Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

(Heinrich Heine)

I have been pondering recently on the burning of the library in Timbuktu. I, along with many more, am mindful of the Nazis doing the same in Germany in the 1930's. Words are powerful, perhaps even more powerful than an autocratic, despotic regime such as the NSDAP. The words from the pamphlets of the White Rose Movement still have a resonance today, long after the fall of Hitler and National Socialism. Ideas were deemed to be dangerous if they conflicted with ideological principals, but to me this is a sign of the weakness of the ideology as much as the power of the opposing argument. 

By burning the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu, along with the bombings of the Bimyan Buddhas, there is almost a fatalistic acceptance that words and images are more powerful symbols than God is a reality. Not that it is seen by the perpetrators as such. Yes, words, ideas and even images can be immensely powerful. We need only to look at the effects wrought by the words and ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, let alone the Holy Prophets, Christ and the Prophet Mohammed. 

We can all look to the atrocities wrought by our own Faith and in the name of others. For those without faith in an Almighty, there are our national affiliations to State or Country. Has there ever been a State or a Nation without blood on its hands? Yet somehow the burning of books seems a taboo too far. A symbol of a nihilistic philosophy beyond our comprehension, and an act of immense brutality akin to the shooting in the head of a little girl for daring to promote female education. As Malala lives and speaks to the world, the words, ideas, culture and beauty of literature will continue to flourish in spite of  the fanatics. 

Here is an article that I read in the Independent yesterday which I found quite thought provoking and I thought that I would share it with you as I continue to ponder on the burning of the library in Timbuktu:

From the Papal monasteries to Timbuktu, absolutism lives on

By Robert Fisk

For the Salafists, a Muslim shrine is a rival to God as surely as Henry VIII saw the monasteries as a Papal rival

“Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust…” – exactly, I imagine, what the Islamic zealots were thinking as they trashed ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu last week.

Or indeed what the Taliban’s munitions men had in mind when they blasted the Buddhas of Bamian to bits in 2001. Only the quotation comes not from the Koran or the Hadith of the Prophet Mohamed, but from the Holy Bible, Deuteronomy 9:21. I’m afraid to say that in the religions of Abraham, idolatry is a statue-smasher, a stained glass window- breaker, a shrine-destroyer, a book-burner.

True, the Saudis have already bulldozed graves of the early Islamic era. But didn’t Oliver Cromwell’s troops pull out the bones of the knights of Kilkenny and hurl them into mass graves, all the while hacking off their carved stone heads from their tombs? All golden calves must be immolated. And if cosmopolitan art and culture are symbolic of a hated multi-ethnic world, then surely this explains why I discovered on the floor of the burned-out Sarajevo library only the card-index files of books in the failed pre-war European ‘language’ of Esperanto.

Odd how Mohammed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who became the 18th Century philosophical high priest of the future Saudi kingdom and the Sunni world’s principle enemy of graven images, was so unpopular. The Iraqis of Basra allegedly chucked him out of town - even his own brother condemned him - but the beliefs he bequeathed to the house of Saud have survived. Fight corruption but never kill the king, which means that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his family are safe, at least until he dies of old age. Quite a sword to live under.

Yet Wahhabism remains the Salafist creed, a Sahara Puritanism that Cromwell’s army could only dream of. Read the first chapter of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and you’ll find the most compelling explanation of this harsh, self-destructive absolutism. Infinitely sad, totally uncompromising, a belief sucked from the colourless sands and the sword-like heat of the desert. God cannot tolerate any partner, any rival, and thus the Arabic ‘shrk’ – the act of ‘sharing’ – has come to represent iconoclasm which, at its most extreme, means that no bust, no written page, no decorated grave may distract us from the worship/fear/abstraction and anger of God. Teach this to the illiterate, the poor, the lost souls of war - and they will tear down the gates of the Sufi saints, and view the libraries of Timbuktu as idolatrous as the torn mobile phone posters and scratched safe-sex advertisements which my colleague Daniel Howden witnessed in the city last week.

The Islamists of northern Mali, many of whom are indeed Malians - with an added cocktail of al-Qa’ida desperadoes to quicken the fury of the West - smash their own cultural history with the same abandon as the Islamists of Nigeria burn churches. For the Salafists, a Muslim shrine signifies a rival to God, as surely as Henry VIII saw the monasteries as a Papal rival of his own supreme leadership of the church in England. The Taliban regarded the representation of any human form as corrupt; so, too, the English Puritans regarded the wondrous stained-glass windows of the Middle Ages.

The Saudis have shown contempt for the Shia as well as Sunni shrines of the Kingdom. They even helped destroy a few in Bahrain after the Shias on the island staged their forlorn 2011 revolt. We shall not contemplate the pulverised Shia basilicas of Iraq. Nor can the one God who rules over both Christians and Muslims protect their heavenly creations or their places of worship. Croatian Catholics shelled the Ottoman – and thus Muslim – bridge of Mostar into the Neretva river. And that same Balkan slaughterhouse consumed the 18 century mosques of Banja Luka – blown up by Serb Orthodox militiamen – and the old Muslim graves of the Drina Valley, as surely as the Muslim Azerbaijanis have smashed the decorated Armenian Christian graves along their common border. The churches of northern Cyprus have been destroyed under the eyes of the UN; so have the Orthodox houses of religion in Kosovo. The 14 century monastery of St Kosma was reduced to rubble by the Muslim Kosovars.

