieved through physical contact with ritually
impure animals, for example; Yohanan Friedmann, "The Temple of Multan:
A Note on Early Muslim Attitudes to Idolatry," Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972):
177; and A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad (Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 208.
53. Flood (as in n. 9).
54. Freedberg, 415; Bezard (as in n. 2).
55. David Freedberg, "The Structure of Byzantine and European Iconoclasm,"
in Bryer and Herrin (as in n. 6), 169.
56. See, for example, Tabari (as in n. 25), vol. 23, The Zenith of the Marwanid
House, trans. Martin Hinds (1990), 194.
57. Hawting, 51, 107.
58. Priscilla P. Soucek, "Taswir 1: Painting and Other Representational
Arts," The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 10 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999), 362.
59. Qur'an 26:72-73; Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, "Idolatry and
Representation," Res 22 (1992): 19-20.
60. Mary Boyce, "Iconoclasm among the Zoroastrians," in Christianity, Judaism,
and Other Greco-Roman Cults, Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, ed. Jacob
Neusner (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 97; William Pietz, "The Problem of the
Fetish, II," Res 12 (1987): 31; and Finney (as in n. 13), 54-56. Although the
icon was inert matter (hyle), it could be inhabited by the malevolent spiritual
beings that precipitated image worship. Such beings entered into the material
of the image at the moment of consecration, which was conceived of as an act
of ensoulment. The identification of consecration as the moment of animation
is common to both iconoclasts and iconophiles. In Hindu consecration
rituals, for example, the icon is believed to become animated precisely by the
entry into it of a divine presence, '"just as a soul must enter a human body to
instill life into it"; Richard H. Davis, "Loss and Recovery of Ritual Self among
Hindu Images," Journal of Ritual Studies 6, no. 1 (1992): 47.
61. Wink (as in n. 7), 327.
62. Sandra Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition
in the 1001 Nights (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991),
115.
63. Rashid and Mokhdoomi (as in n. 42), 23; and Flood.
64. Carl Nylander, "Earless in Niniveh: Who Mutilated 'Sargon's' Head?"
American Journal of Archaeology 84 (1980): 332; Bahrani (as in n. 44), 381; Peter
Stewart, "The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity," in Constructing Identities
in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 165-66;
and Gamboni, 32.
65. William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. Emily
Allwater Babcock and A. C. King, 2 vols. (New York: Octagon Books, 1941),
vol. 1, 296, emphasis mine.
66. Freedberg; Gell, 14-19.
67. See also Oskar von Niedermayer, Afghanistan (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann,
1924), pls. 217, 218.
68. Nancy Hatch Dupree, "The Colossal Buddhas and the Monastic Grotto,"
Marg24, no. 2 (1971): 18, 22.
69. Andre Wink, "India and Central Asia: The Coming of the Turks in the
Eleventh Century," in Ritual, State, and History in South Asia, Essays in Honour
ofJ. C. Heesterman, ed. A. W. van den Hoek, D.H.A. Kolff, and M. S. Oort
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 754.
70. Gianroberto Scarcia, "A Preliminary Report on a Persian Legal Document
of 470-1078 Found at Bamiyan," East and West, n.s., 14 (1963): 73-85;
idem, "Sull'ultima 'islamizzazione' di Bamiyan," Annali dellIstituto Orientale
dell'Universitario di Napoli 16 (1966): 278-81; and Deborah Klimburg-Salter,
The Kingdom of Bamiyan: Buddhist Art and Culture of the Hindu Kush (Naples:
Istituto Universitario Orientale and IsMEO, 1989), 41.
71. W. Barthold, "Bamiyan," in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, pt. 2
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1913), 634; Melikian-Chirvani, 24; and Clifford Edmund
Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861
to 949/1542-43) (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1994), 105-6.
72. Abu Bakr Muhammad Narshakhi, The History of Bukhara, trans. Richard
N. Frye (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1994), 49. The
Buddhas are said to have sustained subsequent damage at the hands of the
Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (a stock figure of Muslim iconoclasm in South
Asia) and the Persian ruler Nadir Shah; Barthold (as in n. 71), 643; Benjamin
Rowland Jr., Ancient Art from Afghanistan: Treasures of the Kabul Museum (New
York: Asia Society, 1966), 95; and Grabar, 45.
