ISIL’s assault on history
Iconoclast seems a pleasant word, altogether harmless. An iconoclast, according to recent dictionaries, is a critic, a skeptic, a dissenter. Many of us admire iconoclasts who challenge the performance of venerated institutions from the Vatican to the Pentagon.
But those are loose extensions of the original meaning and probably ready to be discarded. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has returned us to the idea as previous centuries knew it, as it was used in a quotation from a book on the Reformation in Germany :“An iconoclast riot now commenced. The images were torn from the altars, chopped in pieces and burnt.” The word originated in the eighth and ninth century, when religious conservatives destroyed icons in Eastern Christian churches.
ISIL soldiers, in their religious madness, destroy everything from Shia mosques and shrines to monuments of religions so old that the ISIL followers probably never heard of them until they demolished their symbols.
They use sledgehammers, power drills, explosives, any tools that come to hand, and they do so with a sense of purpose. Radical Islamists want not only to transform life in the present, they also want to obliterate the past. That means destroying blasphemous idols from vanished cultures that worshipped false gods. If a re- ligion was bad, or at least non- Islamic, it should be forgotten forever. From the radical Islamic view, most of the past should be a blank page. If history is one of the necessary attributes of civilization, radical Islamists are willing to do without civilization.
But ISIL also needs money to pay for arms and the upkeep of soldiers. So it steals or digs up antiquities, from collectible rings to ornamental vases, which bring a steady stream of money through the black market. This process involves both greed and piety in a combination that arouses a special level of viciousness.
They demonstrated that twisted passion in the case of Khaled al - Asaad, an 81- year- old archeologist who was in charge of antiquities in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra when ISIL forces were approaching. That was in the summer of 2015. Al- Asaad was among those who evacuated the city museum’s collection to a safe place.
When ISIL looters seized the town they captured Al-Asaad, questioned him for weeks and demanded to know where the treasures were hidden. Since he refused to tell them, they murdered him on Aug. 18, 2015. They dragged him to a public square where a masked swordsman beheaded him as a crowd watched. His body was suspended from a traffic light, with a sign hanging from it that named his crimes: he was called an “apostate,” he represented Syria at “infidel conferences,” he was Palmyra’s “director of idolatry.” He was idolatrous because most of his research focused on pre-Islamic history. That he was a wise archeologist with an international reputation did not impress ISIL.
Fiona Rose- Greenland, a University of Chicago archeologist, recently wrote that the opportunity for discovery in Iraq and Syria is dazzling. The soil is rich with artifacts, left behind by human settlements over 10,000 years, including the first cities on Earth. Syria alone has t housands of known archeological sites, some of them left unattended and subject to attacks by ISIL. Archeological looting is a long- standing practice, which ISIL has developed by controlling large regions, by determining who can dig and who cannot, and by developing a network of dealers who know how to sell the l oot through Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
The U. S. State Department estimates that ISIL looting has earned several million dollars. This business is managed, along with its oil revenues, under ISIL’s Department of Precious Things That Come Out of t he Ground. But even when ISIL is nearby, freelance looters remain at work. A story from Palmyra the other day reported that Russian troops, there to help the Assad government to survive, are being bribed by locals to look the other way when looters are busy searching for choice items in ground recently blown open by Assad’s bombs.
Few of these objects go directly to private collectors. Most will be warehoused by shady investors, for sale or auction when Middle Eastern artifacts cease to carry an automatic aura of illegality. Collectors without expertise do well to be wary. ISIL looters sometimes come back with copies of dubious value. Though many a celebrated museum exhibit has reached its final home through questionable means, archeologists are unhappy when an object reaches them without knowledge of its context.
To grasp the seriousness of looting, archeologists monitor it from space. Jesse Casana, an anthropologist at Dartmouth University, uses high- resolution satellite imagery to track the increase of pockmarks in the earth at archeological sites in Syria. The images prove that ancient ruins in areas controlled by ISIL are now being extensively explored.
But however much the world learns about the illegal antiquities trade, little has been done to stop it. Tess Davis, the archeologist who directs the non- profit Antiquities Coalition, said recently that in this field we are facing a crisis .“Cultural racketeering is not just destroying our past, it is threatening our future by funding crime and conflict around the world.”
It’s often described ( in the words of France Desmarais of the International Council of Museums) as “the largest- scale mass destruction of cultural heritage since the Second World War.”
Whether committed by iconoclasts or thieves, this constitutes an attack on humanity. It robs all of us who want to understand our collective history.
SATELLITES IN SPACE SEE THE SIGNS: ANCIENT ANTIQUITIES SITES ARE BEING LOOTED, THE PRICELESS OBJECTS SOLD TO SUPPORT THE WAR.