[set in stone\u00a0by Lynn C. Rees]<\/p>\n
The Internet told\u00a0me Ahmed Shah Masood<\/a>\u00a0was dead.<\/p>\n I was annoyed.<\/p>\n I hated the Taliban. They were the enemy of all mankind<\/a>. My hate didn’t single them out just for Third World thuggishness, seventh century fanboy oppression, or giving aid and comfort to a declared enemy<\/a> of my country. No, my hate singled them out for blowing up some 1,500 year old\u00a0pieces of rock<\/a>.<\/p>\n For 1,000 of those 1,500 years, Islam lived alongside\u00a0the twin\u00a0Buddhas of Bamiyan<\/a>. A\u00a0millennium of entropy, nature, and sporadic\u00a0fits of\u00a0vandalism had ravaged the two Buddhas. But there they stood, as they’d stood for a millennium and a half.<\/p>\n History is fragile: we inherit only suggestive rubble from the past. From that rubble, we summon\u00a0imagined pasts\u00a0without number and without\u00a0foundation. A\u00a0particularly insistent ghost of conjured history drove Taliban iconoclasm: the shadow of the\u00a0umma<\/em>, the idolized but idol-free\u00a0community of believers supposedly created by Muhammad before his death c.\u00a0AD 632. From its antiseptic remove, far from the compromised Islam of March 2001, this stern shade loomed\u00a0down from the heights of 15 centuries and commanded the Taliban to erase\u00a0those two idolatrous Buddhas of Bamiyan from history. The phantom of the\u00a0umma<\/em> promised that, piece by piece of shattered idol, the sanctified\u00a0community of the Prophet would draw nearer and nearer. The ends of March 622 came calling, now armed with the means of March 2001. Dynamite, artillery, and rocketry let the Taliban do in three weeks what history failed to do in fifteen centuries.\u00a0And so the Buddhas of Bamiyan fell.<\/p>\n Meddling in what survives and what doesn’t is unnecessary. History eats\u00a0itself: time, accident, and negligence will devour more history than intention ever aspire to. The Taliban insisted on moving\u00a0history\u00a0along. Moreover, they thought they could not only speed it up but make it flip 180 degrees and run\u00a0backwards. And so the Taliban declared war on history.<\/p>\n To me, this made the Taliban barbarians.\u00a0To me, they too deserved to be erased from history.\u00a0<\/span>The only man who seemed to be actively helping the Taliban exit\u00a0history was Massood. Massood created an island of sanity in a dark hole of crazy. And now Massood was\u00a0gone, sped to Allah by those same barbarians.<\/p>\n Downstairs I went. I ranted about the shame\u00a0of Ahmed Shah Massood’s death to my Mom. She\u00a0had no idea who Ahmed Shah Massood was. She\u00a0didn’t know where Afghanistan was. To her, it was a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom she\u00a0knew nothing. The Massood in Afghanistan might as well have been the Massood in the Moon, fighting to keep one small grubby corner of the lunar surface Taliban-free.<\/p>\n Mom patiently listened as dinner was set. She’d grown used to my ranting on and on and on and on and on and on and on about this or that distant obscurity. She knew I’d fulminate my way out of my\u00a0id\u00e9e fixe<\/em>\u00a0of the moment, then return\u00a0to quietly tending my trivia. The world would go on. Normalcy would again flow unvexed into the future.<\/p>\n She was right. Rant mode ran out of steam. I ate dinner. I went back to my lair,\u00a0where my books and my computers would protect me. I went to sleep. And so the clock\u00a0set on September 9th, 2001.<\/p>\n With murder in its heart, unseen in the gathering\u00a0night, history, thought dead since 1989<\/a>, was creeping up the East Coast to be reborn. And twin towering\u00a0Buddhas and the Lion of Panjshir<\/a> were but\u00a0the first to fall.<\/p>\n A rock<\/a> feels no pain.<\/em> [set in stone\u00a0by Lynn C. Rees] The Internet told\u00a0me Ahmed Shah Masood\u00a0was dead. I was annoyed. I hated the Taliban. They were the enemy of all mankind. My hate didn’t single them out just for Third World thuggishness, seventh century fanboy oppression, or giving aid and comfort to a declared enemy of my country. No, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[579,457],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archaeology","category-black-globalization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52391"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52395,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52391\/revisions\/52395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAnd an island<\/a> never cries.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"