Taliban Iconoclasm

[Dave Monroe]

>From Kevin Sullivan, "Taliban Had Wrong Impression:
Artists Tricked Police to Save Work With Banned
Images," Washington Post, Wednesday, January 2, 2002,
p. A01 ...

KABUL, Afghanistan -- It was a moody impressionist
painting of a cobblestone street winding down a
hill--deserted, until Mohammad Yousof Asefi came along
with his wet sponge.

Asefi wiped the canvas and women, resplendent in red
and blue cloaks, appeared. Then two more, then six and
10, until the painting's street suddenly came alive
with strolling people.

When Asefi was finished, another valuable painting in
Afghanistan's National Gallery was back out in the
daylight for all to see. Unlike thousands of other
paintings, films, photographs, drawings, books,
statues, musical recordings, relics, archaeological
sites and other Afghan treasures, it had survived the
cultural destruction visited on this country by the
radical Islamic movement.

[...]

Knowing that the Taliban banned all images of living
things--from historical documentary films to a
schoolboy's crayon drawing of a horse -- Asefi used
watercolors to doctor more than 80 oil paintings last
year.

He knew that time was running out. The Taliban had
just defied an international outcry by blowing up two
magnificent stone Buddhas in the central town of
Bamian. The statues, which had been carved into the
face of a cliff in the third and fifth centuries and
were more than 100 feet high, were considered wonders
of the ancient world. But to the Taliban, they were
idols that insulted Islam, so they were blasted into
dust last March.

Asefi also knew that the Taliban had recently smashed
more Buddha statues in the already gutted Kabul
Museum, and he figured the National Gallery would
surely be next.

Working alone in a cold room in the gallery, hiding
when Taliban officials would happen in, Asefi
carefully painted over people, cows, donkeys, birds
and other animals....

Asefi said the Taliban's religious police came
regularly to the gallery to make sure their edicts
against idolatry were being followed. The Taliban
enforcers, most of whom were illiterate, never spotted
his handiwork--just as they had never spotted
watercolors he had added four years ago to 42
paintings exhibited at the Foreign Ministry.

If he had been discovered, Asefi could have been
beaten, whipped, jailed or even executed by the
Taliban for so blatantly defying its version of
Islamic law. Many other Afghans were jailed and
tortured by the Taliban for crimes as simple as
selling books with photographs on the cover....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49523-2002Jan1.html

And so forth, on books and film.  Picking up a thread
from a while ago here ...

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