73. Guy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1905), 418; Muhammad ibn Ishaq ibn al-Nadim, The
Fihrist, trans. Bayard Dodge, 2 vols. (Chicago: Kazi, 1998), vol. 2, 82.
74. Melikian-Chirvani, 23-26, 59-60.
75. V. Minorsky, "Gardizi on India," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 12, no. 2 (1948): 629-39; Ratty D. Bhurekhan, "Hindu Religious
Beliefs and Practices as Reflected in the Accounts of Muslim Travellers
of Eleventh Century," Indian History Congress: Proceedings of the 25th Session,
Poona 1963 (Calcutta: n.p., 1964), 170-75; Bruce B. Lawrence, "Shahrastani
on Indian Idol Worship," Studia Islamica 38 (1973): 61-73; and Yohanan
Friedmann, "Medieval Muslim Views of Indian Religions," Journal of the American
Oriental Society 95 (1975): 214-21.
76. Melikian-Chirvani, 60; and Sachau, vol. 1, 111-24.
77. Davis, 96-99.
78. Simon Digby, "The Literary Evidence for Painting in the Delhi Sultanate,"
Bulletin of the American Academy of Benares 1 (1967): 50-51; and Kjeld von
Folsach, David Collection: Islamic Art (Copenhagen: Davids Samling, 1996),
nos. 273-77. For the palace compared to a temple (bahar), see MelikianChirvani,
69; andJulie Scott Meisami, "Palaces and Paradises: Palace Descriptions
in Medieval Persian Poetry," Princeton Papers 8 (2001): 25, 27.
79. Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, "The Buddhist Ritual in the Literature
of Early Islamic Iran," in South Asian Archaeology, Proceedings of the 6th
International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western
Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 274.
80. Hirananda Sastri, "Devanagari and the Muhammadan Rulers of India,"
Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 23 (1937): 495.
81. Flood, chap. 3.
82.John Briggs, trans., History of the Rise of Mohamedan Power in India,
Translated from the Original Persian of Mahomed Kasim Ferishta (London, 1829;
reprint, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974), vol. 1, 43-44;
and Muhammad Nazim, The Life and Times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna
(Cambridge, 1931; reprint, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971), 221.
This accords with the Tradition that the Prophet urged the Meccans to
destroy their idols rather than sell them (van Reenen, 40). The injunction was
apparently broken by the Umayyad caliph Mu?awiya (r. 661-80), who sold
idols looted in Sicily to the idolatrous inhabitants of Sind (Sachau, vol. 1,
124), although this may be an invention of anti-Umayyad propagandists.
Stories regarding the rejection of ransom for icons are also found in connection
with European iconoclasm; Freedberg (as in n. 55), 170 n. 58. See also n.
111 below.
83. In the 9th-century Book of Idols, a pre-Islamic Arabian idol named dhu
al-Khalasa is said to have been reused as the threshold of the entrance to a
mosque; Faris (as in n. 33), 31. A comparable reuse of the linga is attested
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658 ART BUl-I..ETIN DECEMBER 2002 VOI.UME I.XXXIN NUMNIBER 4
archaeologically in the early Islamic mosque at Banbhore in Sind, where
several were employed as the lowest steps of a flight of stairs leading to each
of the entrances to the Great Mosque; S. M. Ashfaque, "The Grand Mosque of
Banbhore," Pakistan Archaeology 6 (1969): 198-99. The veracity of the traditions
regarding the treatment of the Somnath linga seems to be borne out by
the find of an image of Brahma at Ghazna with its face worn away by the
passage of feet; Umberto Scerrato, "The First Two Excavation Campaigns at
Ghazni, 1957-1958," Fast and West, n.s., 10 (1959): 40. See also nn. 32 above
and 92 below.
84. Sachati, vol. 1, 117; Elliott and Dowson (as in n. 42), vol. 2, 454.
85. H. G. Raverty, Tabkaft-i-Nasis.: A General History of the Muhammedan
Dynasties of Asia, Including Hindustan, 2 vols. (1881; reprint, New Delhi:
Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1970), vol. 1, 82.
