The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (28 page)
Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
An apocryphal story holds that the caliph Umar, the second successor of Muhammad, ordered the famous Library of Alexandria to be burned to the ground. The books in it were not needed: “they will either contradict the Qur’an, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.”
Although this almost certainly never happened, the words ascribed to Umar are illustrative of a tendency within Islam that manifested itself on February 22, 2015, when jihadis from the Islamic State ransacked the Mosul Public Library, burning over eight thousand rare and irreplaceable books and manuscripts, including an ancient Arab astrolabe and books from the Ottoman period.
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The Islamic State has also destroyed numerous ancient Assyrian artifacts in the Nineveh Museum in Mosul.
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It released videos showing jihadis taking sledgehammers and drills to priceless artifacts such as an Assyrian winged bull statue dating from the ninth century BC.
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In March 2015, the Islamic State bulldozed the thirty-three-hundred-year-old city of Nimrud and the two-thousand-year-old city of Hatra and blew up a tenth-century Chaldean Catholic Church north of Mosul.
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It sold Christian icons and other artifacts from the looted churches and turned some of the destroyed churches themselves into torture chambers.
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The Islamic State has also destroyed cemeteries—some of them Christian, in which they destroyed the crosses on tombstones, in line with the Islamic hatred of the cross—in order to prevent “veneration of the dead.”
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NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM
“‘These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned,’ a bearded militant in traditional Afghani two-piece clothing told residents, according to one man living nearby who spoke to The Associated Press. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation, said the Islamic State group official made his impromptu address as others stuffed books into empty flour bags.”
—Associated Press report from the sacking of the Mosul Public Library by ISIS
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“Muslims, these artefacts behind me are idols for people from ancient times who worshipped them instead of God. . . . The so-called Assyrians, Akkadians and other peoples had gods for the rain, for farming, for war . . . and they tried to get closer to them with offerings. The prophet removed and buried the idols in Mecca with his blessed hands. . . . Even if they are worth billions of dollars, we don’t care.”
—the ISIS video explains the destruction of archaeological and artistic treasures at the Ninevah Museum in Mosul
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The world watched agog as ISIS gave it this new confirmation of the Muslim group’s gleeful contempt for civilization and embrace of barbarism. But once again, the Islamic State is simply acting in accord with its stated principles. In April 2015, the Islamic State published photos of jihadis smashing tombstones and destroying the crosses upon them, along with a statement of the fourth
caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib: “I am dispatching you with what the Prophet dispatched me: That you not leave an elevated grave without levelling it, nor an image without erasing it.”
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Many have scoffed at the Islamic State’s claim that they’re simply removing temptations to idolatry. Who, after all, would be tempted to worship a three-thousand-year-old Assyrian statue of a bull? And there is more to the Islamic State’s actions than just that. Besides removing supposed temptations to idolatry, Islamic jihadists want to ruin the artifacts of non-Muslim civilizations because doing so testifies to the truth of Islam, as the Qur’an suggests that ruins are a sign of Allah’s punishment of those who rejected his truth: “Many were the Ways of Life that have passed away before you: travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who rejected Truth” (Qur’an 3:137).
THE ISLAMIC ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF VANDALISM
This dynamic in which ISIS jihadis are inspired to turn archaeological treasures into broken shards is a chilling Islamic variation on the
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
effect that Max Weber claimed to have discovered. Like Dutch Calvinists in the seventeenth century working hard to succeed in business to prove to themselves that they were among the elect—and creating capitalism in the process—the jihadis of the twenty-first century Islamic State smash the priceless art of pre-Islamic civilizations to reassure themselves that the Qur’an is the truth, Allah is triumphant, and they are his instruments, responsible for creating ruins so as to show his wrath and his judgment. For the Qur’an exhorts believers to fight unbelievers as the tools of Allah’s chastisement: “Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people” (9:14). They don’t seem likely to create anything of value in the process.
In other words, travel through the earth and see the ruins of non-Islamic civilizations, and realize that it is Allah who has destroyed them for their idolatry.
The duty to reduce ancient cities to ruins is related to the Islamic idea that pre-Islamic civilizations, and non-Islamic civilizations, are all
jahiliyya
—the society of unbelievers, which is worthless. Consequently, any art, literature, or architecture produced by any non-Islamic culture has no value whatsoever: it is all simply a manifestation of that pre-Islamic ignorance and barbarism.
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul encountered this attitude in his travels through Muslim countries. For many Muslims, he observed in
Among the Believers,
“The time before Islam is a time of blackness: that is part of Muslim theology. History has to serve theology.” Obviously this cuts against the idea of tourism of ancient sites and non-Muslim religious installations. Naipaul recounted that some Pakistani Muslims, far from valuing the nation’s renowned archaeological site at Mohenjo Daro, saw its ruins as a teaching opportunity for Islam, recommending that Qur’an 3:137 (“Many were the ways of life that passed away before you. . . .”) be posted there as a teaching tool, to warn the stupefied onlookers that they were witnessing not the artifacts of a once-great civilization but the visual proof of the awesome judgment of Allah.
PUBLIC ENTERTAINMENT, ISIS-STYLE
In May 2015, as part of an offensive that left them in control of more than half Syria’s territory, Islamic State forces took over the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO Heritage Site containing irreplaceable buildings from the Roman Empire.
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ISIS jihadis issued a video explaining that they would be destroying the “polytheistic” statues in Palmyra but leaving the buildings intact
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—perhaps because they had found a use for them: they summoned the local population to the ancient Roman amphitheatre to watch the public executions of twenty men they said were supporters of the Syrian government.
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The implications are clear. The Islamic State’s caliph has said that the destruction of the Sphinx and the Pyramids is a “religious duty.”
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If he thinks that way about the Sphinx and the Pyramids, it is not hard to guess his opinion of the Vatican, and the Louvre, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Even if the Islamic State never makes good on its threat to enter and conquer Europe, admirers of ISIS and its caliph among Muslims living in the West could menace the very patrimony of Western civilization and render the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci lost artifacts that are known only from old photographs in history books. There have already been incidents of Muslims destroying religious statues in Italy.
TWO-ALARM
OSTRICH ALERT
“Although the Diocese condemned the act of sacrilege against the Madonna statue, it also followed the Pope’s lead by absolving Islam of any responsibility for what happened. In the words of Monsignor Paolo Giulietti, the auxiliary bishop of Città della Pieve, near Perugia: ‘For Islam, the figure of Mary is very important: she is the mother of the Prophet Jesus conceived in virginity, and the Blessed Virgin is the most holy woman. Muslims pray at the Marian shrines in the Middle East. We cannot see in this act of vandalism—which as I said is wrong in every way—an episode of religious hatred. It is important not to feed mutual suspicion, especially at this time.’”
—Catholic officials respond to a January 2015 incident in which five Muslims smashed the statue of the Virgin Mary and then urinated on the pieces
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“Mumbling phrases of the Koran in Arabic, a Moroccan threw to the ground and severely damaged five statues of artistic value and other furniture and religious objects in a church in Trentino. . . . The Moroccan is a longtime resident in Trentino, and since last summer has lived in Cles. According to the police, his actions are connected to mental problems, and not to religious fanaticism. The man has for several months shown signs of anxiety, and already last month disturbed a religious function in the same parish church of Cles.”
—Italian police respond to a similar incident two weeks earlier
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