Islam’s War on Art

Islam is generally understood to prohibit the creation of images: representational art in the forms of drawings, paintings, sketches, or sculpture. For this reason, much Muslim art is nonrepresentational: the generation of abstract patterns in calligraphy and architectural ornamentation are examples.

Outside the mainstream of Islamic thought, there are some groups of Muslims who permit the making and displaying of pictures. These marginal factions, however, are few in number and consistently persecuted by majority groups within Islam.

For this reason, art historians consistently report that the vast majority of Islamic artworks are nonrepresentational, especially in the Muslim cultures of northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. Of the representational pieces created over the centuries, few survive. Those which do survive often do so in hiding, or in non-Muslim nations.

The main source for the prohibition of images is the text of the Hadith, the collected sayings of the prophet Muhammad. Historians Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier report:

In 2001 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Taliban destroyed thousands of artifacts that resembled humans or animals. But museum employees hid statues in obscure storerooms and kept the fragments of pieces smashed by the Taliban. In recent years, 300 have been restored.

The proscription of images centers of God, extending to Muhammad, then to Muhammad’s family and officers, then to humans generally, next to animals, and finally to plants and inanimate objects. While the Sunni are more stringent in the opposition to representational art than the Shia, in practice, any imagery or portraiture is extremely rare in both groups.

It is in fact, relatively easy to find examples of Muslim clerics who have approved the concept of representation art, even up to and including portraits of human beings. It is also easy to find examples of individual Muslim artists who made such artwork, and patrons who’ve funded or bought them. But numerically, these are exceptions. Historically, they are outliers. Geographically, they tend to be found outside historically Islamic nations.

Several early Islamic rulers approved of coinage bearing human images. Some later rulers had their palaces decorated with sculpture and paintings. In the twentieth century, two films were made by Muslim cinematographers the about prophet Muhammad. But the coins were melted down, the paintings and sculptures removed, and the films banned.

Although these exceptions exist, the overriding trend within Islam is against art. As the researchers at the David Collection, an art museum in Copenhagen, write:

The non-figurative character of religious decoration has remained a fundamental principle throughout the history of Islam. At no point have images found their way into the interiors of mosques; as far as we know, no Muslim artist has endeavored to depict God; the Koran has never been illustrated; and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad are rare. With the reform of coinage carried out by the caliph Abd al-Malik in 696, even the portraits of rulers were removed from Islamic coins and replaced by calligraphic decoration.

What do art historians and museum curators do when faced with Islamic attacks on art? The terrorist group known as the “Islamic State” has destroyed artworks, both in museums and elsewhere.

Brave preservationists have accomplished heroic feats, preserving some pieces of art from Muslim attacks. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier write:

“The unsung heroes in these situations are people like librarians or museum directors who do their best to hide things in advance of trouble or as trouble arrives,” Stewart said. One of his colleagues smuggled thousands of manuscripts out of Qaraqosh, Iraq’s “Christian capital,” in advance of ISIS last summer.

The “Islamic State” group seeks to destroy the artistic, historical, anthropological dimensions of culture and civilization. Their efforts are designed to impoverish the human race in every sense possible - intellectually and economically.

Historians and curators around the world are eager to lend assistance in any way possible to those who are trying to preserve bits of art and history inside the Islamic world.

Still, the loss is enormous. “Our understanding of the past is made up of little specks we find and put together,” said Hershel Shanks.

Shanks, who edits an archeological periodical, assess the losses, the pieces which have been totally destroyed: “Much of what we don’t know is gone. It’s heartbreaking.”

Climate and Politics

History is rarely simple, and any easy narrative is suspect. Upon closer examination, an effortless account of some event or process usually contains significant, if hidden, complexities.

Intricacies are not hidden, however, in the task of examining the multidimensional and interdisciplinary phenomena surrounding Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. The former is a documented span of years, approximately 1645 to 1715, during which sunspot activity was significantly lower than average. The latter, which roughly correlates with the former, is a global climate swing, the dating of which is more ambiguous.

