Tears for the Mosque

A student came in before class last night and said, “Did you hear that they bombed a shrine in Iraq?” The question froze me in my tracks. We had just been discussing how Saddam Hussein placed troops, equipment and explosives next to the ziggurats of ancient Sumeria, knowing how the world cherished them. My worst fears flared at his question—was it the White Temple of Uruk? The ziggurat of Ur? Images of the blasted Buddha in Afghanistan as a pile of rubble flashed through my mind’s eye.

When he said it was the Shiite Muslim mosque that had already suffered the loss of its famous golden dome, I felt guilty that I was relieved. Why lash out at a mosque anyway? It sickened my heart because we seem to learn nothing from history. We universally scorn the ignorance we see in the errors of the past, so who are the people that continue to commit such shockingly ignorant acts?

Art history is full of evidence revealing the destruction possible by retribution and hatred. Whenever we study the Head of an Akkadian Ruler, the gouged eyes and scarred metal tell of moments when anger and vengeance left their mark on art. The revolting reprisals of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar shock us today. They razed cities with fire or rerouted rivers and melted them. The destruction was brutal and staggering.

The British soldiers must have so much contempt and scorn for Egypt and her peoples’ accomplishments that they wantonly used the face of the sphinx for target practice. Was this a case of “my empire is bigger than yours?” How big is the British Empire today?

But there’s another equally destructive human characteristic that has done its share of devastation. It’s stupidity. Until the 17th century the world could see the incredibly beautiful Parthenon in Athens much like it existed when the Greeks built it around 450 bce. But in 1687 the Ottoman Turks cleverly used it as a gunpowder magazine and a stray Venetian mortar set it off.

Because there continue to be shocking, unthinkable stories assailing me every day, I find myself retreating more and more into the past. But obviously even in the past, there’s no escaping the ugliness that humans are capable of.