Northeast African Kingdoms

Reconstructing the rich cultural heritage of African civilizations is often a difficult task, given their destruction and near obliteration by invading Islamic armies in the seventh, eighth, and later centuries. Islam forbids the representative arts; this led to wholesale destruction of paintings, frescos, mosaics, sculptures, and other artworks.

The flourishing of Nubian, Ethiopic, and Coptic cultures was abruptly cut off by the conquering Muslims. Many Africans were forced to abandon their native religions and languages.

In the southernmost areas of Africa, animism, a pre-religious or proto-religious system, was a common belief. Northeastern Africa had embraced Judaism and Christianity.

The Africans had paid dearly for this choice. Roman domination had persecuted the Christians and Jews, and many of them lost their lives.

It is worth emphasizing that Christianity and Judaism were at home in Africa. They were well-established there before they ever appeared in Europe. When European explorers entered Africa, they encountered a Christian tradition there which was much older than their own.

The Africans brought Judaism into Ethiopia sometime before 800 B.C., and Christianity was a native belief system by 50 A.D.

Some measure of relief arrived when the Roman persecution stopped in the early 300s A.D.

As these cultures grew over the centuries, historian Basil Davidson notes, civilization grew and “in the Sixth Century emerged the glories of Christian Nubia.” The “Christian kingdoms of ancient Nubia” had five centuries of momentum behind them, and “have left behind some proofs of their achievements.”

Notably, texts written in Nubian go back to the 700s A.D., just before the destructive Islamic invasions which wiped out so many of the Nubian cultural artifacts. Nubian is one of the oldest written African languages.

Centuries older than Christianity in Europe, “the kingdoms of Christian Nubia” received representatives from the Byzantine Empire. The visitors found a functioning Christian community, much to the surprise “of monks from Constantinople.”

Nubia already had a functioning ecclesiastical hierarchy since the 300s, when records show that a bishop was installed. Julian, a Byzantine monk, established communications between Constantinople and Nubia around 543 A.D.

A century after Julian's arrival, Egypt was overrun by Muslim Arabs, and Nubia was all but cut off from the rest of the Christian world. For 600 years its kings and bishops, contemporaries of the kings and bishops building the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, were practically unknown to that Empire, and had only themselves to rely on for faith and reassurance. To the north lay Muslim Egypt.

Living under the constant threat of Islamic invasions, Nubia and Ethiopia continued to develop their civilizations. The Copts in Egypt gradually assumed the role of an oppressed minority under Muslim domination.

It was the proximity of Egypt that eventually brought on the Nubian kingdoms' downfall.

At first, it seemed that Ethiopia and Nubia might work out a peaceful coexistence with the Islamic colonies and thus share the continent. The Fatimid dynasty, which initially ruled the territories conquered by the invading armies, allowed the Africans to retain some of their native culture, religion, and language.

Although an oppressed group, the Nubians and Ethiopians kept some sense of their identity. But when the Fatimid dynasty lost power, even this bit of ethnic distinctness was threatened:

Egypt under its Fatimid rulers accepted the Nubian Christians under sufferance, just as it accepted the Coptic Christians within its own borders. But in the 12th Century the Fatimids were ousted by the Saracens, Muslims of a more militant cast, who invaded Egypt from Syria under their powerful leader Saladin.

The Saracens did not want to tolerate any significant cultural practice of the native African religions. Solidifying their hold on Egypt, the soon looked to expand.

Egypt was governed during this time by the Mamluks, a type of military warrior caste, which emphasized its aggressiveness in imposing Islam on neighboring nations. Basil Davidson notes that

The Saracen rulers of Egypt soon moved south to deal with the Christians nearer home. In 1276 they placed their own nominee on the throne of Nobatia, the most northerly of the Nubian kingdoms. Makuria, the middle kingdom, held out for another century, and Alodia, southernmost of the Christian trio, was not engulfed by Islam until the 15th Century.