Starting points for the Little Ice Age have been proposed around 1300 or 1350, but some scientists argue for a beginning around 1550. The age terminates around 1850 or 1870. In any case, the age was non-anthropogenic. Climatologists are unsure as to the significance of its correlation with the Maunder Minimum.

It is clear that the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum together correlate with a series of economic, social, political, and military instabilities. Kenneth Pomeranz, in his review of Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis, writes:

We can now be sufficiently precise about at least some past weather events that we can tie them to the sorts of political and social events that unfold in months and years, not just the more diffuse patterns of decades or centuries. This allows us to write histories in which both relatively large patterns of climate and specific human decisions matter.

The climatic instability of the years of the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum correlate to events like the Thirty Years’ War, the overthrow of Charles I in England, and political turmoil in Asia and Africa.

Historians hypothesize that wild non-anthropogenic swings in climate threatened the food supply: both crops and wild game would have been affected. Beyond the agriculture needed for human sustenance, goods produced for trade would have been in short supply, if they relied on weather-dependent components or processes (e.g., tobacco, cotton, silk, spices, leather, etc.).

Competition for the dwindling supply of resources could fuel or trigger political unrest. Yet the ability of humans to adapt and adjust allowed for some level of normalization even during these years of statistically outlying weather. Pomeranz notes that

By the 1680s most major polities had regained some reasonable level of internal stability, though bad climate would persist for another thirty years.

As adaptation, often in terms of technique or technology, allowed humans to acclimate, the political upheaval seemed to subside.

Internal unrest became much less of a problem, even before 18th-century warming took hold, as agricultural improvements spread, market integration advanced, plague and smallpox were much better contained.

Given that “political turmoil ceased well before the climate improved,” it may well be that, even though dramatic climatic instability is non-anthropogenic, the tendency to successfully adapt to climate change is truly human.

Art History under Fire

Islam’s prohibition of images is well-known: drawing, painting, and sculpture are considered idolatrous. The faithful are instructed to purge their environment of such things.

Not only does this belief eliminate the production of any representative art, but it also triggers the destruction of such artworks as Muslims may encounter. Non-representational art is allowed, but only if it is in the service of Islam and only if it cannot be interpreted as arising from an “infidel” worldview.

The fact that artworks can be sold, however, creates an internal tension within Islam: destroy the artworks, or use them to fund the mission? Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier write:

ISIS has become one of the world’s best-funded terrorist groups, earning most of its profits by selling seized oil. But details keep emerging of the estimated No. 2 source of its billion-dollar revenue stream: looting.

This question repeatedly confronts Islam: Destroy the cultural artifacts or sell them? If the artifacts are destroyed, a chance to fund the mission is lost. If the artifacts are sold, the seller is open to the charge of hypocrisy on his own terms: he has allowed the “idolatrous” images to continue existing, which for a Muslim is a sin.

The term “ISIS” has become common, along with its variants, “ISIL” and “IS” - referring respectively to the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” and the “Islamic State.”

Under any name, Islam has destroyed archeological treasures wholesale. Scientists and historians from all parts of the world lamented the use of construction equipment and explosives to eliminate all traces of the ancient city of Nimrud, an Assyrian city founded around 1200 BC.

The city’s name is sometimes transliterated as ‘Nimrod.’ It is difficult for non-Muslims to grasp the worldview which demands the destruction of archeological findings from ancient civilizations. Zylstra and Govier continue:

The group often destroys statues and other objects it deems idolatrous. Last month, ISIS bulldozed the ancient city of Nimrod, prompting the senior editor of the New York Review of Books to call for military protection of archeological sites. Italy’s culture minister and Iraq’s tourism and antiquities minister have advanced similar proposals.

