The Destruction of Cultural Memory
Author(s): R. Stephen Humphreys
Source: Middle East Studies Association Bulletin , Summer 2002, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer
2002), pp. 1-8
Published by: Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23063229
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The Destruction of Cultural Memory
(2001 Presidential Address)
R. Stephen Humphreys
IN A WORLD SO STRICKEN BY TRAGIC EVENTS AS OURS, and in a field of stud
ies so closely touched by these tragedies, it may seem odd to use a presidential
address to reflect on the loss of objects made of bronze or stone or paper. But
that is what I have chosen to do in this essay, not as a medievalist who has for
gotten just where and when he lives, but as a scholar who believes that memory
is essential to our lives as human beings. Without authentic memories of our
own, we literally cannot know who we are, where we came from, to whom we
are connected. We are nothing, or more accurately, we are only what other peo
ple tell us we are. In a very real sense, we exist only as products of the imagina
tion of others, an imagination benevolent or malicious as the case may be, but
an imagination which we cannot control or even understand.
Memory floats in the mind, but it is fixed and secured by objects. Collec
tive memories, the memories generated and shared by a society, are anchored in
the products of culture. These products may well be works of nature—a sacred
mountain, for example—but more often they are human contrivances: works of
art or poetry or music. These are the things, broadly shared among a commu
nity, that allow a people to know that they are a people. They are also the things
that visibly (or audibly) set them apart from others. When they are destroyed or
effaced or forgotten, cultural identities and social boundaries disappear along
with them. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course—who among us regrets
the dynamiting of Hitler's Reichskanzlei by Soviet troops in May 1945?—but it is
always a grave matter. Apart from its impact on a particular community, it repre
sents an irreparable loss in our collective human knowledge of who we are and
the tortuous paths we have taken.
What I hope to do in this essay, then, is to examine the destruction of
cultural memory, not simply in order to mourn it—though there is much to
mourn—but rather in order to ask what this process means for us as human be
ings.
We have to begin, I think, with the truism that not everything can be
saved or ought to be. Change is after all the one constant in human life, and
change very often means disposing of what is already here and replacing it with
something new and different. We cannot be confined forever within the worlds
created by our parents. And it would be a fine irony if we were prevented from
creating memories for ourselves out of misplaced piety before the legacy of the
past. What intrigues me is less the process of forgetting or eroding the past than
our own, very contemporary response to it. For sometimes we look on with ironic
and even amused detachment, like so many modern-day Edward Gibbons con
templating the triumph of religion and barbarism. At other moments our sympa
thies are actively engaged, and almost against our will we find ourselves
committed partisans in conflicts that no longer concern us in any tangible way.
Nor is it always a question of how near or remote in space, time, or cultural af
finity an event may be. For me, the defacing of the elegant Greek-inflected re
liefs at the Temple of Philae, at the hands of the very people who had
worshipped so ardently at temples of this kind over so many scores of genera
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
tions, is still a bit of a shock, 1600 years too late to do anything about it. In a
different realm, the loss of so much of France's heritage of medieval religious art
in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion and then again in the French Revolu
tion, provokes dark reflections on the malicious vandalism of our species.
But both Philae and (citing one example to stand for a hundred) Sainte
Chapelle present an intriguing paradox to historical understanding, for both were
looted and defaced by the very people (or properly, the descendants of the peo
ple) who had originally built and adorned them. In that way, the construction,
the pillage, and the abandonment of such monuments are simply the physical
embodiment of the social and cultural processes by which those societies re
shaped themselves over many centuries. If monuments and artifacts had been
preserved perfect and pristine, they would have little to tell us. They would be,
not witnesses to the past, but museum pieces shorn of all connection to time and
place. The sadness and regret that one must feel about the damage suffered by
such exquisite artistic achievements is perhaps tempered by the recognition that
much of their remarkable power to evoke a distant past lies precisely in that
damage. That is why modern replicas, however exact, or over-restored monu
ments, however meticulously carried out, seem so flat, trivial, and unrevealing.
Time and humanity have been scrubbed out of them.
There can be no such mixed emotions, however, when we are dealing
with those who have deliberately set out to destroy the heritage and thereby the
memories of others. Such acts are not genocide in a strict sense, though often
enough they accompany genocide, but they are consciously aimed at erasing a
society's sense of itself and recasting that society in the image and for the pur
poses of another. It is no mere figure of speech to call such destruction a crimi
nal act. And though as historians we are obliged to understand and explain as
well as we can, as human beings we are also compelled to deplore it. Condem
nation is not merely moral outrage, but flows from a deep sadness—a sadness
occasioned by the knowledge that we ourselves, or perhaps our own revered an
cestors, have engaged in similar acts, and also by the foreboding that at some
point, we do not know when, a similar destruction will be visited on our own leg
acy.