In Nubia and in most of Ethiopia, “Christian times were over.” African Jews were also forced to stop practicing their way of life, and the Mamluks forced Islam upon the local populations. There was an exception:

Far away, at the other end of the Red Sea, however, another branch of African Christianity lived on undefeated. Ethiopia, whose King Ezana had put down the Red and Black Noba in the Fourth Century, had become officially Christian with Ezana's conversion. But its legendary contact with Christianity was rooted much further back in time, in the Biblical story of the Queen of Sheba, who went up from Ethiopia to King Solomon's Jerusalem "with a very great train, with camels that bear spices, and very much gold and precious stones." King Solomon fell in love with her, and gave her a son. That son, Menelik, became a famous Ethiopian ruler and founded the line of the Lion of Judah, from whom the current ruler, the Emperor Haile Selassie, claims to be descended.

Ethiopia’s Jewish and Christian communities were some of the oldest, not only in Africa, but in the entire world. For centuries, both faiths had flourished there, peaceably, side-by-side.

Now the Islamic armies set their sights on Ethiopia. The Ethiopians were not parochial or provincial:

Like their Kushite contemporaries at Meroe, these early Ethiopians were an enterprising lot. They welcomed merchants from Greek-ruled Egypt, and their principal port, Adulis, soon became a major point of interchange for goods from the Mediterranean, Arabia and the eastern lands of the Indian Ocean. Their trading contacts extended far down the African coast, and they made expeditions into the inner African lands. By the Second Century A.D. they had built a strong state behind the coastal hills, with a capital at Axum. It was from Axum that King Ezana rode north to punish the Noba.

Ethiopia grew and flourished economically, politically, and culturally. It became an intellectual center, with scholars producing texts in Ge’ez, the literary language of the land.

As a center of learning, Ethiopia was home to acknowledged specialists in Judaism and Christianity. Ge’ez texts are still studied in universities today.

Axum remained the chief power in the region washed by the southern Red Sea until the Eighth Century, leaving behind as monuments to its majesty tall needles of masonry and finely wrought gold coins. Merchants of Axum and Adulis, wrote an Alexandrian merchant in about 523, traded as far as Ceylon and sold their ivory in Persia, Arabia, India and Byzantium. Their merchant vessels were so famous that a Mesopotamian poet used them to describe the progress of a royal caravan: it forged ahead, he said, like one of the ships of Adulis, whose "prow cuts through the foam of the water as a gambler divides the dust with his hand." In 531 the same Julian who ministered to the Nubians was sent by the Emperor Justinian to the Axumite court. He reported that the King received him dressed in a linen garment embroidered with gold and set with pearls, and that the royal throne was a gilded chariot drawn by four elephants; flutes played during his audience.

The emergence of Ge’ez as the scholarly language of Ethiopia included the development of a new alphabet. By contrast, Nubian texts used a modified Greek alphabet.

The script is syllabic in nature, with each character representing the sound of a consonant-vowel combination.

Greek was still officially the language of this court, but Sixth Century Axum was in the process of acquiring a literary language of its own, Geez. The New Testament had already been translated into it — probably by a group of Syrian monks, since the text was based not on the Bible used in Alexandria, but on the one used in Antioch, in Syria.

This scholarship, however, also made Ethiopia a target for Islamic armies. One by one, the countries which bordered on Ethiopia fell to the Muslim invaders.

With the rise of Islam the history of the Axumite empire becomes obscure. Cut off from the rest of the Christian world even more completely than the Nubians to the north, the Ethiopians struggled to survive against Muslims.

Isolated and on the defensive, Ethiopia further developed its own culture. Both the spirituality and the architecture which housed it reflected a native African faith, harkening back to, and preserving, a Christianity which was at home in Africa before any form of it arrived in Europe.

For a long time nothing was heard but a confused and distant clash of arms. When the world at large took note of Axum again, it had been transformed. Its spiritual loyalties were still vibrantly Christian, but it was now a Christianity deep-rooted in the Ethiopian soil. In the 12th Century one of its most famous kings, Lalibela, presided over the construction of some of the most unusual religious structures in the world — a series of 10 chapels and churches, dark-aisled and pillared, hewn out of the living rock in the mountains of Lasta near his capital of Roha.

Ethiopia maintained, for centuries, ties to the oppressed Coptic Christians in Egypt who suffered under the occupying Islamic armies who dominated the native African populations.