In early 2015, ISIS destroyed an ancient architectural feature known as the ‘Nineveh Wall.’ In 2014, ISIS had bulldozed a colossal ancient Assyrian gateway lion sculpture dating to the 8th century BC.

While, on the one hand, Islam is committing these acts of wanton destruction based on intolerance and xenophobia, ISIS paradoxically preserves other artifacts, equally offensive to Muslim sensibilities, in order to sell them.

ISIS cannot avoid the charge of hypocrisy. If it were consistently to apply Islamic values, it would not allow any of these archeological finds to exist. But it violates the worldview it proclaims for the sake of money. ISIS compromises its allegedly Islamic values for the sake of opportunism.

But thousands of potentially lucrative archaeological sites are now under ISIS control. The resulting looting has given rise to the term “blood antiquities.” A parallel to Africa’s “blood diamonds,” where mines in a war zone are looted to finance military operations, ancient artifacts are helping to fund ISIS’s reign of terror.

In a bizarre and nightmarish circumstance, historians and scholars are thankful that ISIS needs cash to continue its terrorist activities: the need for funding is enabling the survival of at least a few of the world’s oldest cultural treasures.

While some of the destroyed items had been catalogued, photographed, and described, other objects had yet to be identified or analyzed. Indiscriminate ruination annihilated both known finds and those which lay undiscovered waiting in vain to be unearthed.

In the blanket destruction caused by bulldozing entire cities, many artifacts have been lost forever.

McCloy and Adenauer in Postwar Germany

After 1945, Germany needed capable political leaders to restore a free and open society. For twelve long years, Germany had suffered under Nazi oppression.

It would require considerable political skill to reinstate the civil democracy, the republic with freely-elected representatives, which had been taken away during Hitler’s dozen years of tyranny. Happily, there were still individuals left who had been part of liberty of the pre-Nazi years, and who had not succumbed to the temptation to collaborate with Hitler’s National Socialist government.

Konrad Adenauer was such a man. He had been the mayor of Cologne - der Bürgermeister Kölns - during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Because of his courageous opposition to the National Socialists, he was removed from power, and lived out those twelve years under persecution, being questioned and jailed by the Gestapo.

At the war’s end, the Germans, finally free from their Nazi tormentors, began to rebuild their cities physically, and their liberty politically. Historian Terrence Prittie describes Konrad Adenauer at that point in time:

One should recall that the Adenauer of 1945 still looked, superficially, little qualified for the role which he was to play. Not only was he in his 70th year, but had next to no experience of party politics, he was utterly unknown outside his own country, and he had travelled little beyond its borders - although the picture of Adenauer, the stay-at-home hick-town boy, has been somewhat overdrawn. Brought back to Cologne as Mayor by the victorious Americans, he might well have stayed there for the rest of his working days - had the British, after taking over from the Americans, not dismissed him from office. Fortuitously and quite unintentionally, he was thrust into the party-political field. There, he made his way because of four characteristics. A previously iron will had been tempered by adversity into something more pliant, yet more subtly formidable. That Roman clarity and logic which had always been his enabled him to set himself attainable objectives, almost always the right ones. Suffering had given him, too, a more rounded character, and an elegance of manner which was highly persuasive. And his self-discipline enabled him to display a truly remarkable patience, and purposefulness.

The challenge to Germany, and to Adenauer, was to bring back the personal freedom which the country had enjoyed prior to the National Socialist dictatorship. Compounding that challenge was the fact that Germany was not a completely independent nation-state during the first postwar years.

Western Germany was occupied by the French, British, and American troops who’d liberated it from the Nazis at war’s end. Eastern Germany was brutalized by the Soviet Army which had invaded from the east.

Adenauer, as Chancellor of West Germany, was constrained by the Allied occupational authorities. He was frustrated by a lack of communication with other nations, and by communications from the Allies which were unclear or indirect.

These ambiguities left him in a position of trying to meet expectations of which he was only vaguely aware, or expectations that he respond to situations about which he had been only partially informed.

