Mian Ijaz Ul HassanOne of the great ironies of history is that the very people who came to save Afghanistan, claiming to liberate it from its enemies, plundered the one museum which did not have a single stolen item
Very few visitors to Kabul ever pay homage to the Emperor Babur, who unlike his vain descendants lies not in an exalted mausoleum but on the eastern flank of a plain hill near Kabul. Babur possessed an incredible eye for detail and beauty. He never forgot the memory of a spring morning when passing this hill on his way to India he saw its slope blooming with blossoms. I am certain the young warrior must have stopped to sate himself. Babur became the emperor at Delhi but desired to be buried on the slope of the same hill, which he had seen cascading with flowers in his youth. Babur would rather lie in solitude among the wild bushes, which blossomed each spring, than be entombed in cold marble condemned to eternal silence.
When we visited Babur’s grave it was without even a tomb. This is how I am sure he would have liked it. Someone in recent times had added a modest metal fence and someone else a small sloping rectangular canopy. To our surprise and great luck, the wild bushes were in bloom. I held a sprig in my hand with buds the colour of burgundy and flowers with petals of a lighter hue receding to pink.
As I delicately held the blossoms in my hand, so that I didn’t injure them in any way, it seemed centuries had ticked away in a moment. I felt as though it was only yesterday that Babur had reined his stead to gaze at this spectacle of colour. Delicately holding a spray in his hand Babur must have wondered what was life all about. Not knowing the answer he must have then without second thought galloped off towards an unknown destiny.
The next day we visited the Kabul Museum. It is one of the most unique museums that one could have ever seen. Nothing in the Kabul Museum is a result of plunder. Most if not all exhibits at the museum, we were informed by the learned curator, were exhumed from Afghanistan. I could not believe the great range of objects, which were on display in the polished wooden cabinets with clean glass panels, could possibly all have been excavated in Afghanistan. There were the Chinese silks, the Alexandrine glassware, and the Roman medallions and Buddhist statues. One of my favourites was an almost three feet tall seated Buddha statue in terracotta. There were Indian ivories — among these I was particularly allured by an exquisite jewellery casket.
The casket had figures of graceful women carved on its panels, which are similar in conception to the feminine forms painted in the frescoes at the Ajanta caves. I assumed that the casket belonged to a later Ajanta period, say eighth century AD. When I peered closely at a small card fixed adjacent to the casket, it stated that the object belonged to 200 AD, which meant that it anticipated the best specimens of Ajanta Fresco paintings by at least two to three hundred years. What made the Indian Ivories in the Kabul Museum so special is that on account of humid and wet climate no ivories survived in the Indian subcontinent.
Begram, an hour’s run from Kabul, where most of the Museum exhibits were excavated from, was the Rome of ancient world. If one looks at a map of the times, all roads go through Begram. All the silk routes or trade route caravans halted and rested at Begram before parting company to go their ways south to India, south-west to Persia and Egypt, west to Rome or eastwards to China. The silver and gold medallions, the gentle glassware, the patterned silk and carved ivories were all found at Begram.
The Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert, the Louvre and many other museums of the world have their priceless possessions at the expense and loss of others. They have been either stolen or forcibly taken through aggression and occupation. One of the great ironies of history is that the very people who came to save Afghanistan, claiming to liberate it from its enemies, plundered the one museum, which did not have a single stolen item. There is a saying that if you have friends like these you don’t have to look for enemies.
The Taliban demonstrated gross insensitivity to the religious feelings of Buddhists and ignorance of history by destroying the image of Lord Buddha. The Americans have also shown extremely bad taste in converting Begram into an operational base and a centre for interrogating Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects.
After the incendiary attack on two National Libraries and destruction and theft of 170,000 priceless artefacts from the Iraq National Museum there is little to be said, since “stuff happens” as one of the “liberators” said. However in both cases not merely the national history of Afghanistan and Iraq has been destroyed but the common history of all mankind has also been obliterated.
The visit to Ghazni was not without mixed feelings. Some Muslims applaud Mahmood Ghazni for being a dauntless soldier of Islam. Most Hindus hate him for being a bigot. Mahmood in reality was neither a soldier of Islam nor a bigot who plundered temples for religious reasons. His purpose behind invading the subcontinent more than seventeen times was not for Islam as some historians claim.
Khwaja A Hayee for instance writes, “How bravely Sultan Mehmood had managed to cross the deserts of Sind and Rajputana to reach his far off target — Somnath is a story of unique determination and implicit faith in Allah.” There can’t be anything more remote from the truth. Mr Hayee while writing is serving the cause of his espoused ideology and not the cause of history.
The reason that Mahmood of Ghazni invaded Somnath was to plunder gold in order to build a feudal empire for himself. The only religious inclination he ever expressed was to attack and destroy the Muslim kingdom of Multan, which owed its allegiance to the Fatamid Caliphate. At that time the Caliphate had split into two rival camps and Sultan Mahmood was aligned with the Caliphate of Baghdad. Whatever the reason there is no justification for the Sultan to desecrate a temple and plunder it for wealth.
Sultan Mahmood liked to have writers, poets and men of learning around him. According to Nicholas Barrington, a Persian scholar and a former British High Commissioner to Pakistan, “Some writers have described him, not so much a patron of letters as a kidnapper of literary men,” because it added to his prestige to have famous poets and scholars around him. This may be a bit unkind because the Sultan is known to have set up many libraries.
He also established a famous university of the time, which we saw on our visit. It was being used as a school. We also visited the great Sultan’s palace, which was built with aesthetic restrain and devoid of opulence usually associated with palaces.
The name of Sultan Mahmood Ghaznavi who was the most powerful ruler of the age was also tarnished, when he avoided suitably rewarding Firdausi for writing the Shahnama, which the Sultan had commissioned him to write. It is worth noting that Sultan Mahmood had asked Firdausi not to write a history of Islam, but about the popular legends of early Persian pre-Islamic dynasties. The Shahnama comprises of 60,000 verses compared to only 10,500 in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. According to Barrington it can be compared to the work of the greatest epic poets of the world like Virgil and Dante. It is said that eventually the huge fee, which Firdausi had expected, arrived, just when his coffin was being taken out of the city for burial. Unfortunately the great Sultan had defaulted and has never lived it down to this day.
Prof Ijaz-ul-Hassan is a painter, author and a political activist