Of such purposeful destruction we can find countless examples, at all pe
riods and among all cultures. A relatively recent example will do by way of illus
tration. In 1943, an attack on German forces by Italian partisans induced a
German military officer to offer his unhappy Italian hosts a choice: systematic
reprisals or the systematic destruction of the Archivio di Stato di Napoli. Obvi
ously there was no choice, and a trove of documents comparable to the Venetian
archives was consigned to the flames.1 This was perhaps the least of all the
crimes committed by the Nazis, and yet it remains breathtaking in the sheer mal
ice and contempt it displays to a defeated and occupied people. In the end there
was a kind of rough justice in this event, since the materials destroyed included
most of the Italian documentation on the Emperor Frederick II, whom the Nazis
fondly regarded as a heroic incarnation of the spirit of the German nation. But
justice or no, the documents are gone, Sicily and the Mezzogiorno have been
1 David Abulafia, Frederick II, a Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 321-22.
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
stripped of a substantial part of their past, and we all are impoverished with
them.
This kind of attack on one's enemies (or in this case, on despised former
allies) hardly surprises us. Defeated foes have always been subject to a system
atic damnatio memoriae, along with a public and highly ritualized destruction of
the works of architecture and art which had symbolized their power, wealth, and
prestige. Only rarely is there some impulse to preserve these things, and even
then it is done largely to symbolize the triumph of a new dispensation. In this
regard, perhaps we should be grateful to the Christian monarchs who led the
Spanish Reconquista between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, for they not
only preserved many of the grandest and most characteristic Muslim monu
ments, but continued to define the symbols of Spanish Christian kingship largely
through the forms and motifs of Andalusian Muslim art. Their Catholic Majesties
Ferdinand and Isabel, unrelenting in so many things, nevertheless recognized the
unique value of the Alhambra, for nothing else could so convincingly demon
strate the victory of Christian truth over infidel error. As a Morisco counselor re
minded their obstinate great-grandson, Philip II, himself already far removed in
time and sensibility from any direct contact with Arab-Muslim culture: "[The
Catholic Monarchs] sustained the rich palaces of the Alhambra...as they were in
the time of the Muslim kings, in order always to manifest their power through
the memory of the triumph of its conquerors."1 There are other such cases, to be
sure, each with a distinct flavor of its own. For example, we might recall the co
lossal irony of the Bolsheviks enclosing themselves for seven decades in the for
tress of the Czars, even as they did everything in their power to eradicate the
country's imperial and Orthodox past. But a willingness to preserve the achieve
ments of others, if only to bend them to serve our own purposes, is all too rare a
thing.
Is there any constructive response to all this? We may mourn the inexo
rable work of fire, flood, and earthquake, and deplore what seems the ineradica
ble violence in human nature, but we cannot rid ourselves of these things. One
possible response, and the most common one, is simply to accept what we must,
even as we lament its effects. Indeed, one of the oldest themes in literature is
mourning the losses of time—a theme readily engaged by the contemplation of
the ruins of majestic monuments. A particularly eloquent example (at least for
those who have a taste for Renaissance rhetoric at its most florid) is furnished by
the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini as he stood on the Capi
toline hill overlooking the heart of ancient Rome:
Her primeval state, such as she might appear in a remote age, when
Evander entertained the stranger of Troy, has been delineated by the
fancy of Virgil. This Tarpeian rock was then a savage and solitary thicket;
in the time of the poet, it was crowned with the golden roofs of a tem
ple; the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged, the wheel of
fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the sacred ground is again
disfigured with thorns and brambles....Cast your eyes on the Palatine
Hill, and among the shapeless and enormous fragments, try to find the
marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticoes of Nero's
palace....The forum of the Roman people...is now thrown open for the
1 Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen {New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 258
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that
were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the
limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stu
pendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.1
Poggio's reflections are suffused with poetic melancholy, and they are superbly
visual; they paint a picture which any Baroque master might envy. But though
they recall a distant past and describe the ruins of the city in minute detail, they
have no historical content. Poggio sees no organic connection between the ruins
of Rome and his own time. He assumes a vast, unbridgeable gulf between past
and present, and takes for granted that what is gone can in no way be recovered
