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| Isis |
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| Baalshemin being blown up |
Some time
within the last month, members of ISIS (or ISIL), the big group that intends to
establish a new Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, systematically mined and blew up
the ancient Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra. Last weekend they also blew up the
Temple of Bel at the same location. Palmyra had been an important trading city
in the ancient world, and was designated as a World Heritage Site by
UNESCO. ISIS also demolished two Muslim
shrines, one Shia, the other Sufi. To
top things off, they beheaded the retired local chief archeologist and
historian, Khalid al-Asaad, who as a scholarly autodidact, had devoted his life
to the study of the venerable city.
According to the New York Times report, ISIS branded Asaad as “an apostate…”
and the “director of idolatry” and accused him of “presenting papers at infidel
conferences.” In other sites, such as
Ninevah and Nimrud in Iraq, ISIS also blew up ancient buildings and smashed
ancient images in local museums after looting them to sell off valuable pieces.
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| The Late Khalil al Asaad |
To make
their caliphate work, it is apparently vital to trash everything that doesn’t
fit with ISIS’s narrow parameters.
Idolatry is certainly against Islamic law—as it is to Jewish Orthodoxy. The original intent here was to make the
public statement that images, big or small, are not to be worshipped as gods,
as there is only one immaterial One, who lives somewhere in the heavens. But the gods –and any images once worshipped at
the Bel and Baalshamin temples are long gone, and no one seems to have the
least intention of reviving them. In the
Islamic, Christian and Jewish religions, the notion of a sole God has been
irreparably established for a very long time.
Why destroy
dead idols, as ISIS has done in museums—at least those they couldn’t cynically
sell to raise money for weapons? The
idea of destroying Muslim shrines dedicated to groups that fall outside ISIS’s
canon, as well as the slaughtering of groups considered “the other,” like
Yezidis, or Christians, has a longer history and way beyond and before Islam.
As a matter of fact, building your
place of worship right on top of the one of your defeated foe has a very long
tradition: for example, the site of the Cathedral of Seville in Spain was
originally occupied by a Roman Temple (or maybe some other cult even earlier),
then became a Visigothic cathedral, then the city’s major Mosque, and since the
13th century, the world’s second-biggest Catholic church.
But is ISIS
planning to build big mosques on the sites of the Palmyra temples? And why kill an archeologist-art historian,
and a Muslim one at that? If all of us
art historians were condemned for studying, documenting and preserving old
sites, is it carte blanche to remove not only the sites, but those who wrote
about them? Does this make me a target for blasphemy and assassination for what
I’m writing here?
ISIS is
probably aware that its acronym (in the United States at least) is synonymous
with one of the most powerful of ancient Egyptian goddesses. (Maybe that’s why
they prefer “ISIL” or “Islamic State.”)
It’s interesting to compare the
destructive activities of ISIS with another time of looting of targeted sites:
the Spanish Civil War. When, on July 18th, 1936, General Francisco Franco
and his allies staged a coup d’état, overthrowing the existing Republican
government, it set off riots all over the country. The Republic had been an uneasy coalition of
worker’s groups, anarchists, Communists, Stalinist, Marxist or Trotskyite,
liberals, and strong regional factions in a very diverse country. It not only marked the beginning of a
three-year civil war, but in its initial stages, it was a free-for all of all
those republican groups on the left versus Monarchists, Carlists, rich
landowners, mine owners and plutocrats on the right, as well as the Catholic
church in general, which was hated for its enduring conservatism
Who got attacked depended of where
you were. Churches and convents were set
on fire and looted of their considerable treasures everywhere. In the Andalusian south, Landowners who owned
most of the arable land and often treated agricultural workers like serfs were
the targets. In the northwest in
Asturias, it was mine-owners, while in the Basque provinces and Catalonia, it
was mixed in with separatism. In
Catalonia, it was rich industrialists who owned factories where disgruntled
workers were organizing. In some places
in the same region, socialists, Communists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and other
leftist groups fought each other, so that in Barcelona, far from the actual
battlefront during the first years of the war, there was a civil war within a
civil war.
