Expert: IS destroying ideas, not artefacts

PARIS: Islamic State (IS) militants have destroyed ancient sites and museum pieces in Syria and Iraq in the last two years.

Historian Francois Boespflug, a French former priest, tells about the roots of attacks against images that the perpetrators consider to be blasphemous or idol worship.

Question: What is the common thread between the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001, the mausoleums of Timbuktu in Mali by al-Qaeda militants and two of the most important temples in the Syrian city of Palmyra by IS militants? Answer: When an image is considered to convey contempt or is the object of a cult that extremists consider fetishist, they react as if they have been insulted themselves.

Destroying artefacts in Mosul, Iraq, should be the least of the militants’ strategic concerns. They do it because they want to cultivate their reputation as ultra-pious Muslims by condemning idols.

But it has a double bonus for the extremists because it allows them to thumb their noses at the West and to all those who love art for art’s sake. Question: Divine representation is banned in the Holy Scriptures, so how does one explain how Christianity has created such a large body of artistic work, in churches, for example?

Answer: Christianity started off, for two centuries, without images, keeping true to Jewish tradition. Judaism, because it has never had dominant political power, has been far less iconoclastic.

The two religions which have been the most iconoclastic are Islam and Christianity — in the case of the latter, with the destruction of effigies of pagan gods.

But Christians then felt liberated from the ban set out in the Ten Commandments — insofar as God became man, it seemed almost contrary to the incarnation never to represent him.

Question: This relative tolerance from the Catholic Church has not prevented Catholic fundamentalists from violently rejecting works of art. What is behind this? Answer: Most Christian extremists who act in this way claim they do so because of blasphemy. But this concept of blasphemy has been gradually removed from the criminal