or restored. It is Edward Gibbon, at once the most coolly ironic and the most ro
mantic of men, who finds the vital link between a lost past and the present, and
thereby transforms nostalgia into history. Most of us are familiar with the famous
statement in his autobiography: "It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764,
as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were sing
ing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall
of the city first started to my mind."2
Evocative as these lines may be, they were written in 1790, a quarter
century after the event. Even more revealing is a letter to his father dated 9 Oc
tober 1764, describing his very first impressions of the city:
I am now Dear Sir at Rome. If it was difficult before to give you...any ac
count of what I saw it is almost impossible here....I am really almost in a
dream. Whatever ideas books may have given us of the greatness of
that people, their accounts of the most flourishing state of Rome fall infi
nitely short of the picture of its ruins. I am convinced there never existed
such a nation and I hope for the happiness of mankind there never will
again.3
These brief remarks reveal a major shift in mentality, for the ruined monuments
of the past are no longer merely an occasion for meditation, but require explana
tion of the processes by which they fell into ruin. They can be understood as the
products of a complex historical process, and that process is intelligible and im
portant. We often forget that the last chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall is de
voted to a meticulous analysis of the transformation of the city of Rome, as it
slowly degenerated from the splendid imperial capital of the Antonine emperors
to the half-ruined eighteenth-century city of the popes. Nor was this transforma
tion due to the impersonal workings of time, but rather to human agency.
It is only a short step from Gibbon's active engagement to an urge to
preserve, restore, and where necessary recreate the past. This tendency, spo
radically visible among the antiquarians of the eighteenth century, took wing
with the Romantic nationalism of the post-Napoleonic era. It began in France in
the circle of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), but soon spread to Germany, Eng
1 Poggio, "Historiae de varietate fortunae," cited in Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, ed. David Wormersley, 3 vols. (London: Penguin, 1994), vol. 3, pp.
1062-3 (Ch. 71).
2 Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. Dero A. Saunders (New York: Meridian, 1961), p.
154.
3 Edward Gibbon, Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton (4 vols., London: Cassell,
1956), vol. 1, p. 184.
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
land, and then Italy. It found a home even further afield, with the Khedive Is
ma'il, who by no accident was the most francophile of nineteenth-century Middle
Eastern rulers. By the 1860s, the Service des Antiquites under Auguste Mariette
was taking steps to preserve Egypt's Pharaonic heritage, and for the Islamic
monuments (though to a far lesser degree) the famous Comite de Conservation
des Monuments Arabes followed soon thereafter, in 1881.1 We often look back
with scorn, even with dismay, on the work of these first generations. Certainly it
is true that Viollet-le-Duc, to take the most famous or notorious among them,
was often guided more by enthusiasm for an imaginary Gothic ideal than by the
sober scrutiny of real monuments. But new movements breed great enthusi
asms; sobriety sets in soon enough.
When the movement to recover and restore the past began, it was al
most always as part of a nationalist project. And of course this has remained the
case down to our time. The new states which emerged in the Middle East after
World War I found the monuments of the remote past to be an essential element
in their emerging national mythologies. Thus, Republican Turkey discovered an
affinity with the Hittites, Iraq with the Assyrians and Babylonians, Pahlavi Iran
with the Achaemenids. Of Israel's obsession with archaeology we need hardly
speak. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, a new ethos had begun to
emerge alongside the nationalist one. There was an increasing concern to re
spect the works of other peoples and cultures, even when these cultures were
remote and little known. After World War II this concern became, perhaps for
the first time, truly global, and was institutionalized in UNESCO, important not
only because of its mission to preserve and enhance the world's cultural heri
tage, but also because it demonstrated a solemn international commitment to
that end and provided a permanent structure by which to pursue it.
So it might seem that mankind had finally learned how to transcend its
ancient instincts of wanton or malicious destruction, how to value and learn from
the cultural achievements of others, how indeed to incorporate these things into
a more universal sense of social and cultural identity. And as multiculturalism
moved from a frame of mind to a movement to at least a proto-ideology, we
might have hoped that this victory had been firmly and permanently secured. But
the 1990s, if nothing else, have taught us how fragile and momentary are our
victories over the common barbarism of mankind. We seem still to be the same
reckless and destructive creatures we have always been.