Ethiopia was loyal to the Coptic bishops in Alexandria and refused to change. It was loyal to other old ways, too. "In this feudal country," wrote two French travelers, the brothers D’Abbadie, in the 1830s, "men are united by an infinity of ties which would count for nothing in Europe. They live together in reciprocal dependence and solidarity which they value highly and consider a matter of pride, and which influence all they do." A man with no fixed obligation to his society was "in their eyes outside the social order."

The forms of Christianity and Judaism which were native to Africa and which had been preserved in Ethiopia were not tied to a rigid social structure, but rather to an ethic of mutual interdependence.

Historians have called many of these African societies ‘stateless’ and this lack of structure encouraged, and was encouraged by, the native African spirituality, which preserved early and original forms of Christianity and Judaism.

Morality was determined by social service; each man had a moral duty to serve the group. This sense of identity with the social group lay at the root not only of complex societies like Ethiopia, but of primitive societies that had no apparent structure at all.

The high degree of freedom found in these “stateless societies” functioned as an incubator for spiritual activity and accounts, in part, for the deep roots which the native African forms of Judaism and Christianity were able to establish.

Ethiopia, which not quite “stateless,” maintained a relatively great degree of freedom, especially in contrast to some European states of the same era, which encouraged the scholarly and intellectual development of Ethiopic Judaism and Christianity.

Nazi Leadership

The party which would eventually come to be called the ‘Nazi’ party was formed by Anton Drexler in 1919. Adolf Hitler did not participate in the party’s founding, but would join it later that year.

Ironically, Hitler first became informed about the party because he was directed to spy on it. He soon found himself in agreement with party and joined it.

When Hitler met Ernst Röhm (also written ‘Roehm’), it proved to be a pivotal moment. Hitler would rise within the party to be its foremost orator and to cast its policy direction. Röhm would be the key administrator, organizer, and ‘enforcer’ when physical violence was needed.

Originally named the German Workers’ Party, it would merge with another small group and rename itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party: die National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, abbreviated as NSDAP. Because all of this took a while to say, the shorter nickname Nazi soon caught on. Historian Marshall Dill writes:

In mid-1919 Hitler got a job with the army as a sort of political training official to keep the men away from left-wing infection and to investigate new political groups that were spawning. Here he came in contact with the general in command in Bavaria, Major General Ritter von Epp, later to became Hitler’s agent (Statthalter) in Bavaria; and with Captain Ernst Röhm, one of the most important figures in the early days of the Nazis. Röhm was a swashbuckling freebooter, happy only when fighting or in the company of fighting men, but nevertheless a person of real administrative and organizational ability. As one of his routine duties, Hitler was told in September 1919 to attend and report on a meeting of a new, small party called the German Workers’ party.

In October 1921, Röhm formalized his band of thugs into the party’s “Storm Troopers” or “Assault Division” - the Sturmabteilung or Sturmtruppen, abbreviated SA. This group used physical violence to intimidate competing political parties, and to intimidate rivals for power inside the party.

Known also as the “Brown Shirts” (Braunhemden), Röhm dedicated the group to Hitler, who soon came to control the party. For four years, Hitler and Röhm led the party.

By 1925, however, frictions had developed between the two. Hitler wanted to use the electoral process in addition to physical intimidation, while Röhm focused almost exclusively on violence. Hitler was not willing to form coalitions with other, similar, parties; Röhm was.

Eventually Röhm resigned from his job as leader of the SA. He left the country for several years.

By January 1931, Hitler wanted Röhm back in command of the SA. Röhm was key to the final push which enabled the Nazis to seize power in early 1933.

Within a year after grabbing power, however, frictions between Hitler and Röhm emerged again. Hitler came to see Röhm as causing several problems: Röhm’s passion for things military clouded his vision to Hitler’s notion of the proper relation between the army and the political power structure; Röhm lacked the nuances required to manage the internal tensions surrounding economic socialism within the party; and Röhm’s hotheadedness and unpredictability would get in the way of Hitler’s careful management of the events which would be triggered by the immanent death of Hindenburg.

