Philip Kennicott has an excellent essay in the Washington Post discussing the destruction of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq.
Kennicott compares the destruction of the Askariya shrine to the destruction of the World Trade Center, and, for me, the comparison really hit home.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, New Yorkers were horrified by the fact that the simple, certain form of their skyline had been altered. That couldn’t happen. Now imagine that same wound to the orderliness of the world magnified by an overlay of religious disbelief.
According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University:
“To see this before your eyes is like the world crumbling before you,” he says. In part, that’s because it was in Samarra that the last imam, the “Mahdi,” disappeared, leaving the world to await both his return and the restitution of justice and order that will come with it.</blockquote
The destruction of the World Trade Center had an added component of grief for those of use that grew up in its shadow. Many New Yorkers complained about the boxiness of the architecture or the way it had cut off the tip of Manhattan from the surrounding neighborhoods. But, the Twin Towers dominated the skyline and whenever they came into view it was reassuring to know that you were back in New York where everything is bigger, and faster, and edgier. It’s hard to express what it meant to round a bend on the Jersey Turnpike and see that gaping hole in the skyline. And not too many people have tried to articulate their feelings of rage and loss over the buildings because of the much greater loss of life. To complain about an architectual travesty is to somehow trivialize the dead.
I think I have just a touch of the feeling of bewilderment about the WTC that Shi’a Muslims are feeling about the destruction of the Askariya shrine. Something terrible has been done and nothing can make it undone.
After 9/11 there was an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence in this country. Thankfully, it didn’t last long and was only sporadic in nature. But, it does not surprise me that the Shi’a in Iraq have reacted with violence against Sunnis. It’s a natural reaction to the feeling of powerlessness and the mixture of shock, sadness, fear, and rage that people go through when a part of one’s world is suddenly and senselessly destroyed.
It isn’t just the “simple, certain form of their skyline” they have lost. It is the simple, certain form of life itself.
The religious/worship similarities are startling. Good catch and great diary.
Yeah, like in the way that the two towers were also a symbol of wealth and money, so it was kind of like taking down a shrine to America’s “God”.
Freedom to worship the powers of one’s choice, I guess. I can see the symbolism in each but I don’t think the two are comparable in any way. I think that both attacks were done by the same forces-mercenaries, and neither had anything to do with attack in the name of any religion…
…nothing personal, just business.
And, even for the non-religious, it’s tragic that such a stunning work of beauty be destroyed … we have little enough beauty in the world, and modern architecture (if it can be called that) leaves us bereft of beauty.
Ohhhh…this is just getting TOO deep.
The destruction of a temple dedicated to some moral hope for the future…no matter HOW likely or unlikely you may find that particular form of hope to be… equated with the destruction of a temple devoted to sheer greed? To economic imperialism? To “World Trade” that benefits only one side of the transaction?
Please.
I felt sorry for the thousands of relatively innocent peoople who were just doing their job inside of that temple to Mammon…hell, it could just as easily have been me in there. I had just done a concert a few weeks before 9/11 on one of the promenades a number of floors up.
But let us call a spade a spade, here.
The World Trade Centers were a monument to greed and exploitation.
NOTHING more, and nothing less.
You know those moneychangers that Christ chased out of the temple?
That was their shop.
The hopes and prayers of millions that a Messiah might appear to right all wrongs is of another order of aspiration entirely. Whether you believe in their religion or not.
Excuse me.
I have to go out and get a breath of fresh air.
It is beginning to STINK in here.
AG
That’s not what the WTC meant to me. I don’t look at the Chrysler Building and think about what corporation use it for a headquarters, and I don’t look at the Empire State Building and think about the business that goes on there. I look at them as monuments of human ingenuity and as art.
The WTC had a certain minimalist aspect to it that contrasted with its guargantuanism. I was always fascinated by the towers.
I understand that the WTC and Pentagon were not attacked because of their architectual merits or demerits, but that is how other people looked at those buildings, not how I looked at them.
You write:
‘I don’t look at the Chrysler Building and think about what corporation use it for a headquarters, and I don’t look at the Empire State Building and think about the business that goes on there. I look at them as monuments of human ingenuity and as art.”
Look again.
Look at HOW you look.
And who is really doing the looking.
I find a renovated brownstone in in some heretofore drug addled neighborhood of Harlem or Bed Stuy or the South Bronx…renovated through the blood, sweat and tears of an upward-striving family…to be more beautiful than ANY monument to multi-national greed.