John McCloy was appointed U.S. High Commissioner for Germany in September 1949. He would work closely with Adenauer; the two were sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict. McCloy held the office until August 1952.

McCloy coordinated the treatment of some war criminals. McCloy reasoned that individuals who’d been involved in procurement of industrial supplies like steel and coal were different than the Nazis who’d been directly involved in the atrocities committed against civilians.

Sorting the truly evil from those who’d merely been exploited as part of the German economy, McCloy left the brutal war criminals to face their sentences, but among the those who’d faced tribunals merely because they were part of industry, he pardoned some, and commuted the sentences of others. He restored confiscated property to a few industries.

Adenauer, and public opinion in West Germany generally, encouraged McCloy to consider that the war crimes trials had gotten out of hand. The Nazis who’d committed atrocities and “crimes against humanity” had been tried, convicted, and sentenced. The trials, however, continued. Ordinary Germans were being hauled into court as defendants and charged with “war crimes” when in fact the definition of this phrase was being stretched well beyond its previously established usage.

Thus McCloy, as U.S. High Commissioner, pardoned, or commuted the sentences of, Germans who’d been wrongly convicted as war criminals. Adenauer had worked to inform McCloy about this situation.

The working relationship between Adenauer and McCloy also came into play when Germany joined the Council of Europe.

The Council of Europe was founded in 1949. It is separate from, different than, but similar in nature to, the European Council which is a branch of the European Union. The Council of Europe also predates the EU. Hans-Peter Schwarz writes:

Adenauer was constantly troubled by his ignorance of the hidden intentions of the Western Allies with regard to Germany. In April 1950 he complained bitterly about the situation during a confidential conversation with McCloy. He was expected to make a decision that was vital for his country - here was referring to entry to the Council of Europe - even though, without representation abroad, he could not know what was going on in the world.

Continuing his personal mission to help rebuild Germany, McCloy became a founding member of the American Council on Germany in 1952. His goal was to give West Germany true sovereignty and give Adenauer real governing authority.

Rebuilding and rearming Germany were central to a successful Cold War strategy. The Germans needed to know that the Allies would not randomly round up ordinary German civilians and convict them of imaged war crimes. The men whom McCloy had pardoned, or whose sentences he'd commuted, brought expertise to the rebuilding of Germany's industrial base. This base was needed as part of the defensive effort against the USSR's Cold War threat.

McCloy had reported to Truman that the Germans needed to feel they could help defend themselves against a possible Soviet invasion, and that the U.S. needed Germany as part of the defense of western Europe. The imminent Soviet invasion did not happen, in part because McCloy’s actions convinced the Germans of Allied good will.

The Southeast Asian Seascape

While some historians have embraced the slogan ‘demography is destiny’ to explain great historical trends, one might justifiably assert a competing slogan, ‘geography is destiny.’

Describing the setting for what will be decisive moments in the twenty-first century, Robert Kaplan describes the situation of the nations which border the South China Sea. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and China ring this body of water which is the main navigational route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

Geographically, the center and heart of this part of the world is water. Kaplan writes:

Europe is a landscape; East Asia is a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The most contested areas of the globe in the last century lay on dry land in Europe, particularly in the flat expanse that rendered the eastern and western borders of Germany artificial, and thus exposed to intensive to-ing and fro-ing of armies. But starting in the last phase of the Cold War the demographic, economic, and military axis of the earth has measurably shifted to the opposite end of Eurasia, where the spaces between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime. By maritime, I mean sea, air, and outer space: for ever since the emergence of aircraft carriers in the early decades of the twentieth century, sea and air battle formations have become increasingly inextricable, with outer space now added to the mix because of navigational and other assistance to ships and planes from satellites. Hence naval has become shorthand for several dimensions of military activity. And make no mistake, naval is the operative word. Because of the way that geography illuminates and sets priorities, the physical contours of East Asia argue for a naval century, with the remote possibility of land warfare on the Korean Peninsula being the striking exception.