This time, Hitler acted more decisively. Röhm, and other leaders of the SA, would be murdered. Their thoughts of subjugating the regular army to the SA would ended, and their erratic behavior would not get in the way of Hitler’s fine-tuning of political events. Marshall Dill explains:

June 30, 1934, was the blood-soaked day. The events of the blood purge, as the night of the long knives as it is sometimes called, are familiar. On June 29 Hitler and Goebbels flew from the Rhineland to Munich. During the night they arrested a number of S.A. leaders. In the early morning they drove to Roehm’s hotel, where they found him still in bed. Some of his companions were shot on the spot. Roehm and others were returned to Munich, where they were shot as the day went on.

Ever the master manipulator, Hitler kept the true nature of the internal frictions, and the internal purge, hidden, and presented a different narrative to the public. He claimed that Röhm had planned to overthrow him.

Two weeks later on July 13, 1934, Hitler called together the Reichstag to hear his version of the purge. He gave a long speech in which he alleged that Roehm had been planning a coup to depose him and thus had forced him into violence. He attacked the behavior of the S.A. leaders, stressing Roehm’s homosexuality, of which he must have known for years. Hitler promised that the revolution was over.

Thus Hitler was willing to murder one of his long-term associates and friends. Röhm had worked closely with him since the earliest days of the party.

It became clear that nobody within the Nazi power structure was ever truly safe. Hitler had fraternized with Röhm in a friendly way, and then had him executed.

Geopolitical Factors Surrounding the South China Sea

When people in the United States consider the situation among the nations which encircle the South China Sea, it is important that they shed the interpretive lens of ideological conflict.

Americans have tended to view international conflict as a matter of differing worldviews: WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and the Islamic aggression of recent years have all been seen this way. Whether or not such an understanding is correct for those wars, it is, Robert Kaplan argues, not correct for understanding the matters surrounding the South China Sea.

To the contrary, Kaplan asserts, relations between the states in that part of the world are based purely on the calculation of power. Metternich’s power politics and Bismarck’s Realpolitik are at work in the western Pacific.

There are no philosophical questions to ponder in this new and somewhat sterile landscape of the twenty-­first century. It is all about power; the balance of power mainly. While the language at Asian summits will be soft, the deployment of warships in disputed seas will be hard. Military engagements on land involve occupation of civilian populations, which lead often to human rights violations, so that foreign policy becomes a branch of Holocaust studies. But the application of sea power is a purely military matter. Unless shelling on shore is involved, the dead are usually all in naval uniform, and thus there are no victims per se. In the early twenty-­first century, the South China Sea will continue to be at the heart of geopolitics, reminiscent of Central Europe in the twentieth century. But unlike Central Europe it will not constitute an intellectual or journalistic passion.

While Wilson’s slogan encouraged Americans to view WWI as a moral conflict - Wilson himself probably didn’t believe that - the belligerent nations in WWI were more realistic about their motives. This same dynamic may be at work when Americans view southeast Asia.

The nations bordering the South China Sea do not quarrel about democracy or human rights. They are competing in economic and military matters. This is somewhat difficult for American media to accept. There may not be a profound social or moral issue in which to frame the tensions between China, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

The separation of geopolitics from human rights issues, which were conjoined in the twentieth century in Europe, plus the degree of abstraction that surrounds the naval domain in any case, will help make the South China Sea the realm of policy and defense analysts, rather than of the intellectuals and the media elite. Realism, which is consciously amoral, focused as it is on interests rather than on values in a debased world, will therefore triumph. This is how the South China Sea will come to symbolize a humanist dilemma.

The question is whether the United States, and other global powers, will be able to recalibrate its thinking about international conflicts, and be able to frame some of them in terms apart from moral or social issues. A sober Realpolitik practitioner assesses, avoids, or engages in conflict based on a calculation of power, not on an evaluation of worldviews.

While some of the domestic policies of these nations are doubtless classic cases of questions about human rights and natural law - think of Tiananmen Square or North Korea - the foreign diplomacy of these nations, Robert Kaplan argues, is not and cannot be evaluable from a standpoint of humanistic values.