86. Karl-Heinz Golzio, "Das Problem von Toleranz in Indischen Religionen
anhand epigraphischer Quellen," in Frank-Richard Hainm Memorial Volume,
October 8, 1990, ed. Helmut Eimer (Bonn: Indica et Tibetica, 1990), 89-102;
Wink (as in n. 7), 310-11; Phyllis Granoff, "Sacred Objects in Medieval India:
Anti-image Polemics and Their Legacy," abstract of a paper presented at the
annutal meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, March 9-12,
2000, available from nwsNiss.aasianst.org/absts/2000abst/Inter/I-175.html; and
Flood, chap. 7.
87. Hermann Ktlke, Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India
and Southeast Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 15; and Michael D. Rabe,
"Royal Temple Dedications," in Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald S.
Lopez (Princeton: Princeton University; Press, 1995), 239-40.
88. Davis, 54-68.
89. Sachaul, vol. 1, 117.
90. Davis, 108.
91. Sheila S. Blair, The Alonumental Inscriptions from Early Islamic Iran and
Transoxiana (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), 183-84.
92. A similar principle is evident in the Jews of Sardis trampling the defaced
pagan reliefs laid face-down on the forecourt of their synagogue or the
Christians of Gaza trampling paving from the Holy of Holies of the Marneion
in their approach to the church that replaced it; George M.A. Hanfmann,
Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times: Results of the Archaeological Exploration of
Sardis 1958-1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unisersity Press, 1983), 176;
and Helen Saradi-Mendelovici, "Christian Attitudes to Pagan Monuments in
Later Antiquity and Their Legacy in Later Byzantine Centuries," Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 54.
93. Gulab Chandra Choudhary, Political Histo,r of North India from Jain
Sources (c. 650 AD to 1300 AD) (Amritsar: n.p., 1964), 287; and B. P. Sinha,
"Sonme Reflections on Indian Sctulpture (Stone or Bronze) of Buddhist Deities
Trampling Hindu Deities," in Dr. Satkari llIookerji Felicitation Volume (Varanasi:
Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1969), 97-107.
94. Note that in the Hadith, both sculpted stones and uinsculpted found
objects are recognized as having the capacity to ftinction as idols; Hawting,
106.
95. For a full discussion of this topic, see Flood, chap. 2.
96. Milton Gold, trans., The T7arikh-e Sistain (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il
Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1976), 171.
97. Raverty (as in n. 85), vol. 1, 82.
98. Fisher 20; and Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material
Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991), 155-56. For the idea of the heterotopia as a single space
dedicated to the juxtaposition of several spaces that are culturally, chronologically,
or otherwise incompatible, "a sort of simuiltaneously mythic and real
contestation of the space in wshich we live," see Michel Foucault, "Of Other
Spaces," Diacuitics 16 (1986): 22-27.
99. Mark Twain, quoted in Diana L. Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in
India (Chambersburg, Pa.: Animna Books, 1981), 14; and Fisher, 20; Howard
Risatti, "The Museum," Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992): 106.
100. Pamela Constable, "Taliban Ban on Idolatry Makes a Country withoutit
Faces," Washington Post, Mar. 26, 2001, A20.
101.Jean-Michel Frodon, "La gtuerre des images, ou le paradoxe de Bamiyan,"
Le Monde, Mar. 23, 2001.
102. Isabel Hilton, "Blaming the Breakers of Statues," Guardian, Mar. 7,
2001. Foi the suggestion that the earlier undertaking to protect Afghan
antiquities was similarly motivated by the Taliban's concerns with its relation
to the international community, see Robert Kluyver, "L'optique culturelle des
Taleban," in Afghanistan, patrimoine en peril: Actes d'une journee d'etude, 24 fevrier
2001 (Paris: CEREDAF, UNESCO, 2001), 55-59.
103. Esther Peskes, "Wahhabiyva: The 18th and 19th Centuries," The Encyclopaedia
of Islam, new ed., vol. 11 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 40, 42-43.
According to recent ieports, Afghan Taliban refused to carry out the destruction,
which was both initiated aInd executed by al-Qaeda members; Art Connection,
BBC World Sentice broadcast, Nov. 17, 2001; "Documents Detail
al-Qaeda Training of Foireign Fighters," Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2001, A35.