The South China sea is a highway for billions of dollars of shipping, from agricultural products to finished high-tech machinery. More cargo moves through it than along any paved highway on land.

This body of water is also important in terms of military strategy, both because of the freight which moves through, and because any nation which would control it would also control the nations encircling it.

China is, of course, the single biggest power among these countries, but an alliance of several of the others would be something which China cannot afford to overlook. These smaller nations also look to the United States to support them diplomatically, and militarily if necessary, as they face China.

The United States must then decide if, for the sake of its own interests, or for the sake of Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, it is willing to apply its power in this location. For this goal, an expansion and repurposing of the U.S. Navy might be necessary.

In May 2015, the Philippine GMA Network wrote about China’s slow but steady aggressive expansion into the South China Sea:

A Chinese state-owned newspaper said on Monday that "war is inevitable" between China and the United States over the South China Sea unless Washington stops demanding Beijing halt the building of artificial islands in the disputed waterway.

Who owns which parts of the South China Sea? Which parts are international waters, owned by no one nation? These are some of the questions which cause friction, and could potentially cause war. The GMA Network gives details:

China claims most of the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also have overlapping claims.
The United States has routinely called on all claimants to halt reclamation in the Spratlys, but accuses China of carrying out work on a scale that far outstrips any other country.
Washington has also vowed to keep up air and sea patrols in the South China Sea amid concerns among security experts that China might impose air and sea restrictions in the Spratlys once it completes work on its seven artificial islands.
China has said it had every right to set up an Air Defense Identification Zone in the South China Sea but that current conditions did not warrant one.

Even without war, however, China can increasingly manipulate the dynamics of the region. The Chinese government probably would prefer it that way - if it can succeed in establishing its tyranny over smaller countries and draining away their liberty without the expense and chaos of warfare, all the better for China.

Kaplan argues that China’s chances at aggressive imperialism are the result of a “gradual American decline, in a geopolitical sense.” The United States Navy has been slowly shrinking, both in size and in technological competitiveness.

The U.S. government has not demonstrated the will to protect American interests or lives. The historical axiom that ‘weakness is provocative’ takes effect in this situation: China could not possibly restrain itself from aggression, given a weak target. David Feith, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports that

But even without war, Chinese military and economic power could erode the sovereignty of neighboring states, establishing Chinese hegemony over the world's most populous, economically powerful and strategically significant region — an outcome that grows more likely as the U.S. retrenches.

Without the United States, will the nations around the South China Sea be able to resist aggression from mainland China? One possible answer to that question is India. Historically, India has cultural connection to regions in Vietnam and Malaysia.

Those cultural connections are, by themselves, probably not enough to cause India to enter the fray. The diplomatic machinations around the South China Sea operation purely on calculations of power.

But India is also a rising economic power, one which seeks to compete with China. Bismarckian Realpolitik might well convince India that a Machiavellian excursion into the region could be to its advantage. One looming question for the twenty-first century is, then, whether, and to which extent, India might become a player in the South China Sea.

California's Drought in Historical Context

Over time, the earth’s climate has demonstrated persistent instability: take any span of decades or centuries, find the average temperature or precipitation for that segment of years, and then note that there are long periods of above average or below average data.

Because this can be done for any arbitrary segment of years, it becomes difficult to give meaning to an ‘average’ value. The arithmetic mean of temperature during one decade might, by comparison, show that decade to be above average for the two centuries before and after it, but below average for the four centuries which lie ahead of it and behind it.

Thus it is interesting to note that a New York Times article, published in May 2015, says of California’s weather that

According to climate scientists, it may be the worst arid spell in 1,200 years.

The article is quite correct: around the year 800 AD, the globe was in the midst of a decades-long hot and dry spell known to historians as the ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ a time much hotter around the globe than anything within living memory.