The great exception to this line of argument is the environment. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 took place in the vicinity of the South China Sea and claimed more victims than the Iraq War. Even absent global warming, the normal variations of climate and seismic activity in environmentally fragile areas, combined with continued absolute rises in coastal populations, will virtually guarantee occasional humanitarian disasters around the South China Sea in coming decades. Navies will need to respond. By responding in the grandiose manner that it did to the Indian Ocean tsunami, the U.S. military, led by an aircraft carrier strike group, applied soft power in a way that augmented its hard power. Namely, humanitarian assistance to Indonesia led to resumed ties with the Indonesian military that the United States had not enjoyed for years. The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media’s distorting mirror. The experts will follow naval movements in these waters regularly, while the media will lavish prime-­time attention on the region only in cases of natural catastrophe. But even in the midst of such catastrophes, in comparison to twentieth-century Europe, the human rights angle will be muted because while there will be victims, there will be no villains, except of course for Mother Nature. And without villains, moral choice that distinguishes between good and evil cannot operate, meaning that in a philosophical sense there will be comparatively little drama.

The climate of the region, apart from any allegedly anthropogenic influences, always has been, and always will be, such that tsunamis and other natural disasters will strike from time to time. These will give the United States a chance to demonstrate goodwill by using its navy for humanitarian purposes. This is worth doing, because it buys a certain amount of reciprocal goodwill toward the United States. It is also important not to overestimate that amount.

But such natural disasters, and the humanitarian responses to them, do not change the essentially Bismarckian and Machiavellian nature of power politics in the region.

To conduct an amoral foreign policy is not to conduct an immoral foreign policy. An amoral policy in this sense is simply a realization that a situation may not involve moral factors. The choice, e.g., between vanilla ice cream and strawberry ice cream is not a moral one, and is made with reference to non-moral, or amoral, factors.

The lesson of the South China Sea today, and of WWI a century earlier, may be that ideological, moral, ethical, and social considerations are salutary for shaping domestic policy, but, at least in some situations, an amoral Realpolitik is the most practical and most successful method for foreign policy.

Thucydides, Machiavelli, and China

To understand the dynamics of the nations which border the South China Sea, historian Robert Kaplan gives us analogies. First, he mentions Thucydides; second, he cites Machiavelli.

In his famous book, which primarily recounts the events of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides includes an account known as the ‘Melian Dialogue’ which summarizes discussions between representatives of the island of Melos and representatives of the city of Athens.

The Athenians present an ultimatum to the Melians: surrender and become subjects of Athens, or suffer a massive attack by the superior Athenian military. In the context of the war (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.), the Melian dialogue reveals the naked lust for power which motivates Athens.

The Athenians refuse even to attempt a justification of their actions, simply pointing to their superior power. The Melians find themselves unable to move the Athenians by any moral or rhetorical appeal.

Robert Kaplan argues that China’s superiority, by any and every metric, relative to Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and other nations around the South China Sea, allows China to simply state its terms and ignore any attempt at negotiation.

The only factor at work is the balance of power, and the only significant change in this balance happens if, or when, the United States takes a side. Otherwise, the nations of the western Pacific are at the mercy of China, and China doesn’t have much mercy:

The moral drama that does occur will take the form of austere power politics, of the sort that leaves many intellectuals and journalists numb. Imagine the Melian Dialogue from the Fifth Book of Thucydides, but without the killing of the Melian menfolk, and without the enslavement of the children and womenfolk that followed — ­and that provided for the tragedy in the first place. In this revised Melian Dialogue for the twenty-­first century: the Athenians, Greece’s preeminent sea power, tell the Melians that while Athens is strong, Melos is weak, and therefore must submit. As Thucydides writes, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Thus, the Melians give in without violence. This will be China’s undeclared strategy, and the weaker countries of Southeast Asia may well bandwagon with the United States to avoid the Melians’ fate: in other words, power politics, almost mathematical in its abstractions, without war.

Turning from Thucydides to Machiavelli, Kaplan points out that the South China Sea area might hold the possibility of realistic improvement regarding global conflict. Such conflict, he argues, is inevitable. We can, however, he learns from Machiavelli, manage it.

Accepting some form of war as unavoidable - for this is what it means to be human - Kaplan hopes that massive civilian casualties can be reduced or nearly eliminated, especially in the context of a naval war. Given that human nature is what it is - imperfect and flawed - managed warfare might leave room for simultaneous constructive social activity.

