It is easy to disturb others, and easier to break people’s hearts with insults. It’s even easier to make enemies by attacking their sacred objects. Samuel Huntington, the author of Clash of Civilization, can gleefully now find a case for his theory with the Taleban, who volunteered to clash the Muslim world with the Buddhist.
While the Taleban still live outside the coordinates of history and geography, Der Spiegel, a German weekly magazine, states that the Taleban are not the first to set such a precedent. The Europeans themselves caught the fever of iconoclasm. The Protestants destroyed much of Northern Europe’s pagan relics. Oswald Spiengler, German historian and philosopher, also describes the tragedy of the Mayan civilization: “[It] did not die of hunger but was rather murdered during its peak. All the Aztec civilizations, with all their power and resources, which were larger than those of the Greeks and the Romans in the time of Hannibal, were not wiped out by a desperate war but by a small number of bandits.” Today, we don’t know any of their cities’ names, and only three of their books survived destruction while the language in which they were written remains a mystery.
The story of the Taleban urges a debate on the concept of the idol. An idol can be a stone, a human, or even an ideology. It could be made of anything: stones, dates, slogans, parties, families, or classes. In fact, it does not matter what an idol is made of because it is us who ascribe meaning and significance to the idol.
Nevertheless, idols are always given a position of superiority with supernatural abilities and change over time while procuring compliance and awe. It would be a mistake to think that idols are made only of stone. The simplest idols are those carved in stones, and the most complicated ones are the ideological ones, because they hide behind slogans and words.
The struggle for monotheism, which the prophets undertook, was not in the sky but here on the earth. It wasn’t an abstract theological conflict but a sociological-political struggle involving power, dominance, money, and reference points. It was an arduous struggle, in which the prophets were continuously in danger. Some paid for these ideas with their lives. When Muhammad (pbuh) sent his messengers to the rulers of the world, he asked them to come to a word of equity where people do not set each other as gods. These are the ideals of today’s democracy, where people share equal rights and duties in a horizontal society. The Qur’an recounts the story of Pharaoh, who ordered the building of the pyramids as tombstones, to make us understand the dynamics of dominance. Although Muslims damn Pharaoh, the political atmosphere in much of the Muslim world is a reminder of the Pharaohs. This is an example of how a culture can neutralize its most sacred text and make its meaning obsolete.
Malik Binnabi, the late Algerian intellectual, analyzes the role of the idol in the assassination of the Algerian renaissance. He explains that there is an antithetical relationship between the idea and the idol. “If paganism, in the view of Islam, is ignorance, then ignorance, in fact, is paganism because it does not implement ideas but erects idols. One of God’s laws is that when ideas disappear, idols appear and vice versa.” Where are the idols then? Are they really in Afghanistan?
The Evening Star, a British newspaper, announced in March 31 in 1845 an important exhibition for different breeds of donkeys on April 1.The showroom became packed on the appointed date. After a long period of waiting and anticipation, the crowd realized that the show was never meant to be. They laughed their heads off when they realized that if there were any donkeys, it were they. It was a prank on April Fool’s Day.
But are we living an April Fool’s Day everyday?