104. Gamboni, 22; see also Freedberg, 409; and "Taliban Open Afghan
Mutseum, Statues Gone," Newz York Times, Mar. 22, 2001. Nigel Spivey notes
that this was "a spectacle of iconoclasm staged under Western eyes, surely
designed less to offend practicing Butddhists than to enrage the high priests
of UNESCO"; Spivey, " 'Shrines of the Infidel': The Btiddhas at Bamiyan,"
Apollo 156 (July 2002): 28-35, at 28.
105. As Edward Said swrote of an earlier Middle Eastern crisis, "the drama
has unfolded as if according to an Orientalist program: the so-called Orientals
acting the part decreed for them by what so-called Westerners expect
... Westerners confirming their status in Oriental eyes as devils"; Edward
Said, Covering Islam: How the iVIedia and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest
of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 56. On the mutual interdependence
of "tradition" and "modernity," see also Mutman (as in n. 4), 184,
187-88; and, more generally, Nicholas B. Dirks, "History as a Sign of the
Modern," Public Culture 2 (1990): 25-32.
106. Associated Press, "Taliban: Statues Must Be Destroyed," Guardian, Feb.
26, 2001.
107. Qadratullah Jamal, the Taliban information minister, referred to the
destruction of artifacts in Bamiyan, Ghazni, Hadda, Herat, Jalalabad, and
Kabul; Associated Press, "Taliban Destroying All Statues," Mar. 1, 2001, circulated
electronically by the Afghanistan Research Group as "News from
Afghanistan" 01/015, Mar. 2, 2001. In addition, in Kabul, works in the
National Gallers were threatened, and some of the National Film Archives
destroyed; Kevin Sullivan, "Taliban Had Wrong Impression: Artists Tricked
Police to Save Work with Banned Images," Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2002, Al,
A8. The scale of the holdings of Buddhist art in Afghan museums is evident
from the fact that before the Soviet invasion, more than half the exhibition
space of the Kabul Museum had been dedicated to the display of Buddhist
antiquities; Ann Dupree, Louis Dupree, and A. A. Motamedi, A Guide to the
Kabul Museum (Kabutl: n.p., 1968). Ironically, it is reported that published
guides to the collections of the Kabul Mtuseum were used by the Taliban in the
selection of objects for destruiction; Maev Kennedy, "Bacchus Survives Orgy,"
Guardian, May 3, 2002, 11. For images that reveal the scale of destruction in
Bamiyan and the Kabul Museum, see Kristin M. Romey, "The Race to Save
Afghan Culture," Archaeology 55 (May-June 2002): 18-25.
108. Associated Press, "Taliban Praises Statue Destrtction," Guardian, Mar.
5, 2001.
109. Reuters, "New York's Metropolitan Makes Afghan Art Offer," Mar. 1,
2001, circulated electronically by the Afghanistan Research Group as "News
from Afghanistan" 01/015, Mar. 2, 2001.
110. Reutters, "Afghan Taliban Say Parts of Statues Blown Up," Mar. 5, 2001, at
wN^vw.dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010305/wl/afghan_statues_dc_l.html.
111. See n. 82 above. On the role of Mahmud in recent historiography, see
Peter Hardy, "Mahmud of Ghazna and the Historians," Journal of the Panjab
University Historical Society 14 (1962): 1-36. Other Taliban supporters reportedly
favored selling the Buddhist statues and using the money to alleviate an
ongoing drought and famine in Afghanistan: Rory McCarthy, "Fate of Ancient
Statues in Balance as Talks with Taliban Continue," Guardian, Mar. 5, 2001.
According to later reports, fragments of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas were
taken for sale in Peshawar; "Bamiyan Relics Up for Sale in Peshawar," Jang,
Apr. 2, 2001, at http://xwN'ss.rawa.org/statues2.html.
112. Gamboni, 13.
113. Tim Weiner, "Seizing the Prophet's Mantle: Muhammad Omar," Jsew
York Times, Dec. 7, 2001; Flood, chap. 5.
114. Davis, 186-221.
115. Associated Press, "India Asks Taliban for Statues," Mar. 2, 2001,
H-ISLAMART list. For a discussion of the trope of medieval barbarism in
relation to colonial and nationalist constructions of the past and present of
Islamic South Asia, see Flood, chap. 1. For a critical overview of scholarship on
the history of Islamic South Asia, see Patel (as in n. 49), chap. 6.
