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Fitzgerald: History and Jahiliyya

Jan 16, 2008 3:05 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Iran is planning on submerging the tomb of King Cyrus (Coresh), the Persian King known for authorizing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Holy Temple”¦.

The Iranian ayatollahs are planning on destroying the tomb as part of a general campaign to sever the Persian people from their non-Islamic heritage; Cyrus was thought to be a Zoroastrian and was one of the first rulers to enforce a policy of religious tolerance on his huge kingdom. Journalist Ran Porat quoted a young Iranian who said that the measures being taken by the Islamic Republic’s regime include the destruction of archaeological sites significant to this heritage. — from this article

This is merely Islam as Islam has always been: at best indifferent to, at worst actively hostile to, all that is pre-Islamic or non-Islamic in the history or traditions or civilizations of lands now dominated by Islam and ruled by Muslims. And this indifference, or this hostility, is shown in the deliberate destruction of monuments and religious sites.

It is all one vast Jahiliyya, or Time of Ignorance. Over 1350 years, despite the so-called status as “Protected peoples,” the Christians and Jews endured, in the Middle East and North Africa, the destruction of churches (where was Tertullian from? And where St. Augustine?) and synagogues. In India, tens of thousands of Hindu temples and temple complexes were the main victims of Islamic destruction, though Jain temples, and Buddhist temples and stupas, were also destroyed. In the East Indies, which was once Hindu and Buddhist, how many of those Hindu and Buddhist structures have survived?
In Afghanistan, the Greco-Bactrian civilization was reduced to rubble. Statutes of Buddhas, and stupas, and libraries of ancient Buddhist texts, were destroyed everywhere in Central Asia.

But that was then, you say. That was at a time when this was standard behavior by primitive peoples. But was that really true? Did the Hindus destroy Buddhist texts? Did the Buddhists destroy the monuments of others? Did the Jews ever destroy the monuments of others?

And what about now? What do we see now? In Afghanistan, the Bamiyan Buddhas — so large and seemingly so impervious to attack — were finally destroyed, not because of a new “extremist” doctrine, but because Saudi and Pakistani technical help was available to the Taliban so that those statues might be blown up. In Kuala Lumpur, venerable Hindu temples are brought down by government decree. In Israel, the “Palestinians’ reduced to rubble Jacob’s Tomb and have attacked other sites. They have destroyed as much as they can, or thrown out, into vast rubbish heaps, tons of material found to include ancient Jewish artifacts from the time of the Temple. They have filled with their own rubble the place known as Solomon’s Stables, and in their attempt to efface any Jewish connection. They have been working like old moles, burrowing into the Temple Mount and, in their hysterical and a-historical hate, they have endangered the very foundations of the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque of Omar — and are apparently prepared to blame “the Jews” should anything happen.

Sita Ram Goel filled up two full volumes merely listing, laconically, the Hindu temples and temple complexes that were destroyed by Muslim conquerors and invaders. One could do the same for Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian sites.

And one could even do the same, in a sense, to Muslim historical sites that have been destroyed by adherents of the “pure” Islam of the Wahhabis. The Saudi architect Algosaibi has deplored the way that the Al-Saud, buying off the Wahhabi clerics (in order to keep stealing much of the national wealth), have — presumably in their role as “Guardians of the Two Noble Places” (Mecca and Medina) — reduced to rubble what was said to be the house of Muhammad in Medina. They have in Mecca torn down almost every old building, and just a few years ago managed to finish the job by destroying an old Ottoman fort. In the place of these things they have put up an arab-muslim version of high-rises, making Mecca more akin to Dubai — as Dubai, of course, is itself merely, in its thrust and lack of architectural charm, merely a more expensive Las Vegas.

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