Attempting to avoid the extremes of a jaundiced cynicism on the one hand, and of a naive idealism on the other, Kaplan hopes to find a realistic middle in this concept of managed warfare. Whether or not he succeeds, the reader may determine:

The Cold War excepted, the South China Sea presages a very different form of conflict than the ones to which we have become accustomed from World War I to Iraq and Syria. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, we have been traumatized by massive and conventional land engagements on one hand, and dirty, irregular small wars on the other. Because both kinds produced colossal civilian casualties, war, as I’ve said, has been the subject of humanists as well as of generals. But in the future we just might see a purer form of conflict (at least in East Asia), limited to the naval realm, with little for the intellectual journals of opinion to chew over: like the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but without the prospect of land warfare. This is a positive scenario. For conflict cannot be eliminated from the human condition. A theme in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is that conflict, properly controlled, is more likely to lead to human progress than rigid stability. A sea crowded with warships does not contradict an era of great human progress for Asia.

The South China Sea will be the stage for - peaceful or belligerent - significant international events in the decades to come. The dynamics are complex, because the competitors are not merely bilateral but multilateral.

In some cases, a region of sea or an island is simultaneously claimed and coveted by three or more states. The waterways are the routes for a significant percentage of global trade.

China overshadows the region, and the smaller nations, even if allied with each other, are clearly the weaker party. To achieve some balance of power - echoes of Metternich? - other countries would need to ally themselves with the smaller Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, etc., against China.

The United States, while the most obvious third party, is not the only possible one. India has enough economic clout and the economic interest to make an impact in the region if it chooses, although its military would need to be upgraded for the purpose.

Should Japan, South Korea, or Russia choose to ally themselves in the matter, they also would make significant difference. The European Union and the UK would almost certainly choose not to take part.

Whichever configuration emerges, diplomats will work to calculate the balance of power and adjust accordingly. If they do so accurately, actual armed conflict might be avoided.

ISIS Attacks Arts

The group known as ISIS is responsible for mass beheadings: killing unarmed and innocent civilians merely because they identified themselves as followers of Jesus. But who or what is ISIS?

The name, an acronym, has variations: ISIS is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while ISIL is the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and IS is simply the Islamic State. All three acronyms are found in publications.

The word ‘Levant’ refers to the area of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.

In addition to setting up a worldwide caliphate and slaughtering people who follow Jesus, ISIS hopes to purge world cultures of what it finds to be ‘immoral’ or ‘degenerate’ influences, primarily artistic.

To this end, ISIS has undertaken large-scale destruction of sculptures, architecture, and paintings. This is based on an Islamic belief that any form of representative art is evil.

Representative art is an image or sculpture which depicts people, plants, animals, or inanimate objects. Non-representative art, such as abstract patterns, is allowed by Islamic law.

Museum curators and conservators of art around the world are concerned about the priceless works of art being destroyed by Islamic groups. CNN reports that

Sturt W. Manning is director of the Cornell Institute of Archeology and Material Studies and chair of the Department of Classics at Cornell University.

Like other historians, Manning laments the loss of historic artifacts. He notes that ISIS is not only motivated by the Islamic hatred of images. ISIS is also motivated by a desire to destroy history itself: to destroy the record of the past. Manning writes that ISIS

seeks to destroy the record of the past. In the past week, video has circulated showing absurdly dressed figures wielding rather new-looking sledgehammers and destroying archaeological objects in the Mosul Museum.

By destroying information about history, ISIS hopes to keep the populace in ignorance. People who know about the past are able to view the present in an informed context.

ISIS hopes, borrowing a tactic from the North Korean government, to keep the population in an ‘information vacuum.’ An uninformed population is easier to manipulate. Thus, for example,

ISIS has been busy trying to damage the famed Nergal Gate entry to the ancient city of Nineveh - a city with a history reaching back thousands of years - and most recently it is reportedly bulldozing the site of Nimrud, capital of the 9th-century B.C. Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II, and source of the famed Nimrud ivories. These ivories were first cleaned by none other than Agatha Christie while accompanying her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, during his excavation.

The Taliban, an ideological cousin of ISIS, destroyed 1500-year-old Buddhist sculptures in Bamyan in Afghanistan. ISIS destroyed the tomb of Jonah in Iraq. Islamic detestation of art, and Islamist enforcement of Sharia law, is responsible for the loss of these historic Bamiyan Buddha carvings and for the loss of Jonah’s tomb.

