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Author Topic: Saudi royals destroying home of Muhammad
Cueball
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posted 19 August 2005 10:48 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Toronto Star

quote:
In December 1992 a mob of 150,000 Hindu nationalists attacked a 15th-century mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya. Within hours, the mosque was reduced to rubble and in the weeks to follow, thousands of Indians died in Hindu-Muslim riots.

The Muslim world reacted in outrage. Among the countries that expressed anger at the destruction of the centuries-old Indian mosque by Hindu extremists was Saudi Arabia. Here in Canada, imams gave fiery sermons and urged congregations to protest.

Although more than a dozen years have passed since the destruction of the mosque, there is still bitterness in the air. Muslims worldwide feel a sense of betrayal and impotence at not being able to control their own destiny and protect their historical religious sites.

[SNIP]

An eminent Saudi architect, he is a brave man in a country where courage is scarce. Today, he leads a one-man campaign to save the home of Muhammad.

He told the London newspaper, The Independent, "The house where the Prophet received the word of God is gone and nobody cares ... this is the end of history in Mecca and Medina and the end of their future."


The cultural massacre of Islamic heritage sites is not a new phenomenon. It is said that in the last two decades, 95 per cent of Mecca's 1,000-year-old buildings have been demolished. In the early 1920s, the Saudis bulldozed and levelled a graveyard in Medina that housed the graves of the family and companions of Muhammad.


Salafists on the rampage?

[ 19 August 2005: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Mandos
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posted 19 August 2005 11:42 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yep. Plus money. Always money. There's is a *very* modern religious movement in some way. They do not believe that history is relevant to Islam.
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Cueball
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posted 20 August 2005 12:09 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I have posted this quote a few times on this site, but you have reminded me of it, again:

quote:
It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered the difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary because of its appeal to all those whom the new system disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless and, yes, the orphans.

Salman Rushdie


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Boom Boom
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posted 20 August 2005 12:14 AM      Profile for Boom Boom     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Actually the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are a combination of oral and written history, with a whole bunch of other stuff crammed in as well.
From: Make the rich pay! | Registered: Dec 2004  |  IP: Logged
Mandos
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posted 20 August 2005 12:32 AM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I think that Rushdie is the wrong messenger for any such message, and I think that there are strawmen in that text that have been discussed by the likes of, say, Edward Said. Denying Qur'anic hermeneutics is essentially a modern phenomenon, as modern as Salafism is.
From: There, there. | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 20 August 2005 04:31 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What is the matter with Rushdie's message?
From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
ephemeral
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posted 20 August 2005 11:50 PM      Profile for ephemeral     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
cueball, this thread has brought back memories as a kid. i remember hearing about the destruction of the babri masjid, and i remember being amazed that it had been destroyed by bare hands in a few hours. how intense the anger of the hindus must have been. i was raised roman catholic in a largely indian community, one of my two closest friends was a hindu from gujarat and the other was a muslim from bengal. we weren't even teenagers yet, and dreamed often of a secular world where all religions are tolerated and world peace and all that rubbish that we were too young to realize would never materialize in the real world. and i remember us 3 little ones feeling incredibly hurt and confused by the behaviour of our parents and our friends' parents. the adult hindus forbade us from talking to the muslim kids, and vice-versa. everybody was waiting to see whose side the christians would take. and we just couldn't understand why it was okay for us to be friends all these years, and then, one day, a political party's actions that had nothing to do with us destroyed so many friendships.

more on topic, i don't like the angle that this toronto star article has been written in. the article makes a very simplistic comparison to the ayodhya incident without saying anything about the history behind the babri masjid. in my opinion, that makes it an invalid comparison. or perhaps, just biased, seeing how the article might have been written by a muslim (muslim sounding name). the mosque in ayodhya replaced a hindu temple many centuries ago. its location is a point of dispute between hindus and muslims - however, an archealogical survey found the remains of a temple buried underneath where the mosque had been. the mosque itself was a symbol of muslim cultural imperialism, and the reactions to its destruction are all a symbol of muslim self-righteousness and cultural imperialism. it is a symbol of how people who have a religious faith typically become convinced of their own 'greater' goodness, and of how nothing they do can be 'wrong'. yes, they can even destroy their own symbols of culture because it is theirs to destroy and nobody can condemn them for it. the saudi royal family has no need for money from foreign land developers, yet they've always been a greedy lot. i'm not surprised that they would destroy the home of the prophet muhammad for money.

why aren't many muslims speaking up against the parking lot and hotels? i feel that it has a great deal to do with the saudi royal family being one of the worst dictators in the middle east. people live in constant fear in saudi arabia. how could anybody have the courage to protest the actions of the royal family? and what good would it do? they would only have their heads chopped off.

another factore (and this one drives me absolutely nutty) is westernization. not just the western corporate powers push to expand all over the fucking world, but the desire of asian and middle-eastern countries to ape the west. to look like the west, to have the modern riches that the west appears to have. the modern riches that catch their eyes are shopping malls. high rises. and naturally, where there's a shopping mall, there must be huge parking lots. there was a beeeaauuutiful souk (food market) in abu dhabi, UAE that was a perfect example of arab culture and architecture. it was a lively and bustling place, run by the locals and it was a major tourist attraction. it broke my heart to learn that it has recently been replaced by a shopping mall. yuck.

