The West’s strange double standard
The West rightly condemns the Islamic State’s vandalism of ancient sites – but is remarkably quiet when the Saudis do the same
EXPLOSIVES pulverise historic sites in the Middle East, bulldozers erase ancient tombs and shrines, historic forts are torn down and Ottoman facades destroyed.
The home of the favourite wife of the most revered man in an entire religion is even turned into a block of toilets. How can the world prevent this wicked desecration and extinction of a heritage that belongs to all mankind? I am, of course, referring to those iconoclastic Wahhabi-Salafist Muslim headchoppers… the Saudis.
And the world will do absolutely nothing. It will screech and rage and curse as the iconoclastic WahhabiSalafist Muslim head-choppers of the so-called Islamic State blow to bits the Roman ruins of Palmyra, but would not dare – and has not dreamed – of uttering a pussy-cat’s protest against Saudi Arabia’s wilful destruction of the ancient graves, homes, shrines and buildings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and his closest relatives and companions.
Naturally, we could conclude that Roman remains are more valuable than the antiquities of Islam. But this would be about as racist a reaction as suggesting that the Roman empire was more important than the Islamic empire. No, the real reason we ignore the vandalising of so many Muslim sites is that we cannot – will not, must not – criticise the Saudis whose grotesque wealth silences all of us to such obscene lengths that our prime minister flies our flags at half-mast when its autocratic ruler dies.
No suggestion must be made – not even the softest whisper must be uttered – that might connect our Saudi friends with the apocalyptic cult called Islamic State, which follows with absolutist determination the Wahhabi Sunni faith adopted 270 years ago by the ancestors of the present Saudi monarchy.
In the past few days, we have rightly bewailed the pulverisation of the magnificent Arch of Triumph at Palmyra, 1 800 years old – probably erected to commemorate the Emperor Aurelius’s victory over Queen Zenobia who was later dragged, Islamic State-style, through the streets of Rome – and the loss of the entrance to the magnificent and roofless Roman colonnade which, we must all fear, will also be levelled by the time the Syrian army, with its Russian air cover, recaptures the city.
The reduction of Palmyra to rubble is a war crime, according to the UN. But when the country with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Islamic State supporters – and donors – wipes out the Islamic history of Arabia, including 90% of Mecca’s millennium-old sites, we pay as much attention to this mass vandalism as we do to the damage of a nativity window in a Co Kerry church.
Take a glance at what has come to pass in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A library has been built over the dwelling where the Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca in AD570 – even this may now be replaced by skyscrapers – and the fine Bilal mosque, dating from this same period, has been bulldozed. Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, lived in a house in Mecca that has been turned into toilets.
Expansion
The Mecca Hilton Hotel was erected over the house of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law, his closest companion and future Caliph.
Hundreds of old Ottoman houses have been destroyed in Saudi Arabia and Ottoman architecture around the Great Mosque is being torn down for pilgrimage “expansion” projects.
Five of the famous “Seven Mosques”, built by Muhammad’s daughter and four companions, were demolished 90 years ago. And, after Lebanese (Christian) professor Kamal Salibi published a book in 1985 suggesting that many Saudi villages bore biblical Jewish place names, the bulldozers arrived to erase them.
This grotesque destruction of Muslim history is directly linked to Isis’s own purgation of the past by the Wahhabi faith, which the Saudis adopted from the teachings of the 18th-century Mohamed ibn Abdul Wahhab – who preached that Islam should return to the purity of its earliest principles. From these ideas came the notion that almost any historical monument represents an excuse for idolatry, a precept adopted with ferocious enthusiasm by the Saudi tribes. When Abdul Aziz ibn Saud moved into Mecca in the 1920s, his first actions included the destruction of the graveyard in which Khadijah was buried, along with the tomb of one of the Prophet’s uncles. The same fate awaited the tombs of Muhammad’s daughter. Fatima. and his grandson, Hasan ibn Ali.
Thus began the vandalism of graveyards, tombs, shrines and historic buildings across south-west Asia: from Shia shrines in Pakistan to the Buddhas of Bamiyan to the ancient libraries of Timbuktu; from the antiquities of Mecca to the Roman ruins of Palmyra.
Even beautiful Bosnian mosques hundreds of years old have been torn down in favour of the Saudifunded concrete monstrosities that are now appearing in the Balkans.
This hatred of history is part of the retrograde Wahhabi belief in which the past has only a spiritual presence, its physical remains a reminder only of imperfection.
May the saints preserve us from such folly – and the kingdom’s lawyers – should we suggest that the Saudi regime supports the Islamic State. But if we are to understand just what Islamic State is – and what it represents and who admires it – then we must study much more carefully the frightening religious habits that connect it, the Taliban and al-Qaeda to the people of a country whose king calls himself the “Caretaker of the Two Noble Sanctuaries” of Mecca and Medina. – The Independent