116. Reuters, "Indian Hindus Protest Afghan Statue Destruction," Mar. 5,
2001, at wws,.dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010305/wl/afghan_hindus_
dc_l.html. The threat should be seen against the backdrop of the destruction
of the Babri Mosque in 1992. A Mughal mosque near Asind in southern
Rajasthan was also demolished by a mob in July 2001, and a temple built on
its site; "Mosque Demolished," Hindu, July 30, 2001.
117. BBC, "Taliban 'Attack' Buddha Stattues," Mar. 2, 2001, circulated electronically
bv the Afghanistan Research Group as "News from Afghanistan"
01/015.
118. This rhetorical transposition of the religiously idolatrous past and the
cultutrally idolatrous present is again evident in Osama bin Laden's characterization
of the United States as "the Hubal of the age," Hubal being the
preeminent deity of pagan Mecca; "These Young Men Have Done a Great
Deed," 14ashington Post, Dec. 29, 2001, A5.Just as for European scholars of the
19th and 20th centuries the "Greco-Btuddhist" style of many of these icons
rendered them positively assimilable within an existing framework of Hellenizing
classicism (see n. 143 below), so Taliban rhetoric invokes the same
strategy, assimilating the Buddhas negatively to the pre-Islamic idols known
from Islamic historiography. This tendency can be discerned in medieval
descriptions of the Bamiyan Buddhas, which are sometimes referred to as Lat
and Manat, two further idols of pre-Islamic Arabia; Melikian-Chirvani, 60. The
Somnath linga was also assimilated with the latter; Davis, 95-96. Although the
rhetoric, like that of most iconoclasts, invokes a return to origins, to see this
as an attempt to dissolve historical time is too reductive a reading. In the same
way that an isnad, a chain of transmission, serves to invest a textual citation
with authority by linking it to its historical precursors and, ultimately, an
originary tutterance, so the invocation of historical precedent (prophetic and
profane) attempts not to deny the elapse of historical time between the earlier
act and its reenactment in the present but to invest the present (re)enactment
with a cumulative authority dependent on the existence of a chain of prece-
dent.
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BAMIYAN, ISLAMIC ICONOCLASM, AND THE MUSEUM 659
119. It is already present in Eusebius's distinction between idols in religious
contexts and those that adorned the civic architecture of Constantinople,
which were therefore "works of art"; John Curran, "Moving Statues in Late
Antique Rome: Problems of Perspective," Art History 17, no. 1 (1994): 47. As
Curran points out, Eusebius's distinction between the secular and the sacred
was an ideal one. The classical sculptures reused in Constantinople might be
valued for their aesthetic properties, but the belief that they were animated,
often as the result of demonic possession (see n. 60 above), was widespread
and persistent; Cyril Mango, "Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder,"
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 59; S. G. Bassett, "The Antiquities in the
Hippodrome of Constantinople," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 87-96;
Saradi-Mendelovici (as in n. 92), esp. 51; and Liz James, " 'Pray Not to Fall
into Temptation and Be on Your Guard': Pagan Statues in Christian Constantinople,"
Gesta 26, no. 1 (1991): 12-20. Charles Barber has argued that at
a slightly later date, the end of Byzantine iconoclasm was followed by a
reconceptualization of the religious image as art object; Barber, "From Transformation
to Desire: Art and Worship after Byzantine Iconoclasm," Art Bulletin
75 (1993): 7. See also Belting (as in n. 52), 164-83.
120. Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York: Universe Books, 1967),
173; Klaus Herding, "Denkmalsturz und Denkmalkult-Revolution und Ancien
regime," Neue Zircher Zeitung, Jan. 30-31, 1993, 63-64; Belting (as in n.
52), 170-71; Stephen Bann, "Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display,"
in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter
Wollen, Dia Center for the Arts Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 10
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 15-29; and Dominique Poulot, "Revolutionary
'Vandalism' and the Birth of the Museum: The Effects of a Representation of
Modern Cultural Terror," in Art in Museums, ed. Susan Pearce, New Research
in Museum Studies, 5 (London: Athlone, 1995), 192-214.