By now, you will have noticed that throughout this essay, the Middle East
has entered in only in passing; it has simply provided a few examples among
many. This does not represent a memory lapse, a failure to remember for whom
I am writing or for what purpose. Rather, I have wanted us to view in the broad
est possible sense the things that have been done to Muslims—and, one must
admit, by them—in recent decades. It might be useful for us to close with some
thoughts not only on spectacular acts of cultural destruction, but also on certain
subtler but in some ways even more damaging transformations. Under the first
category, one thinks of the razing of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, or—a far greater
loss to our cultural patrimony—the systematic destruction of the Ottoman (and
post-Ottoman) heritage in Bosnia, largely though not entirely at the hands of
11 owe this reference to Professor Irene Bierman, University of California, Los Angeles.
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
Serbian forces during the civil war of 1992-93. Even to mention a few items in
this list is profoundly depressing: the burning of the Bosnian National Library in
Sarajevo, the dynamiting of countless mosques, including both masterpieces of
imperial architecture and more modest regional designs, and the bombardment
of bridges and whole neighborhoods simply because of their historical associa
tions. So far as I can tell, we have lost almost all the vast architectural legacy
created in his homeland by the most prominent Bosnian politician of the six
teenth (or any) century, the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmet Pasha.1 On the Muslim
side, we have most recently and notoriously the dynamiting of the Buddhist co
lossi at Bamyan in March 2001. Less widely noted, but no less tragic, was the
wholesale smashing and looting of the priceless and utterly irreplaceable collec
tions of the National Museum in Kabul.
In the category of destruction masquerading as restoration, we witness
what might be called the Disneyfication of the ruins of Babylon, with the irony
that anyone who wants to get some idea what the Ishtar Gate might have
looked like now must go to the Pergamon-Museum in Berlin to find out. In Da
mascus, the Ottoman-era streets south of the Umayyad Mosque and the Midan
outside the Citadel have been cleared—not great architecture, to be sure, but
still two very characteristic popular quarters now replaced by empty space. Or
finally, on quite a different plane, there is the alarming spread of white marble
among the Fatimid monuments of Cairo, and indeed a rather wholesale reshap
ing of these monuments.2
The first set of acts appears to belong to the too-familiar category of
eradicating the achievements of your enemies, but in each case there is a pecu
liar twist. The destruction of Muslim monuments, and of buildings which housed
(among a multitude of other things) the historical memory of Bosnian Muslims,
was part of the whole 'ethnic cleansing' project. These acts were not directed at
the Ottomans, who were the builders of the monuments or the compilers of the
priceless Turkish documents, for they after all had departed more than a century
earlier, in 1878. Rather, it was aimed at the existing (and largely Slavic) Muslim
presence in Bosnia and indeed in all of southeastern Europe. A Croatian militia
man explained the destruction of the city of Mostar with perfect clarity: "It is not
enough to cleanse Mostar of the Muslims; the relics must also be destroyed."3
The Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, more or less ignored both by Hindus and Muslims
for centuries, was caught up in the wave of Hindu nationalism in India which has
reduced if not eliminated the secularist orientation of Nehru and his immediate
1 See a lengthy discussion of these events by Andras Riedlmayer (bibliographer for the
Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Harvard University), delivered as a public
lecture in 1994. "Bosnia's Multi-Cultural heritage and its destruction"
[www.kakarigi.net/manu/ceip2.htm],
2 Paula Sanders, "Bohra architecture and the restoration of Fatimid culture," in L'Egypte
fatimide, son art et son histoire, ed. Marianne Barrucand (Paris: Presses de I'Universite
de Paris-Sorbonne, Nov. 1999), pp. 159-65. At greater length: Sanders, "The contest
over context: Fatimid Cairo in the twentieth century," in Text and Context: Proceedings
of the Nineteenth Levi Delia Vida Conference, ed. Irene Bierman (forthcoming).
3 Riedlmayer lecture, p. 10.
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
heirs.1 The fate of the Buddhist colossi at Bamyan is far odder, since no Bud
dhists have lived in that region (or anywhere in Central Asia and Pakistan) for
centuries. If we are to believe the words of Mullah Muhammad 'Umar, it was not
even provoked by feelings of personal enmity or revulsion. It was a matter of
pure religious principle—the need to purge the land of even the vestiges of idola
try. To most outsiders, of course, an act of principle seemed ignorant fanaticism.
And to historians of Inner Asia, steeped in the vast sweep of cultures and relig
ions and peoples that have mingled there over so many millennia, it was a brut
ish campaign to eradicate the still impressive though slowly eroding traces of a
religion and culture that once had reached from Japan to the eastern frontiers of
Iran, and north across the Gobi and Takla Makan to Mongolia and Manchuria.