But then…that’s just me.
To me, the WTC was a symbol of the END of the American Dream as my ancestors and I believed it.
The triumph of the corporate over the individual.
Which is why most Americans left their native lands to come here in the first place.
Substitute the words “hereditary aristocracy” for “corporate” and there y’are.
Right back in 1700s England.
1800s and 1900s Ireland and Scotland and Italy and the rest of Europe, Asia and South America.
Only the African slaves did not come here for that reason…and even THEY bought into it as far as they could once the color barriers began to fall.
Only to find Bloomberg and BushCo and Trump.
Cheney and Rockefeller and the CIA.
The REAL pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Guarded by legions of armed thieves.
The NEW “aristocracy”.
The CORPORATE aristocracy.
And the World Trade Center was their vision of the future.
Brave New World v.3.2.7, with all tthe little clones going about their job managing money that was not theirs.
Did you notice that not ONE boss…none of the REAL bosses…was killed on 9/11?
Not one.
Slave owners did not hang around the slave quarters, they hired overseers for THAT plebian and nasty duty, and as David Rockefeller assured Gore Vidal after a fine meal at Rockefeller’s palatial country palace “We hire CHEFS to cook our food.”
Yup.
Once again BooMan, you have swalllowed the media line. ALONG with its hook and its stinker.
And once again I offer you a foolproof cure.
Turn off the media.
Usually I prescribe about three weeks cold turkey, but you appear to be an extreme case.
Intelligent enough to know better, but almost irretrievably hooked.
Step away from the TV (and the newspapers) with your brains in the air.
For a MINIMUM of three months.
Don’t worry…nothing will sneak up on you as long as you stay on the web, and I offer special dispensations for bad weather, local riots, natural disasters of any sort and…oooohhh, say football games and such. (As long as you turn the sound off and look away during the commercials.)
You’re a smart guy with a good heart…it’s just that you are an addictive personality and appparently easily hyponotized.
Three months.
(Betcha can’t eat the whole thing…)
Best of luck in the future…
AG
Okay Arthur. I’ll take off the next three months and you can wrote my stories for me. Be sure to berate all your readers and the other front-pagers whenever they show any awareness of what’s on the news or in the newspapers.
You looked at the WTC and saw a monument to greed. So did the people that attacked it. That’s great. I however do not look at the WTC as a monument to greed because I have a different perspective. I looked at it as a mixed architectual accomplishment.
I looked at it and felt differently everytime. Sometimes I hated it, sometimes I marvelled at it. Sometimes I stayed in the Hotel and slept in it. But I took it for granted that it would be there and be a major part of what makes New York, New York. For good and ill.
And I wish it was still there.
And my feelings about it have nothing to do with my media consumption habits.
It is a pretty bleak world you appear to be living in. Do you think about pederastry and the auto-de-fe everytime that you look at the Sistine Chapel? I don’t.
‘Do you think about pederastry and the auto-de-fe everytime that you look at the Sistine Chapel?”
Yup.
ESPECIALLY after what we have learned about the Roman Catholic Church over the past 20 years or so.
I prefer to take my art unfucked, thank you very much.
AG
that says it all. If you cannot enjoy the work of Michelangelo because the client was the Papacy then you have cut off huge swaths of aescethic appreciation in the pursuit of non-stop political thinking. And you claim that others need to tune out.
Also, Arthur, I am tolerant of you being a prick to me, but much less so when you turn your guns on others.
A reminder that you desperately need:
Sorry, Boss.
I just thought I was telling the truth.
AG
P.S. And my world is NOT “bleak”.
I listen to people who did NOT cop out.
AG
Booman, that prick thing….drop it.
It was an office building that also became part of a beloved skyline, like it or not. It represented a spirit of place for millions of people, irrespective of its function. Its destruction left a hole in peoples’ hearts that left us, or example, unable to ever see the famed skyline shot in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” without a new overlay of sorrow and anger.
Booman had it right: buildings in an of themselves take on meaning. I have no sympathy with any of the sky god cults, but feel pain for the loss of this temple as I would feel pain for the loss of Chartres cathedral or St Patrick’s in NYC. Or the pyramids of Egypt or of Guatemala, even without knowing what they signified to their builders, even though they, like most religious monuments, existed to glorify a ruthless ruling class.
