[Mb-civic] What Was and Never Shall Be - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

What Was and Never Shall Be
In the Destruction of a Golden Dome, the Debris of Certainty

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 23, 2006; C01

Again and again, it's distressing how little we know about how Iraq 
looked before destruction became an everyday occurrence. And so the 
first glimpse, for many, of the Askariya shrine was not of a magnificent 
shining dome, but twisted metal and broken walls.

As the first images of a massive destruction at one of Iraq's holiest 
shrines began coming in yesterday, it was hard not to think of the 
building, rather than what it stands for. How old was it? What was the 
architecture like? Was this another loss, like the Bamiyan Buddhas, 
needlessly destroyed by the Taliban? Is its destruction equivalent, say, 
to the bombing of St. Peter's in Rome, or Chartres Cathedral? The mind 
grasps for an easy equivalence.

It was reassuring -- in the rather heartless way that people in a 
secular society look at old religious buildings as mere relics or 
potential tourist destinations -- to learn from the BBC, which quoted 
Robert Hillenbrand, a professor of Islamic Art at Edinburgh University, 
that while the shrine had immense religious and emotional importance to 
Iraq's Shiite population, it was not of enormous architectural 
importance. Measuring religious importance seems to land us in the realm 
of the irrational; measuring architectural or historical importance is 
different, but ultimately leads us down all the wrong paths.

But there was hardly time for any of those fumbling efforts to find an 
analogue between the Christianity many Americans know and the Islam so 
many of us learn about only when violence brings it into view. And no 
sooner had the building appeared on our television screens than it was 
obscured by images of rage in the streets. Tens of thousands of Shiites 
protested the bombing, and Sunni mosques were attacked in Basra and 
Baghdad. The pundits chattered about civil war. A great golden dome, 
that most of us had never seen, came down, replaced by images we've seen 
all too often, proof that yet again the sum total of anger in the world 
had gone up a few notches.

"It is not a question of the date or the age of the structure," said 
Professor Hamid Algar, of the University of California at Berkeley. 
Algar, who hadn't yet heard of the bombing when a reporter called, 
sounded sad and weary as he explained the historical background to the 
Askariya shrine. It is the burial place of the 10th and 11th imams, 
revered by Shiites as the direct descendants and spiritual heirs to the 
prophet Muhammad.

Besides the obvious religious and historic significance, Algar 
explained, its location in Samarra, north of the traditional Shiite 
stronghold of southern Iraq, makes it particularly fraught with 
religious tension. It was here, in the late 19th century, that the great 
scholar Mirza Hasan Shirazi set up as the spiritual leader of the 
Shiites, making inroads into the Sunni north. He led a newly vigorous 
Shiite community, and one that was increasingly threatening to Sunnis 
and the Ottoman overlords, who controlled the country. Samarra was, in 
some ways, a line in the sand in a long-standing religious struggle. And 
it is a line in the sand again.

Was. Is. Terrorism functions by conflating the categories. Old 
grievances are renewed, old tensions rekindled. The past, filled with 
the sting of injustice -- there's always enough to go around, no matter 
what small niche of the human race you occupy -- isn't so much 
remembered as it is constantly relived. There's no time for reflection, 
no time to come off the boil; humanity finds itself in a state of 
perpetual adolescence, short-fused and remarkably indifferent to whether 
it wants or expects to have a future.

Unlike so many images of terrorist destruction, the calculated 
demolition of the shrine in Samarra captures the "was" and "is" with 
rare power. When the twin towers came down, there was nothing left, just 
rubble and then, with astonishing alacrity, a sterile hole in the 
ground. In Samarra, they leveled the dome, destroying the visual focal 
point of the shrine, and one of the most distinctive features of the 
city of Samarra. There's a bit of twisted metal left, and the shell of 
the building that held it. In some ways, it's reminiscent of images of 
the old industrial hall that was left standing in Hiroshima after the 
atom bomb attack -- the remains of which are now a memorial to the 
victims (was, is, was, is).

The before and after shots show the shell of a building stripped of its 
most magnificent feature. The attackers went for the surface, the showy, 
the part of the architecture that best expresses the daring and 
determination on the part of those who raised it. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 
professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, says that 
while Islamic architecture was originally very simple and plain, and 
while graves of ordinary people remain quite austere today, the 
mausoleums associated with imams, saints and early spiritual leaders 
developed a magnificence one saw plainly in the old, now destroyed dome. 
This wasn't just an architectural nicety, but something that expressed 
"the wisdom of the community," as manifested in the imams it honors.

And for a Shiite to see it destroyed?

"To see this before your eyes is like the world crumbling before you," 
he says. In part, that's because it was in Samarra that the last imam, 
the "Mahdi," disappeared, leaving the world to await both his return and 
the restitution of justice and order that will come with it. Some 
interpreters of Islam associate dire apocalyptic events with his 
reappearance. Others, including Algar, dismiss the idea, arguing that 
even making predictions about the when of the return is religiously 
frowned upon. But seeing the destruction of a shrine raised in the city 
of the imam's disappearance -- or occultation -- which contains the 
bodies of his forebears, brings with it profound eschatological 
resonance, according to Nasr.

"Nobody would think it is possible to destroy the most sacred objects," 
he says.

The side-by-side photographs, the was and is, shatter that certainty. 
Again, with grim admiration, one confronts the profound methodology of 
terror: To attack certainty is to attack the very basis on which 
societies are built. Certainty that the bank where you place your money 
is secure; that the title to your home is valid; that elections will 
happen on schedule; that power will be transferred without bloodshed. In 
the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, New Yorkers were horrified by the 
fact that the simple, certain form of their skyline had been altered. 
That couldn't happen. Now imagine that same wound to the orderliness of 
the world magnified by an overlay of religious disbelief.

It isn't easy, which is why it was tempting to process the news, and the 
images, in other ways. On a right-wing Web site in this country, 
http://Lucianne.com , people posting reactions under pseudonyms were 
often gleeful. "Isn't pretty much every real or imagined location of 
every Imam's spitoon a 'Holy' site?" wrote someone called "kwddave." 
That post suggested the vicious cycle of miscommunication we've entered. 
Anger is no longer read, here, as a sign of great depth of feeling, or 
sincerity, or as a symptom of fear; it is now proof of the 
insignificance of what Muslims are angry about. Simply because they are 
angry, their shrines are no better than spittoons. Rhetorically, 
"kwddave" repeats the act of terror, diminishing the meaning of a 
building that terrorists, literally, have reduced to a gaping cavity 
open to the rain.

Images of a building are never as interesting as the dynamic, moving 
pictures of people in the streets. And that image, of anger and protest, 
has been seen so often that it's become what we might as well just label 
The Blur -- the loud, threatening tape loop of enraged people that 
blends together all distinctions about who they are, where they are and 
why they're angry.

The first and most difficult fact of the bombing is its portent of civil 
war, and its most troubling message for Americans is its reminder of the 
degree to which we went to war, as a nation, ignorant of the basic 
sectarian rifts that we are now struggling to manage. But The Blur has a 
different message. Even when "they" are victims of internecine strife, 
the images seem to confirm that they are all the same in a particularly 
dangerous and hard to understand way. That has become our certainty, and 
one wonders what could possibly shatter it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022202534.html
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