Ruined Buddha's shown off by Taliban 

How would we react if the Egyptian government were suddenly to announce that they were going to blow up the pyramids, bulldoze the temple of Luxor, burn the mummies and melt down the golden artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo?... Exactly! Yet transpose that scenario to Afghanistan and that is exactly what the Taliban are doing today - systematically obliterating their country's pre-Islamic heritage.

Civilized Muslim states throughout history have respected the pre-Islamic heritage of their own countries and those they conquered. Muslim rulers allowed freedom of religion to non-Muslims, even if their beliefs and practices were anathema to Islam. When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (raa) conquered Jerusalem, he refused the opportunity to offer salat within the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for fear that some ignorant Muslims after him might claim the church and convert it into a mosque because he had once prayed there. He left the church with its icons and works of Christian religious art intact. Umar also conquered Persia, yet a Zoroastrian community still exists to this day in Iran.  When the Ottomans conquered Greece, they did not demolish the pagan temples of antiquity. And even when they captured Constantinople (Istanbul) and converted the cathedral of Saint Sophia into a mosque, they did not vandalize the Christian art on its walls, but merely covered it up so that it is still preserved today. Egypt's sphinx may be missing its nose, but it was not any of the country's Muslim rulers over the past fourteen centuries who were responsible for blasting it off but invading French troops in 1798.

Afghanistan has been a Muslim country for only a slightly shorter period than Egypt. The Taliban claim that the age-old Buddhist monuments are "an insult to Islam".  Yet until now no regime in the country's well over a thousand years of Muslim rule has sought to damage or destroy Afghanistan's priceless, pre-Islamic cultural heritage.  Does anyone seriously think that the Muslims of Afghanistan today are suddenly going to start worshipping Buddha statues? Not even Buddhists themselves do that. The statues are not idols to be worshipped, as the ignorant Taliban claim.  And what of Islamic tolerance for the religious freedom of Afghanistan's small remaining Buddhist community?

The Islamic Organization for Education, Sciences and Culture based in Morocco has stated that Afghanistan's Buddhist statues and artifacts represent "a true universal inheritance" that does no harm to Islam.  These sentiments are echoed by the Foreign Ministry of Qatar, current chairman of the Organization of the Islamic Conference which is on record as stating that the Bamiyan statues "belong to the whole of mankind and they should be preserved".

Other voices across the Muslim world have also condemned the Taliban's actions.

"The Taliban should focus on fighting poverty, diseases, unemployment and bloodshed on its soil and not on destroying relics, which are a living lesson of history," said Sheikh Youssif al-Qaradawi, a Muslim scholar based in Qatar.  "They should consider going back on their decision."

Grand Mufti Nasr Mohamed Farid Wassel of Al-Azhar, Cairo, the world's oldest university and the foremost seat of scholarship in Islam, has been quoted as saying: "The Taliban should have consulted with scholars before taking such a decision.  Such statues are only a recording of history…their presence does not in the least impinge on the Islamic faith."  He also pointed out that not a single Muslim scholar had ever claimed that the presence of thousands of Pharaonic and Roman statues and ancient relics in Egypt violate the principles of Islam.

Not only is Muslim Egypt preserving its ancient heritage, it is actually restoring the art and icons of the country's Christian past.  According to a recent story in the Middle East Times, Cairo, St. Anthony's Monastery, Egypt's oldest, which is named after the man who founded Christianity's monastic tradition, re-opened on March 1 after extensive renovation work.

"The restoration work on the frescos and icons is almost finished," said Gaballah Ali Gaballah, the head of Egypt's supreme council for antiquities referring to the site situated in the Al Galala mountains along the Red Sea, some 260 km (161 miles) southeast of Cairo. Gaballah added that the icons and frescos were some of the oldest examples of ancient Coptic Christian art with some pieces dating back to the 6th or 7th centuries. The restoration, which has lasted three years, covered the monastery's four churches and its fortifications.