121. Robert S. Nelson, "The Discourse of Icons, Then and Now," Art History
12 (1989): 145. On the transformation of the religious image into an art
object in early modern Europe, see Belting (as in n. 52), 458-90. See also n.
123 below.
122. Benjamin (as in n. 1), 217-18, 237.
123. Gell, 97. Even without discussing commodity fetishism here, the Gell
passage bears comparison with Marxist critiques of ideology, "which begins
historically as an iconoclastic 'science of the mind' designed to overturn 'idols
of the mind,"' and "winds up being characterized as itself a new form of
idolatry"; WJ.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), 167. Like the fetishism involved in ideology itself, the
fetishism resulting from the aesthetic attitude that Gell refers to "is part of an
iconoclastic rhetoric that turns against its users"; ibid., 204.
124. Carol Duncan, "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship," in Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D.
Lavine (London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 91; Fisher, 19-20; and
Joan R. Branham, "Sacrality and Aura in the Museum: Mute Objects and Articulate
Space," Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 52-53 (1994-95): 33.
125. Abb6 Gregoire, quoted in Poulot (as in n. 120), 194.
126. Freedberg, 378-85; Gell, 62. An unnamed gallery spokesperson commented
at the time, without any apparent trace of irony: "I can't think why
anyone would want to do this to a painting.... It is not offensive. It just
depicts the Israelites dancing around the golden calf;" "Poussin Painting
Slashed in London," Washington Post, Apr. 4, 1978, A14.
127. John Dornberg, "Art Vandals: Why Do They Do It?" Artnews, Mar. 1987,
102-9; Freedberg, 407-27; Jeffrey Kastner, "Art Attack," Artnews, Oct. 1997,
154-56; and Gamboni, 190-211.
128. Smita J. Baxi, "Problemes de securit6 dans les mus6es Indiens," Museum
26, no. 1 (1974): 52; Branham (as in n. 124), 37; and Goetz Hagmuller,
"Darkness and Light," at www.asianart.com/articles/darkness/index.html.
129. Gell, 97.
130. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 182-
84; and Mark Crinson, "Nation-Building, Collecting and the Politics of Display,"Journal
of the History of Collections 13, no. 2 (2001): 231-50. The idea that
ancient monuments constitute a type of national patrimony, so that whoever
attacks them "is excluded defacto from the community of citizens," is already
present in Abbe Gr6goire's impassioned writing in favor of the museum;
Poulot (as in n. 120), 203-4.
131. Fisher, 8; Brian Macaskill, "Figuring Rupture: Iconology, Politics, and
the Image," in Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, ed. David B.
Downing and Susan Bazargan (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 249.
132. Duncan (as in n. 124), 102.
133. For a critique of the hegemonic potential of universalism, see S. Sayyid,
"Bad Faith: Anti-essentialism, Universalism and Islamism," in Hybridity and Its
Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, ed. Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 261: "universalism is the expansion of one
particularity so that it can consume other particularities. What distinguishes
the universalist particularity from any other particularity is empire, in other
words historical and contemporary forms of power relations."
134. Anderson (as in n. 130), 182-84; Thomas Richards, "Archive and
Utopia," Representations 37 (winter 1992): 118; Risatti (as in n. 99), 106; Gyan
Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 18-19; and Crinson (as in n. 130). See also
the collection of essays edited by George W. Stocking Jr., Objects and Others:
Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985). The point is underlined by the fact that the conversation that
provides the epigraph to this essay takes place with Kim astride the looted
cannon of a Muslim ruler, relocated by the British outside the newly founded
Lahore Museum.
135. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British
India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 76-105; and Duncan
in n. 124), 89.
136. Stanley K. Abe, "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and th
West," in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism,
Donald S. LopezJr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 89-90; a
I. K. Sharma, "Archaeological Site Museums in India: The Backbone o
Cultural Education," Museum International 50, no. 2 (1998): 45.
137. Fisher, 10; Stephen Greenblatt, "Resonance and Wonder," in Karp a
Lavine (as in n. 124), 44; Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders, "What Does
Iconoclasm Create? What Does Preservation Destroy? Some Observations
from Case Studies of China andJapan," abstract submitted to the conference
"Iconoclasm-Contested Objects and Contested Terms," Henry Moore Institute,
Leeds, July 13-14, 2001.