ISIS and its Islamo-fascist ideology control people most effectively when they live in a historical vacuum: when they have little or no information about other people, other times, and other cultures. Sturt Manning writes:

All attacks on archaeological sites and artifacts are brutal assaults on our collective human memory. They deprive us of the evidence of human endeavors and achievements.

The memory that Iraq was once Babylonia, home to the rich cultural heritage of Babylon and its empire, is a threat to ISIS. The heritage of the civilization which inhabited this region before Islam invaded in the 700s is a heritage which ISIS wants to forget.

Likewise, Persia was a great empire, a civilization with a magnificent culture, prior to Muslim invasions which began to erase that artistic and literary tradition. ISIS wants to erase the humanistic traditions of the Ancient Near East.

The destruction eloquently speaks of the human folly and senseless violence that drives ISIS. The terror group is destroying the evidence of the great history of Iraq; it has to, as this history attests to a rich alternative to its barbaric nihilism.

Through a long and winding historical development, the intellectual foundations of legal systems laid in the Ancient Near East led to modern Western Civilization. The law codes of Hammurabi and Moses led to English Bill of Rights of 1689 and to other documents about the rule of law and individual political liberty.

The general Islamic prohibition against representative artworks is merely a special case of a broader desire to erase a collective human memory of a long struggle toward individual freedom.

Ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, is at the heart of the human story: home of the first cities, states and empires. The law Code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon over 3,700 years ago, is the first great legal text of the world; it begins a heritage leading to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

Yet ISIS is willing to betray its own ideology, and violate its own Islamic law: the few artworks it does not destroy, it is willing to sell on the black market to raise funding for weapons. Sturt Manning notes that the activities of ISIS

are dishonest and hypocritical: the same ISIS also is busy looting archaeological sites to support its thriving illegal trade in antiquities, causing further incalculable harm.

ISIS has explicitly stated its goals for forming a caliphate, and has targeted Greece, Spain, and Austria, among other nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. If ISIS should succeed in its goals, then the outcomes would be predictable: the destruction of paintings and sculptures by a range of artists from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Botticelli to Caravaggio, from Dürer to Dali.

In July 2014, French police detected, and foiled, an Islamist plot to bomb the Louvre and destroy it. ISIS will certainly continue to target art museums and other cultural treasures.

Ethiopia's Ancient Faith

Ethiopia has one of Africa's most ancient and most civilized cultures. Scientists study texts written in an Ethiopian language called Ge'ez to learn more about the advances made by this society.

Early in its history, Ethiopia was home to large numbers of Jews. Later, they were joined by many Jesus followers. Characterized by a diversity of beliefs, the nation developed to advanced levels of civilizations. Albert Collver writes:

Christianity has been in Ethiopia for nearly 2,000 years. It became the state religion in 330 A.D. when Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria sent a bishop to Ethiopia, resulting in the birth of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and it remains the predominant religion to this day.

The peaceful coexistence of these faith communities was threatened by Muslim armies, which attempted to impose Islam on the Ethiopians. The nation courageously resisted, with significant results: currently, approximately 34% of Ethiopia is Muslim.

That more than 50% of Ethiopia identify themselves as followers of Jesus is the result of a willingness by their ancestors to resist, often at the risk of their own lives, Islamic efforts at forced conversion.

The continued existence of a nearly 2,000-year-old community of Jesus followers in African is a reminder that the influence of Jesus was not primarily or initially targeted toward, or felt in, Europe. To the contrary, belief in Jesus was in Syria before it was in Greece, in Ethiopia before it was in Europe, in India before it was in England, and in China before it was in America.

The community of Jesus followers in Ethiopia began as an illegal and persecuted group. For the first three centuries of their existence, they were perpetually at risk of being arrested, beaten, tortured, jailed, or executed. They enjoyed perhaps somewhat less harassment, being on the fringe of Roman territory, than other groups of Jesus followers who were located deeper in Roman-held lands.

But their beginnings as an underground group gave them a strong sense of identity which allowed them, after three hundred years of legal permission to exist, the strength to sustain another wave of persecution when the Islamic armies attacked.

Up to the present time, both Jews and Jesus followers live peacefully together in Ethiopia, demonstrating mutual tolerance. But also up to the present time, both groups must be prepared to face period attacks.