| Whose heritage?
But what is this "heritage" that the international community was trying to defend in Afghanistan? As art historians told reporter after reporter, the Bamiyan statues were not just the tallest Buddhas in the world--they also represented an important period in the history of Buddhist development, a time when diverse cultures mingled along Asia's fabled Silk Road. One commentator described Afghan society of the day as "melting pot," recalling the United States' own myth of origin. In the eyes of these experts, Buddhist Afghanistan, dead for centuries, was somehow more authentic than contemporary Islamic Afghanistan. The truth is, Bamiyan was only "discovered" (in the Christopher Columbus sense of the word) in 1922. In that year Afghanistan's King Amanullah requested that France conduct an archaeological survey of his lands. Thus began the French Archaeological Mission in Afghanistan (DAFA), a research arrangement that would split findings between the newly formed Kabul Museum and the Musie Guimet in Paris. Histories of Central Asian archaeology praise DAFA for bringing to light what previously "lay neglected, misunderstood, reviled, or buried." Bamiyan is considered one of the jewels of these rediscovered sites. Before the mission, as the story goes, locals had the audacity to regard the statues as a pagan king and queen, and the site was much abused. It was DAFA that "saved" the statues from the natives and established them as crucial fixtures of Afghanistan's "heritage." But in spite of the fact that foreigners were the ones who dubbed the Buddha statues "valuable," world leaders continued to insist that the artwork had some ancient place in the Afghan people's hearts. A UNESCO press release sent out the same day that the Taliban issued its decree urged the regime to "stop the destruction of the cultural heritage of the peoples of Afghanistan, which forms their identity" and "ensure that this heritage is reserved for present and future generations." The New York Times was even harsher in an editorial: "Some day Afghanistan will be rid of the Taliban. But it will be permanently impoverished by the movement's legacy of fanaticism and destruction." National identity, it seemed, was genetically bound to this curious thing, heritage. And the protection of heritage was important not for its own sake, but for the sake of a future nation--a more "civilized" Afghanistan. There was reason to question, too, the motives of those countries that rushed to denounce the Taliban. As the crisis dragged on, news reports reminded us that Afghanistan was fast on the track of becoming a tourist hot spot until the Soviet Union (no friend of "heritage") invaded the country in 1979. Egypt's head Muslim cleric, the Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel, reminded readers of London's Arabic daily Al Hayat that religious monuments--whether the tombs of Egypt's ancient pharaohs, or the statues of Afghanistan's Buddhist past--were a boon to tourism and thus the local economy. "Heritage" was not just a matter of preserving culture for future generations; it was also a cash cow that allowed otherwise isolated countries to participate in the global economy, to the benefit (in this increasingly interconnected world) of all. And now the Taliban rulers were about to wreck their country's tourism industry for good--a proposition that had to revolt any well-meaning capitalist. To the Taliban, however, such policies make sense. Like the protesters who decry globalization, the Taliban are resisting a vision of the future propagated by the world's elites--a future dominated by secular culture and crass materialism. At the tail end of the Afghan art crisis an illustrative piece ran in the Far Eastern Economic Review. The article, entitled "Buddha Reborn," told of the "Sleeping Buddha" statue newly unveiled at Tajikistan's Museum of National Antiquities. With the Buddhas of Bamiyan destroyed, the "Sleeping Buddha" was hailed as the "largest ancient Buddha in Central Asia." After the Taliban's string of barbaric actions, we were finally provided an example of a country "doing it right." The article was not just about the restoration and display of a great artifact--it was about how Tajikistan, by cultivating its history, was coming out from under the shadow of the Soviet Union and becoming a modern nation. The struggle over the Buddhas of Bamiyan wasn't simply about the past; it was a confrontation involving two competing visions of the future. Many countries, like Tajikistan, yearn for progress in the Western sense and groom themselves accordingly. Others resist, refusing to buy wholesale from the global company store.
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Whose heritage? |