[ 21 August 2005: Message edited by: ephemeral ]


From: under a bridge with a laptop | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged
aRoused
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posted 21 August 2005 01:27 AM      Profile for aRoused     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An interject an archaeologist's perspective..ephemeral has already touched on some of these points.

This story, while tragic, is, frankly, nothing new to me whatsoever.

Or rather, it's yet another page in the book of sites of historical, ethnographic, archaeological, and world significance that have been wiped out by the wheels of 'progress'. Don't get me wrong, in the right light I'm probably beyond the curve in terms of advancing development, yay windfarms and all that, but to treat this like some endemic and solely Muslim problem is purest ignorance. Your convenient highway across Canada? It probably involved blitzing a few buried Indian villages out of the way, along with any evidence we might have found of their ways of life prior to European contact.

In this particular case, Mecca is no different from London, except that the UK has stricter planning regulations.

What we're seeing here is a fight between development (to catch up with the world that you and I both live in), and preserving the past (which frequently stands squarely in the way of that development). We kid ourselves that we managed to get up the industrialization curve 'without destroying our heritage'. Bullshit. We blitzed our heritage, our archaeological sites both above and below ground 150 years ago when we threw up steam engines, railways and turnpikes all over the land. Now we arrogate to ourselves some kind of authority to say to other countries: You can't wreck that, it belongs to the WORLD.

Well, yeah, it does belong to the world. So did all the irreplaceable archaeological and historical sites and buildings that got torn down by enthusiastic Victorian excavators, but, hey, that's acceptable losses because it happened in the past, right? Fuck that shit.

I'm not saying this is okay, I'm just trying to put it into perspective: we are arrogating to ourselves some right to say 'You don't know how to deal with your archaeology, you just step back, little brown man and let the big tough white folks handle that for you, we know best'. At the same time, we say to them 'You gotta *develop*, little brown man, otherwise you won't be *competitive*, and the money'll go elsewhere'.

What choice would you make in those circumstances? Feed your kids? Or save the old disused church from the bulldozers? I think I'd choose my kids.

Now I have to go sleep, I need to be on site, excavating what may be the economic and religious heart of Iron Age Orkney tomorrow at 9:30.

[ 21 August 2005: Message edited by: aRoused ]


From: The King's Royal Burgh of Eoforwich | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged
Hephaestion
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posted 21 August 2005 08:44 AM      Profile for Hephaestion   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
This Torstar article is a re-hash of a Yahoo news article (which I THINK was ripped off from Reuters) from a couple of months ago, which I posted about on babble 'way back then (and which I'm too lazy to dig up a link for.) Nevertheless, it desrves to come to public attention yet again. It's not JUST the Taliban who's guilty of desecrating valuable international historic and cultural sites. (Ohhh! But the House of Saud are our "friends", right? Well then... that makes a difference! Right....?)
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ephemeral
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posted 21 August 2005 09:26 AM      Profile for ephemeral     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
it's a tragic shame to tear down culture and history only to replace it with someone else's culture. however, i have to say this because tarek fateh referred to new construction as ugly. the arab countries like UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia are so rich, they can afford to bring in the best architects from around the world, and buildings go up with incredible speed. there are few pieces of modern architecture in these countries that can be called ugly, and maybe even that's an exagerrated description. perhaps disappointing. modern architecture in these arab countries is some of the best you'll find in the entire world, extremely creative and breath-taking. beautiful works of engineering. but still, that's no reason to replace their ancient heritage with the west's shopping mall culture. it's also bad for tourism, i tell ya.
From: under a bridge with a laptop | Registered: Apr 2005  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
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posted 21 August 2005 09:50 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Such an interesting discussion all round.

quote:
I'm not saying this is okay, I'm just trying to put it into perspective: we are arrogating to ourselves some right to say 'You don't know how to deal with your archaeology, you just step back, little brown man and let the big tough white folks handle that for you, we know best'. At the same time, we say to them 'You gotta *develop*, little brown man, otherwise you won't be *competitive*, and the money'll go elsewhere'.

aRoused, I know this to be especially true, although where those two forms of Western condescension come into conflict, as they sometimes do, the archaeologists are hardly a match for the guys who drive the IMF, are they. I'm thinking, eg, of the archaeologists who were left staring in disbelief at the USian invaders in Iraq who left sites and monuments and archives to be plundered in the chaos while protecting the energy ministries and the gold.

Ok, so tell me: which settlement was the economic and religious heart of Iron Age Orkney? ie: where are you? Ring of Brogar?


From: gone | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Hephaestion
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posted 21 August 2005 10:09 AM      Profile for Hephaestion   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's cultural imperialism. No more, no less.
From: goodbye... :-( | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged

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