Muslim attitudes toward art

Fjordman has written another excellent (as usual) essay for The Brussels Journal. This time he turns his attention to the differences between Islam and the West with regards to art:

It is not a coincidence that the Islamic world was slow at adopting cultural inventions from the outside world. Muslims tend to be at best indifferent towards non-Muslim cultures, past or present, at worst actively hostile. Saladin or Salah al-Din, the twelfth century general loved by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned even in Western history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to remember that his son Al-Aziz Uthman, who was presumably influenced by his father's religious convictions, tried to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt, only three years after his father's death in 1193. The reason why we can still visit them today is because the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt. He did, however, manage to inflict visible damage to Menkaure's Pyramid, the smallest of the three. It is tempting to view this as a continuation of his father's Jihad against non-Muslims:

"When king Al-Aziz Othman, son of [Saladdin] succeeded his father, he let himself be persuaded by some people from his Court, who were devoid of good sense, to demolish the pyramids. One started with the red pyramid, which is the third of the great pyramids, and the smallest. [...] They brought there a large number of workmen from all around, and supported them at great cost. They stayed there for eight whole months [...] This happened in the year 593 [ i.e. 1196 AD]." (transl. SACY, Description de l'Egypte IX, 468)

The legend that the missing nose of the Great Sphinx at Giza was removed by Napoléon Bonaparte's artillery during the French expedition to Egypt 1798-1801 is incorrect. Sketches indicate that the nose was gone long before this. The Egyptian fifteenth century historian al-Maqrizi attributes the act to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. According to al-Maqrizi, in the fourteenth century, upon discovering that local peasants made offerings to the Sphinx, al-Dahr became furious at their idolatry and decided to destroy the statue, managing only to break off its nose. It is hard to confirm whether this story is accurate, but if it is, it demonstrates that Sufis are not always the soft and tolerant Muslims they are made out to be.

Far from damaging the Sphinx, the French expedition brought large numbers of scientists to Egypt to catalogue the ancient monuments, thus founding modern Egyptology. The trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, was employed by philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. In this task, Champollion made extensive use of the Coptic language. Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years, yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part displayed much interest in doing so. Westerners did so in a single generation after they reappeared in force in Egypt. So much for "Arab science." And they did so with the help of the language of the Copts, the Egyptian Christians, the only remnant of ancient Egypt that the Arab invaders hadn't managed to completely eradicate.

Sita Ram Goel and other writers have tracked the destruction of numerous pre-Islamic temples in India in the book Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them. Infidels would be well-advised not to believe that such cultural Jihad is a thing of the past. Within a few years, thousands of churches have been destroyed in Indonesia, and many more Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries have been damaged by Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. An attack on statues at a museum in Cairo by a veiled woman screaming, "Infidels, infidels!" shocked the outside world. She had been inspired by Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, who quoted a saying of the prophet Muhammad that sculptors will be among those receiving the harshest punishment on Judgment Day. The influential Sheikh Youssef Al Qaradawi agreed that "Islam prohibits statues and three-dimensional figures of living creatures" and concluded that "the statues of ancient Egyptians are prohibited."

The great Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan were demolished by the Taliban regime in 2001, who decreed that they would destroy images deemed "offensive to Islam." The Taliban Information Minister complained that "The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can't knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain." The statues, 53 meters and 36 meters tall, the tallest standing Buddha statues in the world, turned out to be so hard to destroy that the Taliban needed help from Pakistani and Saudi engineers to finish the job. Finally, after almost a month of non-stop bombardment with dynamite and artillery, they succeeded.

Judging from the experiences with the Bamiyan Buddhas, it is tempting to conclude that the only reason why the pyramids of Egypt have survived to this day is because they were so big that it proved too complicated, costly and time-consuming for Muslims to destroy them. Had Saladin's son Al-Aziz had modern technology and engineers at his disposal, they might well have ended up like countless Hindu temples in India or Buddhist statues in Central Asia.

As a European, I fear for the future of the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There is every reason to believe that they will end up the same way as the Bamiyan Buddhas. Although it may not happen today, tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow, sooner or later, pious Muslims will burn these works of art, and doubtlessly consider it their sacred duty. Muslim immigration now threatens many of the masterworks of the Western tradition of art, the most inventive and groundbreaking mankind has ever seen, with annihilation. History will never forgive us for our cowardice and stupidity if we allow these treasures to be destroyed just because we think history is boring or don't want to say anything unfashionable about other cultures.

The official reason given by Muslims for why non-Muslims are not allowed to visit the cities of Mecca and Medina is because they might damage or destroy the Islamic Holy Sites. But since Muslims have a proven track record of more than a thousand years, from Malaysia to Armenia, of destroying non-Muslim places of worship or works of art, perhaps we should then, in return, be entitled to keep Muslims permanently away from our cultural treasures?

The whole thing is much longer than this and is very much worth a look.