Booman’s piece helped those of us unsympathetic to the religion remember that the temple and its destruction had meaning beyond the sectarian one.
They say a breath of fresh air clears the head. I hope it works for you.
Hope I’m allowed to re-post to a link I included in my comment – Iraq War grief.
The link, a closeup of the skyline, the Shrine, its destruction, In Pictures, A Slideshow captures some of the sentiments expressed here.
This was more than a building – for some, it was a burial place – a mausoleum.
You may well feel that way. There are probably others who do.
And I’m sure there are people who look at the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, however beautiful it was, and think “good riddance to a symbol of false ideology.” It’s the same mindset that caused the Taliban to destroy the Buddhas at Bamiyan, described by the BBC as “one of the world’s great archaeological treasures” but decried by the Taliban as “representations of a false god.”
But it is not “nothing more and nothing less” than what you describe. It is much more.
I can only speak to this second-hand, but I have a friend who lives on Long Island. His deck faces the city. He says he can still see a memory of the Towers there. His memory isn’t of what went on inside them, but of a part of his life that’s gone now. Like a missing tooth, maybe, or the memory of a limb amputees are said to feel.
It’s not the same for me, I’m sure, since I live 3,000 miles away, but I can’t remember New York without the Twin Towers, even if it’s just from the intro to “Barney Miller” and other shows I used to watch that took place in New York. I never gave a thought to what went on inside the towers; they were just there, and now they’re gone.
Of course your mileage may vary.
Personally I think the destruction of all of the above was tragic, unnecessary, and just a reminder of how far as a species we have yet to evolve in certain very important ways.
Those who see a building and do not think of what goes on there are blind, deaf and dumb.
What if we built a REALLY beautiful prison?
An Abu Grhraib to end ALL Abu Ghraibs?
All marble and steel, in a really conspicuous spot…say on the mall in DC.
Set up with the VERY latest in torture chambers. Automatic sprayers to get rid of the blood, underground passages so the tourists wouldn”t have to see all that messy stuff that is going on so that they can afford to take a vacation in the nation’s capitol during cherry blossom time.
How would you like THAT?
Well THAT, Mr. + Ms. America…sits glowing in your living room every night of the week and all day Saturday and Sunday, too.
TV.
The VIRTUAL prison.
Anyone who refers to Barney Miller as some sort of justification for missing the World Trade Center needs a fucking emergency mediotomy.
STAT!!!
AG
Excuse me, but I did NOT use “Barney Miller” as a justification for anything. It is context for the way I viewed the World Trade Center. Until the day of the bombings I had no idea what went on in the World Trade Center, nor did I particularly care any more than I cared what happened inside any of hundreds of other prominent buildings in this country.
As for the rest of your rant, you seem to have completely ignored what I wrote in favor of a jeremihad against television, which while I will admit 94% of it is not worth watching, there is still that 6% that keeps me from ripping the box out of the wall. (None of which, I assure you, is televised news. I couldn’t tell you who the anchors on the various network newscasts since Brokaw, Rather and Jennings moved on are, nor does it concern me overly much.)
I suggest you go take that constitutional you mentioned in your original post.
Plus, Barney Miller had one of the best theme songs ever. It was the first thing I ever learned to play on a bass.
IIRC Barney Miller and M*A*S*H were two of the first shows on TV where the focus was as much on the ensemble as it was on the main characters.
As for the bass, yeah, that was one cool bass line. I once made an offhand comment about prominent bass lines to someone and they came back with “Yea, the opening theme from Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ and . . . “
That’s about as far as it got. LOL
“Until the day of the bombings I had no idea what went on in the World Trade Center, nor did I particularly care any more than I cared what happened inside any of hundreds of other prominent buildings in this country.”
Precisely.
Deaf, dumb and blind.
SURPRISE!!!
There ARE people who think about such things, and any NUMBER of them are right now ready to die to make well-meaning people like YOU see what is really happening.
I suppose not many well meaning Germans “particularly cared”
what went on in Hitler’s beautiful mountaiin home in the Alps…the Berghof…or for that matter in the Reichstag or Gestapo headquarters. THEY were nice buildings too. At least they didn’t care much until the food got short and the bombs started raining down on Berlin.
Start caring.
We’re getting close to the same place.
