Taliban-chopped idols in Kabul Museum
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Kabul, Dec.8 (ANI): A collection of pre-Islamic wooden idols chopped up by the Taliban in 2001 in their drive for a pure Muslim state is back on display in Afghanistan after being restored in a project financed by the Austrian government.
The near life-sized idols, some bearing at least a passing resemblance to the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, went on display this week at the Kabul Museum, which was badly ravaged in Afghanistan’s civil war and Taliban rule until 2001.
The idols come from Kafiristan-literally “Land of the Infidels”-a near legendary region of the majestic Hindu Kush mountain range straddling the borders of eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.
They date back to a period of ancestor worship before the region’s tribes people were forced to follow Islam in the late 19th century and the area became known as Afghanistan’s Nuristan province and Pakistan’s Chitral district.
"I consider this to be a most important collection.
It goes back to the time when that population of Nuristan was not yet Islamised and had their own very traditional beliefs in different gods, ghosts and deities, and this of course was very different to the Islamic culture surrounding the so-called Kafirista Hindu Kush," Professor Mak Klimburg, a retired University of Vienna, told a foreign news agency.
The collection is made up of more than a dozen statues brought back as trophies by the Afghan army from its brutal Islamisation drive in the 1890s. It also includes artifacts collected by Klimburg and returned to Afghanistan in 1978 as a gift from the German government, which had purchased his collection.
The Taliban attempted to destroy the idols because they considered such images an affront to their purist concepts of Islam.
In early 2001, the fundamentalists shocked the world with the extent of their intolerance by blowing up two giant stone Buddhas that had overlooked the central town of Bamiyan for some 1,600 years.
Restoration work on 11 of the wooden figures in the museum’s collection was carried out in May by an Italian-Austrian specialist, Giovanni Rindler. Experts at the Kabul Museum estored three others. (ANI)