The destruction of the monastic libraries in the British Isles and the dissolution of the mother houses – how perfect were their ruins for Turner and his fellow artists – remain a disfiguring scar on our history. No, this does not excuse the Salafist pillage, any more than it does the peasant ignorance of the Taliban - who would literally hang television sets from gallows in Afghanistan while approving the smashing of their own nation’s artefacts.

But that is the point. The Taliban recognised their ‘nation’ only as a mini-caliphate, a Saudi-funded experiment in Salafi state-building, in which humiliation of the West – of our armies and of our predilection for ‘heritage’ at the expense of human suffering – becomes proof-positive of Islam’s superiority. How many Muslim institutions – a dangerous question, this – have condemned the Timbucktu book-burning or the Sufi shrine-bulldozing? For what is parchment in comparison to the majesty of God – especially when a god belongs only to the most self-regarding, the most irredeemable and most isolated of believers, grinding his rivals to powder as fine as dust?

Source:http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/from-the-papal-monasteries-to-timbuktu-absolutism-lives-on-8478900.html?origin=internalSearch

Painting of the week: Gassed by John Singer Sargent

© IWM (Art.IWM ART 1460)

At the moment I am reading 'Forgotten Voices of the Great War, by Max Arthur. It is a great read, and reviews the history of the First World War through the eyes and words of those that experienced it. I was reading it on the tube the other day and was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of official war art, Gassed by John Singer Sargent. Every time I visit the Imperial War Museum in London, I spend time in the gallery, trying to absorb the image and its overwhelming story. Every time I see it I am horrified and moved.

I may have used this image before, however I make no apology for using it again. It illustrates perfectly the memory of one of the survivors of the horrors of WWI and gas attacks, which I will reproduce here:

Sergeant Jack Dorgan

7th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

During the attack on St Julien on the 26th of April a shell dropped right in amongst us, and when I pulled myself together I found myself lying in a shell-hole. There was one other soldier who, like me, was unhurt, but two more were heavily wounded, so we shouted for stretcher-bearers. 

Then the other uninjured chap said to me, 'we're not all here, Jack,' so I climbed out of the shell-hole and found two more of our comrades laying just a few yards from the shell-hole.

They had their legs blown off. All I could see when I got up to them was their thigh bones. I will always remember their white thigh bones, the rest of their legs were gone. Private Jackie Oliver was one of them, and he was unconscious. I shouted back to the fellows behind me, 'Tell Reedy Oliver his brother's been wounded.' So Reedy came along and stood looking at his brother, lying there with no legs, and a few minutes later watched him die. But the other fellow, Private Bob Young, was conscious right to the last. I lay along side him and asked, 'Can I do anything for you, Bob?' He said, 'Straighten my legs, Jack,' but he had no legs. I touched the bones and that satisfied him. Then he said, 'Get my wife's photograph out of my breast pocket.' I took the photograph out and put it in his hands. He couldn't move, he couldn't lift a hand, he couldn't lift a finger, but he somehow managed to hold his wife's photograph on his chest. And thats how Bob Young died.

But I had to get on. As we moved forward we came across a ditch in a corner of a field, where there were some Canadian soldiers. They said, 'You can't go any further than this. The Germans have released gas and we've had to retire to these reserve trenches.' But it was just a ditch to me, so I jumped across it along with the rest of the fellows.

But we'd only gone a hundred yards in front of  the Canadians when we encountered the gas. We'd had no training for gas prevention, never heard of the gas business. Our eyes were streaming with water and pain, and all we had was a roll of bandages in the first aid kit we carried in our tunic. So we bandaged each other's eyes, and anyone who could see would lead a line of half a dozen or so men, each with his hand on the shoulder of the one in front. In this way lines and lines of British soldiers moved along, with rolls of bandages around their eyes, back towards Ypres. When we got there, we were directed to a first aid station and lay down in a field. We hadn't even got to the original front line. We'd only got as far as the Canadians reserve trenches. But we just accepted it. It was war to us.

The day afterwards, the 27th of April, what was left of the Northumberlands were paraded in a field somewhere near Ypres to be addressed by Sir John French, the Commanding Officer of the British Forces. He praised us for our bravery, but we thought little of him. We just felt, 'Well, he's just come down from his office somewhere back in the line and is praising us up now. What did he come here for?' We just accepted it, but we didn't want it rubbed in.

Source: Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Max Arthur in association with the Imperial War Museum: Ebury Press. Pages 81-3

I have given the full text from Sargeant Jack Dorgan as it contextualizes the events around the gas attack, and illustrates the brutality and futility of war. 

My Friend, you would not tell with such high zest,

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie, 'Dulce et decorum est,

Pro patria mori.'

(Wilfred Owen)