138. Gamboni, 18.
139. Pierre Bourdieu, quoted in Dornberg (as in n. 127), 105.
140. Nancy Hatch Dupree, "Import of the Cultural Destruction in Afghanistan,"
Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage (SPACH)
Newsletter 7 (July 2001): 2.
141. Sayyid (as in n. 133), 266, sees the conflict between Islamists and their
enemies not as a contest between liberalism and fundamentalism but between
different types of hegemonic universalisms: "One may have one's own prejudices
for preferring one to the other, but both are attempts to remake the
world. Neither is sanctioned by any innate logic, both are themselves grand
political projects: projects that aim to transform our cultures, histories, and
societies." See also Mutman (as in n. 4), 189.
142. Frodon (as in n. 101).
143. Kipling (as in n. 1), 54; and Abe (as in n. 136), 77-84. The perceived
European affinities of the Buddhas came to the fore in various ways during
and after their destruction, with some observers mourning the loss of "the link
between Western and Asian culture"; "Afghan Buddhas May Be Rebuilt," at
www.cnn.com/2001 /WORLD/europe/11/ 19/rec.swiss.buddhas/index.html.
144. On classicism and power, see Henri Zerner, "Classicism as Power," Art
Journal 47, no. 1 (1988): 36: "classicism means no more than an assertion of
authority, of power under whatever form." This was no less true in colonial
South Asia, where classical imagery often served as a vehicle to assert political
dominion; Barbara Groseclose, "Imag(in)ing Indians," Art History 13, no. 4
(1990): 494.
145. W. L. Rathje, "Why the Taliban Are Destroying Buddhas," USA Today,
Mar. 22, 2001, at www.usatoday.com/news/science/archaeology/2001-3-22afghan-buddhas.html;
and Barbara Crossette, "Taliban Explains Buddha
Demolition," New York Times, Mar. 19, 2001.
146. Barry Bearak, "Where Buddhas Fell, Lives Lie in Ruins, Too," New York
Times, Dec. 9, 2001, Al, B10; and "Afghanistan: Taliban Massacres Detailed,"
Human Rights Watch press release, New York, Feb. 19, 2001, at www.hrw.org/
press/2001/02/afghan0219.html. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas
will have future economic implications for the local Hazara community,
which formerly derived some of its income from the tourism associated with
the statues.
147. Mary Richardson, quoted in Gamboni, 94-95.
148. Freedberg, 409. Jean Baudrillard takes the implications of this commodity
fetishism to its logical extreme, comparing the art in a museum to a
gold reserve in a bank: "just as a gold bank is necessary in order that the
circulation of capital and private speculation be organized, so the fixed
reserve of the museum is necessary for the functioning of the sign exchange
of paintings"; quoted in Mitchell (as in n. 123), 203.
149. Mitchell (as in n. 123), 163; and Wyatt MacGaffey, "African Objects
and the Idea of Fetish," RES 25 (spring 1994): 123; and Peter Gathercole,
"The Fetishism of Artefacts," in Museum Studies in Material Culture, ed. Susan
M. Pierce (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), 73-81. See also the
interesting and provocative comments of James Clifford, "Objects and
Selves-an Afterword," in Stocking (as in n. 134), 244.
150. In terms of the cultural value invested in them as a result of their
classical affinities, the "Greco-Buddhist" Buddhas and bodhisattvas that were
the primary target of Taliban iconoclasts display several features traditionally
ascribed to the fetish, among them a heterogeneous or hybrid nature and "a
dependence for meaning and value on a particular order of social relations,
which it in turn reinforces"; Pietz (as in n. 60), 23. See nn. 143-44 above.
151. Gamboni, 97.
152. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things," in The Social Life of
Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 67.
153. See Freedberg, 418.
154. Bearak (as in n. 146), B10: "Hundreds of years from now this may be
the single footnote the Taliban have carried into the annals of time." See also
Freedberg, 409, on the destruction of art as a way of acquiring fame in
perpetuity.
155. Tighut, a Qur'anic term, can refer to either idols or idol shrines;
Hawting, 55. Since the term recurs in the edict, both are presumably intended
here.
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