ISIL Destroying Islamic Sites

[The Romulan Republic]

Ebul Nimrud offended the feelings of muslims. Nimrud was obviously islamophobic.

ISIS does not equal Muslims. You are a bigot. Nothing more to say here.

[Dakran]

Ebul Nimrud offended the feelings of muslims. Nimrud was obviously islamophobic.

ISIS does not equal Muslims. You are a bigot. Nothing more to say here.

It seemed to be sarcastic to me...

[Zakuvia]

RIP Hatra.

[The Romulan Republic]

ISIS does not equal Muslims. You are a bigot. Nothing more to say here.

It seemed to be sarcastic to me...

Hard to tell sometimes.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood.

[Zakuvia]

It seemed to be sarcastic to me...

Hard to tell sometimes.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood.

I'd be remiss.

[Salus Maior]

They actually do want to destroy the Kaaba.

This statement surprised me so much that I've spent some time trying to look at it more closely; given what this entails, it's a genuinely shocking claim as destruction of one of the most revered sites across all manifestations of Islam would surely cause outright revulsion across the Muslim world.

The origin of this story seems to rest with an unsubstantiated quote in the Azeri national news agency APA, that was subsequently conditionally reported in the Huffington Post.

Note that the HuffPost story contains this important opening disclaimer:

The Twitter account https://twitter.com/nm8smyh, which sent the original message, has been suspended. The authenticity of the account as belonging to an ISIS member has not been verified.

No mainstream news agency subsequently picked up on the story as far as I can tell; even Fox News restrained themselves to a qualified reference to "an unverified threat to Mecca itself, the holy city in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia where Muslims believe they must make one pilgrimage during their lifetimes, was unprecedented. Allegedly tweeted by a member of the extremist group on a since-suspended account".

Therefore there's no means of verifying whether this one-off quote reported by one of Europe's more obscure news agencies (and apparently missed by every other news agency) is in any way true, or represents some clever anti-ISIS propaganda.

Because if ISIS are threatening to blow up the Kaaba and parts of the Al-Masjid al-Haram, they are openly rejecting a key part of one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and they are no therefore longer Muslims; which is an observation that would surely suit a lot of people.

ಠ_ಠ .... Great Caliphate. A great Caliphate is one that destroys Islam's holy sites, right?

Anyway, in all seriousness, this surprises me so much that I find it very difficult to believe. If it were to come from a verified source, I'd probably put more stock in it.

[Pope Joan]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

If I were local, I would deeply resent that vestigial colonialism.

Britain and France need to repatriate their stolen artifacts.

[Washington Resistance Army]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

If I were local, I would deeply resent that vestigial colonialism.

Britain and France need to repatriate their stolen artifacts.

Maybe after the morons trying to destroy said artifacts are gone.

[Sebastianbourg]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

If I were local, I would deeply resent that vestigial colonialism.

Britain and France need to repatriate their stolen artifacts.

Repatriation is not important at the moment; it can be decided after this matter has been settled. For now, I am glad many artefacts facts are safely stored in European museums where they are immune to the beasts wreaking havoc through the Middle East...

[Salus Maior]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

If I were local, I would deeply resent that vestigial colonialism.

Britain and France need to repatriate their stolen artifacts.

If they hadn't done so those artifacts would be destroyed now.

[Meryuma]

Fuck, this is upsetting.

The spelling 'archeology' and its variants is only used by some branches of the US government and some US university anthropology departments, typically those who embraced a particular theoretical perspective in the 1960s. Almost all US-based professional societies, and the majority of academic institutions, continue to use 'archaeology', however.

Why is English so obsessed with superfluous etymological letters? Foneticized alfabet master race.

"Funettisaizd alfabett" at minimum.

they have said they would destroy even the Kabbah if they reached it (IIRC, their sect holds that religious sites are idolatry).

What the fuck? Nothing "Islamic" about this state, then.

I believe you, but do you have a source?

[Tagmatium]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

If I were local, I would deeply resent that vestigial colonialism.

Britain and France need to repatriate their stolen artifacts.

Maybe not the best time?

Albeit I am just one of the evil English...

[Zakuvia]

Repatriation is fine and dandy when there's the expectation that the relics in question can have their safety vouchsafed, which isn't possible in this.

I find it extremely doubtful that ISIS actually threatened to attack the Kaaba/Mecca. They follow a hyperliteral interpretation of the Quran that would forbid such a thing.

[Kubra]

Fuck, this is upsetting.

Why is English so obsessed with superfluous etymological letters? Foneticized alfabet master race.

"Funettisaizd alfabett" at minimum.

they have said they would destroy even the Kabbah if they reached it (IIRC, their sect holds that religious sites are idolatry).

What the fuck? Nothing "Islamic" about this state, then.

I believe you, but do you have a source?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/0 ... 47635.html
it's a bit dubious

[The Archregimancy]

The CBC broadcast with an archeologist who was devastated by this event revealed that the West had been quickly looting the site and shipping off its contents to places like the Louvre and the British Museum.

Could you clarify this statement, please?

What's the nature of the alleged looting, and when is the alleged looting supposed to have occurred?

Is this contemporary 'looting' or a reference to past activity?

Because whatever British and French antiquarians may have done in the past, I can say with some confidence that neither the modern BM nor the modern Louvre condone 'looting'.

