Did You Know Taliban Just Means ‘Religious Students’?
I saw part of a remarkable episode of National Geographic on TVO last night.
I was surfing past when I caught a reference to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. I’m a Silk Road junkie, witness the Samarkand story in my previous post, so this grabbed my attention.
I watched a little bit more and they were talking about how the Afghan Film Archive was saved from the Taliban censors’ destruction in two phases; when ordered by the Taliban Thought Police to surrender the film library for burning, the keepers gave them only the prints, not the negatives, and there was a great burning. Then the keepers took some drywall, using it to block off the door to the room where the negatives were kept, then disabled the light fixture in the hallway near the hidden door to lessen the chances of their subterfuge being discovered. It wasn’t.
The episode told this wonderful story too. The Taliban had ordered all paintings in Kabul’s National Gallery that portrayed living things to be destroyed because such portrayals were un-Islamic, the same doctrine that ‘allowed’ the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Doctor Mohammed Yusef Asefi took matters to heart and proceeded to try and rescue as many paintings as he could by - get this - painting over the oil paintings with water colours to hide any living creatures in them. Soon the National Gallery had a vast collection of ‘dreary landscapes’ that ‘few Afghans visited’.
After the fall of the Taliban, the paintings were restored to their original appearance.
I like this quote from the above article: “Some of the paintings that Dr Asefi saved are not that good. But looking at even a second-rate painting in the same way is difficult after you know the pains and risks taken to preserve it.”
These stories made me very viscerally happy for no logical reason. Howzabout you?