What the Taliban are now doing in Afghanistan is a betrayal of centuries of Islamic civilization and tolerance. It is a crime against the history of their country, a crime against world culture and a crime against Islam itself. The Taliban are defying the word of God that there should be no compulsion in matters of religion. (Quran 2:256). They are potentially endangering the wholly innocent Muslim minority communities in Buddhist countries such as Thailand and war-torn Sri Lanka. Perhaps most abominable of all, instead of creating a favorable impression to attract non-believers to Islam, they are reinforcing all the old stereotypes and caricatures and attracting immense horror and revulsion to the image of Islam among non-Muslims (CNN top story, Friday, March 2, 2001), thus undermining and reversing the solid Dawah work of others.  As a statement from the Iranian Foreign Ministry puts its: "The Taliban's destruction of the statues has cast doubts on the comprehensive views offered by Islamic ideology in the world."  The eyes of the world are being drawn in disgust and revulsion to the antics of the Taliban in Afghanistan at this special time when they should be drawn in admiration to the hajj in Makkah.

The Taliban have already brought so much undeserved negative publicity to Islam through their well-documented perversion of the teachings of Islam about women. They are outcasts not just in the so-called "international community" but within Islam. Of the dozens of Arab and Muslim countries in the world, only three - the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Of these, only Pakistan, whose military intelligence service is widely credited (or blamed) for creating the Taliban in the mid 1990's, maintains an embassy in Kabul. And even Pakistan, which carefully preserves its own Buddhist heritage, has called on the Taliban to halt their cultural vandalism.

"We have conveyed to them the international concern, in addition to bilateral concern, and we have asked them to show sensitivity to international sentiment in this matter," said Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan. "In our appeal we have said that we hope that the Afghan government will show the spirit of tolerance joined upon by Islam."

Also in Pakistan, Dawn, the country's most widely read English-language publication, commented:

"Pakistan has requested the Taliban government to reconsider its decision to destroy all historic statues under its control....We sincerely hope that the Taliban will spare the treasures... Islam is a religion of harmony and peaceful co-existence among various communities.  Buddha was an apostle of peace and non-violence.  Certainly he deserves better treatment than what he has hitherto received at the hands of the blind zealots in Afghanistan."

The 22-member Arab League has also condemned the Taliban move as a "savage act". The group of Arab UNESCO Member States has issued a communiqué calling for "an international mobilization with concrete actions, to end this unprecedented undertaking which affects invaluable universal heritage treasures."  And  the Islamic Republic of Iran, long portrayed in the Western media as a "fundamentalist bogeyman", has offered to purchase the Buddhist statues and relics and remove them from Afghanistan.  But the Taliban have rejected all appeals and offers made to them from within the Muslim world.

This is not an issue of the rest of the world versus Islam represented by the Taliban. The Taliban most definitely do not represent Islam, or at least not any sort of Islam that many Muslims would care to be associated with. We Muslims have been appointed by Allah (swt) as a "middle nation" Quran 2:143, not a bunch of intolerant, extremist wreckers.  We must tackle this issue ourselves and put our own house in order. In this context, the words of the late Sheikh Muhammad Al-Ghazaly of Al-Azhar seem particularly fitting:

Some Muslim callers preach a false and ugly version of Islam and then complain because people do not accept it. I think that those ignorant preachers should be imprisoned or lashed because they divert people from the way of Allah and the truth that Muhammad, the final Messenger, declared.

In terms of their mindset, the Taliban are reminiscent of a fanatical sect from early Islamic history, the Kharijites, who counted among their number the murderer of Caliph Ali (raa). The Sabahah were so appalled by the judgmental fundamentalism of this group and the damage they were doing to the spread of Islam that over the ensuing decades, they decided that for the greater good of Islam there was only one solution - ruthless suppression.

The Taliban have spent the last five years dragging the good name of Islam ever deeper into disrepute.  For the greater good of Islam today, now the mainstream Muslims of our era must also take the decisive, "concrete actions" called for by the Arab league against the "blind zealots" and  "ignorant preachers" of the Taliban and their "false and ugly version" of Islam.

Allahu a`lam. God knows best.