There's an extensive Nimrud collection at the BM, but this largely stems from the perfectly respectable excavations undertaken by Sir Max Mallowan. We might possibly regret that those excavations subsequently resulted in the removal of Nimrud antiquities to the British Museum, but this systematic excavation (with an extensive photographic record from Sir Max's wife Agatha Christie) can't be characterised as 'looting'.

As to repatriation, we can certainly argue over the rights and wrongs of the removal of antiquities from their home country when that country isn't wholly free to make its own decisions. But almost all of the Nimrud Ivories (for example) held in Iraq have been destroyed; whether via the 2003 looting of the National Museum or the accidental American shelling of the bank vault where many National Museum collections were held in the same year, or the destruction of the Mosul Museum's collections earlier this year. The Nimrud Ivories in the British Museum are still intact.

That observation doesn't necessarily make removal of antiquities morally right under the specific circumstances described above, but it certainly adds a layer of moral complexity to the issue.

[Cyrisnia]

Its pretty saddening. As a history enthusiast, its pretty well known that Mesopotamia is almost the cradle of civilization itself.

[The Transcaucasian Democratic Republic]

Its pretty saddening. As a history enthusiast, its pretty well known that Mesopotamia is almost the cradle of civilization itself.

It's not just sad; it's utterly depressing. I wonder how this will affect the Assyrian nationalist sentiment.

[Salus Maior]

Its pretty saddening. As a history enthusiast, its pretty well known that Mesopotamia is almost the cradle of civilization itself.

It's not just sad; it's utterly depressing. I wonder how this will affect the Assyrian nationalist sentiment.

There's Assyrian nationalists? O_o

[Sun Wukong]

It's not just sad; it's utterly depressing. I wonder how this will affect the Assyrian nationalist sentiment.

There's Assyrian nationalists? O_o

I mean... they're not as popular as the Hittite nationalists, but definitely more active then the Gravettian People's Front.

[The Transcaucasian Democratic Republic]

It's not just sad; it's utterly depressing. I wonder how this will affect the Assyrian nationalist sentiment.

There's Assyrian nationalists? O_o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_nationalism

[Salus Maior]

There's Assyrian nationalists? O_o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_nationalism

Neat. Shame there aren't any Assyrian rebels trying to assert their independence like the Kurds. But I suppose that would just create more problems.

[Nazis in Space]

There's Assyrian nationalists? O_o

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_nationalism

Assyrians are really dutch?

[The Archregimancy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_nationalism

Neat. Shame there aren't any Assyrian rebels trying to assert their independence like the Kurds. But I suppose that would just create more problems.

The connection between the Christian groups associated with the ancient Nestorian Church of the East (including the Chaldean Catholics) and ancient Assyria is an entirely modern late 19th-century / early 20th-century one. It has no basis in continuity of culture, and no verifiable basis on continuity of ethnicity; significantly, it's also a specifically Christian ideology, which rather ignores the problem of why local Christian groups should be the only ones to be able to claim continuity with Assyria.

At the risk of oversimplifying, it stems from the fact that by the time the Church of the East was 'rediscovered' by Western Europeans in its Iraqi homeland in the 19th century, it was largely restricted to the geographical heart of the old Assyrian Empire. At the same time, Western Europeans started to explore the archaeological remains of that Empire. The description 'Assyrian Christians' was then given by Western Europeans to the Christian populations of Northern Iraq, but this ignored the fact that the Church of the East had historically been a much broader-based entity that had reach as far as China; its collapse to the mountains of northern Iraq was an entirely post-medieval phenomenon.

The 'Assyrian Christians' then tried to use this connection to argue for an 'Assyrian Christian' state in what's now northern Iraq during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; they hoped that their Christianity would convince Western Europe to support their co-religionists while ignoring the demographic facts on the ground meant that the Christians were a minority just about everywhere in their putative state.

After the formation of Iraq, some Iraqi Christians appropriated Assyrian imagery to argue not just for their own distinctiveness as a people, but to 'prove' their ancient pre-monotheistic connection to Iraqi territory; this at a time where Iraqi nationalism itself often tried to appropriate the imagery of past Mesopotamian civilisations for its own socio-political purposes.

The observation that the basis of a Christian 'Assyrian Nationalism' has absolutely no basis in fact beyond a purely coincidental late post-medieval overlap of territory that wholly ignores the history of Iraqi Christianity doesn't, however, mean that it lacks force and power for the people who profess it; and it's no more or less artificial than any number of nationalisms whose roots lie in the same period.

So writes the co-editor of the forthcoming [probably 2016] University Press of Florida book The Historical Archaeology of Nationalism and National Identity (ie, me).

[United Marxist Nations]

Arch, would I be able to order that book on Amazon? From the title, it sounds really interesting.

[The Archregimancy]

Arch, would I be able to order that book on Amazon? From the title, it sounds really interesting.

When it comes out, probably.

But my (German) co-editor and I are still putting the final touches on the manuscript; I wouldn't expect it to appear imminently, and the publication year is just an estimate. It's not in any formal publication catalogues yet.

In the meantime, you can fill the gap with Lynn Meskell's excellent edited 1998 volume Archaeology Under Fire; Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. There have inevitably been political changes since its publication, but the historical background discussions are still wholly relevant.