All of this is way too complicated
to analyze here, and your writer is just an Art Historian, but I think I can
say that at that moment, a decade before the activities of the “Monuments Men,”
art enthusiasts organized themselves and acted like a federation of workers
with a purpose. In Barcelona, both the
systematic rescue of objects from damaged sites and items brought in by
spontaneous individual and small groups was carried out, consolidated and
catalogued by museum, academic and library personnel working for the Catalan
republican government. The rescuers
fanned out to the towns and villages, trying to convince local revolutionaries
to convert churches to garages or meeting halls, rather than just destroying
them.
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| Apel.les Fenosa |
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| The Retablo of Lanaja as it was |
“It’s thankless work, and the People don’t understand it. One day they will kill me, confusing me with a robber, as a profiteer of pillage. Ingrates because they are guilty of not understanding. Ingrates because they are guilty of bad faith and ingrates by those that know how much all of this is worth, without having done anything to save it, and when they see it saved, they accuse you of being a thief and vampire of the population.”
The locals believed that they were
being patronized by city folks who didn’t
understand the dire living situation imposed by a poorer economy in the
line of battle. In the small town of
Lanaja was a church that the locals had attacked. When Fenosa arrived there, they were cutting
up pews for firewoods. They were also
cutting up centuries-old wooden altarpieces for the same purpose:
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| Panel from Lanaja Retablo just after rescue |
“I found a formidable
retablo, thirty feet high, which they
had dismantled piled up in the committee courtyard. They wanted to use it for
heating fires in the winter…”
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| Same panel, restored and rehabilitated |
They offered to trade the
dismantled altarpiece for a truck, which Fenosa and his companions didn’t have,
and so the would-be rescuers had to leave most of it behind (they managed to
rescue three painted panels, in bad shape, which they sent on to Barcelona,
restored after the war, and eventually sent back to a museum in Aragon).
But when do aesthetics trump human
desperation? Fighting with a Marxist
militia company in the same region, the British writer George Orwell vividly
described local conditions for soldier and civilian alike:
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| George Orwell |
“[Yet] I believe that even in peacetime
you could not travel in that part of Spain without being struck by the peculiar
squalid misery of the Aragonese villages. They are built like fortresses, a
mass of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the church, and even
in spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the houses have no gardens, only
back-yards where ragged fowls skate over the beds of mule-dung”
Firewood was the one thing that really
mattered…..When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on fatigue-duty we
were in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel. All my memories of
that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost perpendicular
slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots to pieces, pouncing
eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a couple of hours
could collect enough fuel to keep the dug-out fire alight for about an hour.”
All of that ready
wood in those gigantic altarpieces, not in very good condition at that time at
any rate, certainly was a temptation when freezing to death was the alternative.
When does what we
call “Art” cease to be important for its own sake, when are its component
materials are worth more than the finished project (except in the eyes of a
cultured minority)? In the case of
Palmyra and a good deal of the educated world in this time of mass-media and
instant communication of events, such destruction, not only carried out, but
publicized by its perpetrators, seems inexcusable and tragic, particularly when
they are at a remote site, and revered as past history, representing as they do
now defunct religions or empires. The
looting and selling of portable objects is unpalatable but more understandable. Since the ancient looting of the ancient
pyramids in Egypt, moveable objects are easily carried off and fenced, whether
as in the case of ISIS its revenue will be used to buy arms, or for petty
criminals, a quick buck.
In the case of Spain
in 1936, the looting and destruction was a more or less spontaneous
manifestation of the uprising. In the
case of ISIS, destruction is intentional, planned, and in their eyes a
manifestation of their narrow, very black-and-white ideology, which spans both
space and time. If they triumph in their
Caliphate, all culture will be a very narrow, mostly black-and-white corridor
of faith---their's.
About the killing of Khalid al Asaad:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/18/isis-beheads-archaeologist-syria
Stanley G.
Payne, Spain’s First Democracy. The Second republic 1931-1936, Seattle, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
(p. 30)
Apel.les Fenosa is quoted: (in Catalan)
“Catalunya ha salvat a Aragó un trésor artistic,” Mirador. Setmanari de Literatura, Art i
Politica, Any VIII Núm 397, Barcelona, dijous, 3 desembre 1936 (segona
epoca), pp.8-7.
George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War can be found online at:
Homage to Catalonia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111.txt
