The ghost of Bamyan
A number of madrasa students, some of them still smelling mother's milk in their breath, gathered in front of Zia International Airport last Wednesday, and demanded the removal of five baul sculptures which were being erected on a roundabout. In a striking coincidence, the Civil Aviation Authority removed the sculptures on the same day.
The special assistant to the caretaker government in charge of that ministry, a sewing-machine magnet, stitched together an explanation. He said the sculptures were removed because the sculptor had failed to conform to the specs. Most of us are convinced, he couldn't be further from the truth.
That, however, isn't the end of the story. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has decided to throw away the baby with the bath water. Now the sculptures will be replaced by a fountain, a ludicrous reaction to the sculptor's goof-up, if that's what really happened. In that case, why not showcause the sculptor? Why not ask him to make amends at his own expense to conform to the agreed standards? Why drop a project like a hot potato when so much time, energy and money went into it?
The answer is that the CAA has burned its face hiding behind a scalding skillet. It must have got nervous under threat. It must have been ordered by an even more nervous higher authority to come up with a fix. The fix, as it was quickly fixed, proved to be inept.
Beyond this slapstick comedy performed by the CAA, lurks something of real concern. The incident has the smack of what happened in Bamyan of Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban destroyed two Buddha statues dating back to the sixth century. Their leader, Mollah Omar, set out to rectify in a few hours the transgressions proudly suffered by Afghans for over fourteen hundred years.
In 2007, a similar thing was repeated in Swat of Pakistan. The Buddha statues were blown off with dynamite under the instruction of a religious leader named Mullah Fazlullah.
I suppose a similar act of rectification was underway when the students came to demolish those statues. Their leader, a Mufti, is a man of vision. He saved us from hellfire and damnation by ensuring that we didn't commit the sin of even looking at the finished work.
But why did their wrath target those stones? Islam prohibits idolatry in the sense of worshipping human or animal forms in statues or paintings. Ibn Abbas gives us the basis of this prohibition according to the Holy Koran. In Noah's nation, a number of statues were built and placed in key locations to honour some righteous men after they died.
As time went by and nobody remembered the purpose of those statues, Satan started encouraging people to worship the statues, because that was what their ancestors did to herald rains. Over a period of time, the statues transformed into idols, objects of worship that misguided people.
That didn't happen though in Afghanistan. Its people didn't worship those Buddha statues so far as we know, except occasionally visiting them for a picnic on holidays, marveling at the craftsmanship of their ancestors, awed by the dimensions larger than life, posing for photographs.
It hasn't happened in Egypt either as the country gradually emerged from a polytheistic background to a monotheistic religion, its fields, streets, public squares and shops strewn with statues of Ramses, Anubis, Nefertiti, Isis, Sphinx, Tutankhamen and Akenaten. These are testaments to a proud civilisation, telling us more eloquently than thousand history books that the faith of mankind succumbed to the gravitational pull of a unitary God.
In Islam, idolatry is shirk, which is the sin of associating things or beings with Allah. It also includes worship of wealth and other material objects. Many Islamic theologians extend the sense of worship to include praying to some other being to intercede with Allah on one's behalf. Any act of piety whose inward goal is pride, caprice or desire for public admiration also comes under the concept of shirk.
There is something called minor shirk, which is when people show off their fortunes. Even when a man gets up to pray and strives to beautify his prayer because people are looking at him, he commits what is known as secret shirk.
It means there are more ways than one to commit idolatry or shirk, and in most categories idol worship is more pronounced in the flesh of living bodies than the stones of deadweight statues unless those statues are erected with the explicit intention of worship. The baul sculptures, in so much as they could have breathed life into our cultural heritage, were by no means going to be worshipped by any sensible person. They couldn't be more damning to our faith in God than it already has been in our greed and lust.
Why should we go after the statues only, when we have propped up countless icons of sacrilege in our hearts? Why should fledgling believers be incited to destroy inanimate objects and misplace their anger? Why not send them after those who put carbide in fruits, formalin in fish and melamine in milk? Why not send them after those who worship their children and wealth, those who are more hardened in their souls than the flinty stones shaping those statues? Why not send them after corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, who have no consideration for others? Why don't they go after those musclemen who terrorise people in their hearts?
Because the statues are soft targets, which don't retaliate if attacked. They don't fire back if fired at, strike back if struck. They don't protest, they don't agitate, and they only crumble if hammered. Speechless, sightless and devoid of life, these are the punching bags, which bear the brunt of our irreconcilable madness.
The ghost of Bamyan whispered last week. Never mind if you like to cast stones at the sinner, but it manifests sin if you gather those stones and build the image of a righteous soul. Huh!
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