AG
markfromireland on last night’s firedoglake had translated some of the blogs from Iraq after the bombing… seems like the general consensus was that the Americans blew it up.
that’s disconcerting…
Well, it’s highly unlikely that this would have happened if the Americans had minded their own sorry business in the first place.
I suspect “the Americans” are going to get blamed every time a faucet drips for the next 50 years in Iraq. Assuming there is still running water, of course.
.
BBC News just reported a daytime curfew to be enforced in Baghdad and three provinces. The curfew will be from this evening until Friday afternoon, and from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon.
The huge complex also contains a second shrine above the cave (sirdab), where the young Imam al-Mahdi, Al-Askari’s son, was said to have been hidden before he disappeared in 878.
Not accepting that he died, Shias still await his return more than 1,100 years later.
Visitors descend stairs to enter the sirdab, which bears an 800-year-old inscription from the Abbasid Caliph Nasser al-Din Allah.
The golden dome dominatedthe Samarra skyline
“Pilgrimage to such shrines, of which the majority are in Iraq, is an absolutely integral part of their religious life,” he added.
The other three major Shia shrines in Iraq are Najaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya in Baghdad.
● Iraqis Cope With Life Without Lights
Thanks largely to deteriorating security, electricity – along with water, sewage, and oil production – has dropped below prewar levels. Before the invasion, for example, Baghdad was receiving an average of at least 16 hours of power a day. Today, with insurgents targeting power plants and electrical lines on an almost daily basis, the city gets power just four hours each day on average.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Whatever anyone thinks of the WTC, its physical destruction–the absense then of its physical presence–affected a lot of people, probably dominating politics ever since. It was a shrine of some kind, if only because it was in the New York, still the media capital and most immediately powerful city in the country.
There is a difference worth pondering in the days ahead. The WTC’s destruction began all this; it happened where people did not feel vulnerable. And nothing’s happened there like that since.
The destruction of a similarly central shrine in Iraq comes after much destruction, in the midst of destruction, in which everyone feels vulnerable every day. This doesn’t make its destruction less powerful—not at all—but makes it different.
But there is a common response. It became Us v. Them in the U.S. with startling speed, and the Them included such absurdities as the French.
This destruction in Iraq is also going to harden the Us v. Them lines.
The destruction of this dome in Iraq, like the destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues by the Taliban, has an apocalyptic air for us all because it destroys a link with the past, it destroys a cultural symbol and link. We all shudder when this happens.
It was apparently something similiar for many people with the WTC, maybe especially for those who didn’t know NYC without it. But that huge office buildings (which frankly I didn’t like)have a preeminent cultural standing in the U.S., and maybe anthropologicially there is a similiarity to the two cultures, tells us more about our differences. Also that WTC was a symbol about which we have very mixed feelings makes it different. But as far as it goes, yes, we should understand the apocalyptic effect in Iraq, and the Us V Them many here felt when the WTC went down.
Well said.
And another thing.
There is this critique of the World Trade Center that was most famously made by the little Eichmanns comment of the professor from Boulder, that I find to be offensive. One of my friends and co-workers lost his brothers. He was on the 100 and something floor in Cantor Fitzgerald’s office. Whatever you think of the work that Cantor Fitzgerald if you call my friend’s brother a little Eichmann or suggest he deserved to burn to death you are going to get a fist in the mouth.
There are better ways to make a point about the global economy.
Thanks. It’s remarkable how many people knew people either in the Towers or who were close to people who were in them, or else have friends and relatives who lived nearby. I agree completely that all our comments require respect for those people, and for those they left behind. In that situation here, in others there and everywhere, including Iraq.
Sometimes you can be surprised. I used to hang out at a baseball discussion board where one of the worst trolls (a Yankee fan who called himself “Jugghead”) would constantly mock us, individually and as a group of fans of another team. We hated the guy, and had all sorts of reactions to him. I wished he’d find a girlfriend and go away, and I had one of the least aggressive reactions to him. Others wished him bodily harm . . .
until we found out a couple of days after the bombing that he had been laying carpet in Tower Two at the time of the attack.
It was amazing. A bunch of us just sat up for a couple of hours talking to the guy like he was a real human being. I still disagreed with him on the aftermath of the attacks, but at least I didn’t want to crawl through my DSL connection and rip his cord out of the wall any more.
Thanks for the link. No matter how one feels about the WTC, no matter the disconnects of the analogy, this empathetic exercise of the imagination is precisely what we need more of.