The records which reveal this phenomenon are both sentient and organic. Written records of rainfall, snowfall, temperature, the crests of rivers, and the advance or retreat of glaciers goes back to Roman times and even earlier.

In terms of non-human records, tree rings, core samples, and the courses of rivers offer evidence about climate over the centuries and millennia.

As the Times notes, the Medieval Warm Period was a statistical outlier that stretched over several centuries, significantly, observably, and quantifiably hotter than our era. The Medieval Warm Period was also not anthropogenic in cause.

Interestingly, the Times asserts that the current climate, while not uniformly warming, is also not anthropogenic:

The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man.

The statistical counterpiece to the medieval warm period is known as the ‘Little Ice Age,’ and began sometime between 1300 and 1350. Lasting until around 1850 or 1870, it was several centuries of global cooling, with averages temperatures measured to be lower than the average temperatures of preceding or succeeding centuries.

Like the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age was not anthropogenic. The current time, the early twenty-first century, is a time neither hotter nor colder than what has been verified over millennia of recorded history. The climate remains as it persistently has been: erratic and unstable.

It would be a worrying violation of pattern if the climate were stable. That hasn’t ever been observed in more than 6,000 years of human experience.

Valerian Kills Followers of Jesus

Born Publius Licinius Valerianus, Valerian’s year of birth is unknown. He was active both in the Senate and as a military leader prior to becoming emperor in 253 AD.

As emperor, he was part of growing pattern of dividing the empire, for administrative purposes, into a western and an eastern half. At the end of his career, he was occupied largely with war and diplomacy vis a vis the Persians.

During his reign, he escalated the persecution of Jesus followers. They were arrested, beaten, tortured, jailed, and killed in large quantities.

Despite, or because of, the aggressive oppression of those who followed Jesus, their numbers grew continually. Historian Ernest Gottlieb Sihler writes:

In 258 A.D. the Emperor Valerian issued a rescript to the Roman Senate, not only naming bishops, presbyters, and deacons as objects of judicial prosecution, but decreeing also that senators and “honourables” (egregii) and Roman knights, who were Christians, should lose their ranks and fortunes, and if they persisted in their religion, their lives also. We observe at once the spread of the Christian religion and worship among the higher classes. The words of the official utterance of the Proconsul at Carthage, in passing sentence of death on Bishop Cyprian, in September, 258, are a suggestive document of those times.

In 257 AD, the proconsul Aspasius Paternus placed Cyprian under arrest. Cyprian was sent to live in house arrest, in town approximately 90 km from Carthage.

The location of Cyprian’s house arrest is variously spelled Curubis, Kurba, or Korba. Proconsul Aspasius Paternus used the following words to condemn Cyprian as a follower of Jesus:

For a long time you have lived in a sacrilegious frame of mind and have gathered very many men into your wicked conspiracy and have made yourself an enemy of the Roman gods and of the statutes of religion.

The proconsul continues, recounting imperial efforts to convert Cyprian to the Roman civil religion:

Their most august majesties Valerian and Gallienus and the Caesar Valerian could not recall you to the sect of their own ceremonies.

As Professor Sihler notes, the growth of the Jesus movement, especially among the leadership class, was perceived as a significant threat to the aristocracy’s ability to control Roman society.

After a year of arrest, the proconsul sentenced Cyprian to death with these words:

Let sound tradition [disciplina] be enforced by your blood.

Cyprian is one example of the thousands, and tens of thousands, of Jesus followers who were executed, not only during the reign of Valerian, but of Decius and other emperors.

During the career of Cyprian, the Novatianist controversy arose. The question was whether those Jesus followers who denied Jesus under pressure from the Roman government could be welcomed again into the fellowship of Jesus followers.

The majority of Jesus followers answered that those who “lapsed” either by denying Jesus under Roman threats, or by offering sacrifices to the Roman gods, were indeed welcome back among the community of Jesus followers. Cyprian, as bishop, exercised leadership and moderation in dealing with this matter.