What Was and Never Shall Be

[MountainLaurel]

About the bombing of the shrine in Samarra:

Again and again, it's distressing how little we know about how Iraq looked before destruction became an everyday occurrence. And so the first glimpse, for many, of the Askariya shrine was not of a magnificent shining dome, but twisted metal and broken walls.

As the first images of a massive destruction at one of Iraq's holiest shrines began coming in yesterday, it was hard not to think of the building, rather than what it stands for. How old was it? What was the architecture like? Was this another loss, like the Bamiyan Buddhas, needlessly destroyed by the Taliban? Is its destruction equivalent, say, to the bombing of St. Peter's in Rome, or Chartres Cathedral? The mind grasps for an easy equivalence.

It was reassuring -- in the rather heartless way that people in a secular society look at old religious buildings as mere relics or potential tourist destinations -- to learn from the BBC, which quoted Robert Hillenbrand, a professor of Islamic Art at Edinburgh University, that while the shrine had immense religious and emotional importance to Iraq's Shiite population, it was not of enormous architectural importance. Measuring religious importance seems to land us in the realm of the irrational; measuring architectural or historical importance is different, but ultimately leads us down all the wrong paths.

But there was hardly time for any of those fumbling efforts to find an analogue between the Christianity many Americans know and the Islam so many of us learn about only when violence brings it into view. And no sooner had the building appeared on our television screens than it was obscured by images of rage in the streets. Tens of thousands of Shiites protested the bombing, and Sunni mosques were attacked in Basra and Baghdad. The pundits chattered about civil war. A great golden dome, that most of us had never seen, came down, replaced by images we've seen all too often, proof that yet again the sum total of anger in the world had gone up a few notches.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022202534.html