Chomsky has suggested that:
Meanwhile, the balkanization of Iraq continues apace:
Tin foil hat thoughts, that is. Don’t know if this has come up on BooTrib yet, but what about motive? Kurt Nimmo says:
“It makes absolutely no sense for Sunnis to bomb Shia mosques; this would be akin to Baptists bombing Catholic churches. Sectarian violence, dividing Iraqi society, does not serve Iraqis, either Sunni or Shia.”
and
“Only vicious and crazed Muslims would blow up the remains of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad–or American, British, and Israeli intelligence operatives or their double agent Arab lunatics, or crazies incited by Rumsfeld’s Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), designed to “stimulate” terrorist reaction.”
The full article here:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m20891&l=i&size=1&hd=0
I don’t now much about Nimmo, I’ve seen him on CouterPunch.
On a very personal basis, I feel as if the destruction of the WTC was a stone thrown into an apparently placid pool (although we know, of course, that still pools are whirlwinds of activity): the ripples from the impact widen, each ripple — then wave — colored with the perceptions of those who view that wave & at what angle.
This is basically what I believe we’re now referring to in any discussion of the events of 9/11/2001: not the events themselves, but what we see of the waves.
I witnessed the gradual & astounding construction of the WTC; I lived my adult life in Manhattan with ample chance to contemplate their form, their cultural meaning, their practical situation as compass-points, their embodiment of a certain aspect of the city’s complex spirit. I worked on the upmost floors for close to five years, until 1994.
I didn’t witness the planes hitting the towers, but I saw the results almost immediately afterward; I lived for days with their smoke & odor. When I then left the city by bus, I caught my first view of the smoldering gap in the familiar skyline & thought of a beloved face with its teeth smashed in.
And yes, I believe the comparison of their destruction to the destruction of an extremely significant holy site is a bit of a stretch — just as I think of the distance between subjective personal history & spiritual history.
About the Askariya shrine: Last night I talked with one of my students, who is a Muslim of Shi’a belief. She choked back tears as she spoke of her anguish over what the conflict in Iraq was doing to brothers and sisters of her faith.
The single most striking thing to the non-Islamic persons in our group was the depth of her distress. Her American culture, and similar facade to others present, likely contributed to what some said, the the identical observation as here. It’s like the Twin Towers.
As this student had partly grown up in sight of those towers, I think we expected her to agree. But she quietly said, No. That [the World Trade Center] was terrible, but in other ways. I cried for the Towers, but this [the destruction of the Askariya Shrine] cuts my heart; it hurts all of my brothers and sisters.
About the Towers: As a non-New Yorker, I don’t think of the Towers as a constant presence in the skyline, filled with people, in the way that many do.
My thoughts are of sitting in the lobby of one Tower early in the day,facing the walkway coming up from the trains. I can still see the undulating mass of humanity, of all colors and shapes, moving without end, walking up that ramp, a sea of people. Maids in uniform, men and women in khakis with metal tool boxes. People in suits, a group of Hasidic elders, children in t-shirts, young couples with strollers, and bored-looking teens. Several people in non-Western clothing. A seeing eye dog and her companion. A man with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. I moved into the crowd and heard bits of French, Spanish, German, Yiddish, and languages I could not recognize. That’s who I thought of on 9/11, and what I think of now.
I agree with my student. Both are terrible, but they are not parallel.
Many are more likely to ask why are there still any mosques still standing, 3 years after the crusade began.
The perception of the crusade in the mind of the American mainstream has so little connection to reality, or even the perception of the warlords.
Thus I would caution against Washington declaring well, we have successfully destroyed this sacred mosque, let’s go do Karbala and Najaf and then we’re outta there.
To the crusaders, both command and common gunmen, it is just another operation, spreading a little more democracy and shock n’ awe on Haji.
And the average mainstreamer is just anxious to see the crusade move on to Teheran.
The rate the mosques are being attacked there probably wont be many left in Iraq soon. I guess the crusade rolls on. Nothing left to destroy in Iraq. Lets move on to Iran.
And remember how we did nothing to stop the looting of the Baghdad Museum, and tolerate the continuing pilferage of Iraqi archeological sites, both a huge loss to our human patrimony.
I’ve often wondered what unique holy grail type artifacts might have been deliberately stolen for their value other than the money or collector value. Have you seen anything similar?