Smashing idols

The Iraqi army has reclaimed a portion of Mosul, and permitted The Associated Press into the Mosul Museum for a look around.

The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul is in ruins. Piles of rubble fill exhibition halls and a massive fire in the building’s basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash.

[ … ]

IS captured Mosul in 2014 and released a video the following year showing fighters smashing artifacts in the museum with sledgehammers and power tools. The voice narrating the IS video justified the acts with verses from the Quran referencing the prophet Mohammed’s destruction of idols in the Kaaba.

“These statues and idols, these artifacts, if God has ordered its removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” the narration said.

It is somewhere in Mesopotamia that the first hunter-gatherer tribes organized themselves into villages, and then cities, and then states, and so the destruction of the museum is an irrevocable loss of a portion of humanity’s history. We will manage along without it, no doubt; after all, most of us can scarcely remember what we had for lunch — so who cares what happened thousands of years ago amongst people on the far side of the earth? The proper attitude, I suppose, it to be grateful that at least some people probably avoided summary execution while the Devout were busy smashing statues.

I am reminded, too, of the Christian suppression of Epicurus’ writings, and Aristotle’s, in the first few centuries anno domini.

I keep trying to put my finger on the exact reason these sorts of things so offend me, and I keep coming back to the blatant intellectual cowardice of it. After all, ISIS, and the early church fathers, claimed to possess Eternal Truth, delivered into their hands by the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe — and that Eternal Truth is threatened by ancient tokens of erroneous beliefs, and the scribblings of backwater thinkers?

Please. The truth is that the censor is a coward who know he can’t prevail in a fair fight.

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