Buddhism thus fades bit by bit from a dynamic living tradition, to a memory pre
served by the statues of Bamyan and the cave shrines of Binglingsi and Dun
huang, to the arid words of historians, the last and perhaps the poorest of the
vessels of our memory.
In the case of the transformation of monuments, these are not meant to
eradicate the past; they represent an effort simply to turn it to contemporary
purposes and tastes. The work of the Bohras in Cairo is surely the most inno
cent. To the eyes of many, the courtyard of the redone al-Azhar may seem gar
ish, and the al-Aqmar Mosque simply strange. But there is no doubt that the
Bohras are, religiously speaking, legitimate heirs of the Fatimids. In a certain
sense, the Fatimid monuments represent their heritage, and morally they are
free to do with it as they will. Babylon and Damascus are rather a different mat
ter, since they represent a massive intervention by the modern state for a variety
of ideological and pragmatic purposes. Here we run into a long-running debate
between two sets of values, which can be reconciled with patience and good will,
but seldom are. The first set of values states that a government carries the pri
mary responsible for its cultural patrimony—in this case, the ruins of Babylon and
the old city of Damascus—and that a government has not only the right but the
duty to determine the ways in which this patrimony should be preserved and the
uses to which it should be put. The second set of values argues that old monu
ments and works of art should not be preserved in order to glorify the present,
but in order to connect the present to an authentic past, to exhibit in concrete
form the continuity and change of human life. It is a debate which power and
money normally wins.
My comments in this essay have been guided by two general themes: our
sense of loss in the face of the inexorable destruction of the records and monu
ments which embody our memories, and the ways in which historical conscious
ness can turn that sense of loss to constructive purpose. I would like to close by
alluding to a third theme, which time does not permit us to explore, but which
opens up important new avenues for thought and action. In statements issued
on two successive days in March 2001, the Director-General of UNESCO, Koichiro
Matsuura, identified the destruction of cultural property as "a crime against cul
ture." On 12 March, he stated that by demolishing the Bamyan Buddhas,
1 A lengthy discussion of the event and its political context is in Katherine J. Komenda,
"Sojourn through Saffron: The Life of Sadhvi Uma Shri Bharati and the Feminine Heart of
Hindutva Religion and Politics in India" (Ph.D diss., University of California, Santa Bar
bara, 2001), pp. 11-13, 278-81, 369-87.
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MESA Bulletin 36 2002
the Taliban have committed a crime against culture. It is abominable to
witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which
were the heritage of the Afghan people, and, indeed, the whole of hu
manity...The Taliban heeded neither the unprecedented scope of interna
tional mobilization, nor the advice against their decision, spontaneously
issued by the highest religious authorities of Islam. 1
The following day, he had occasion to address parallel acts in the former Yugo
slavia. In welcoming the International Criminal Tribunal's decision to include the
destruction of the historic monuments of Dubrovnik (1991) in its indictment for
war crimes, Matsuura stated:
This sets a historic precedent as it is the first time since the judgements
of the Niirnberg and Tokyo tribunals that a crime against cultural prop
erty has been sanctioned by an international tribunal. This indictment
concerns a breach of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of
Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict...which is administered
by UNESCO.2
These comments by the Director-General raise a host of questions and
difficult problems, if only because the imperative needs of the present and future
inevitably mean that some monuments of the past—of our cultural memory—will
be lost. There simply is not room enough for everything that was, and is, and is
to come, to exist simultaneously. But if we regard "crimes against culture" not as
crimes against objects, but rather as "crimes against human memory and per
sonal identity," we will have some idea of how to begin to think about this prob
lem. The destruction of monuments and records of the past is never a neutral
act; on the contrary, it is morally deeply charged. Such acts have irreversible
consequences, and we need to ask in the most serious manner just what those
consequences will be, for ourselves and for others. If these objects are lost, will
at least the core of our cultural memory remain intact, or will we be deprived of
even the little light that our past can shed as we try to make our way through a
troubled world?
'"Director-General Condemns Taliban's Crime against Culture," UNESCO Press [www.
unesco.org/opi/eng/unescopress/2001/01-38e.shtml].
2 "Director-General Welcomes Tribunal's Indictment on Destruction of Heritage in Du
brovnik," UNESCO Press [www.unesco.org/opi/eng/unescopress/2001/01-40e.shtml].
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