To preserve art, Afghans defied Taliban enforcers
By Kevin Sullivan
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 6, 2002
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Dr. Mohammad Yousof Asefi, 40, spent three months last year doctoring paintings -- instead of patients -- in a locked room at Afghanistan's National Gallery.
He tricked the Taliban religious police, who might otherwise have slashed or smashed the paintings, as they destroyed thousands of other cultural artifacts during their five-year rule.
With a paintbrush and watercolors, Asefi saved more than 80 paintings from destruction by the Taliban regime, which decreed that any art depicting human and animal images was un-Islamic.
One was a moody impressionist painting of a cobblestone street winding down a hill -- deserted, until Asefi came along with his wet sponge.
Asefi wiped the canvas, and women, resplendent in red and blue cloaks, appeared. Then two more, then six and 10, until the painting's street suddenly came alive with strolling people.
When Asefi was finished, another valuable painting in the National Gallery was back out in the daylight for all to see. Unlike thousands of other paintings, films, photographs, drawings, books, statues, musical recordings, relics, archaeological sites and other Afghan treasures, it had survived the cultural destruction visited on this country by the radical Taliban movement.
Knowing that the Taliban banned all images of living things, from historical documentary films to a schoolboy's crayon drawing of a horse, Asefi, a physician and one of Afghanistan's leading painters, decided to save scores of oil paintings last year.
He knew time was running out. The Taliban had just defied an international outcry by blowing up two magnificent stone Buddhas in the central town of Bamian. The statues, which had been carved into the face of a cliff in the third and fifth centuries and were more than 100 feet high, were considered wonders of the ancient world. But to the Taliban, they were idols that insulted Islam, so they were blasted into dust last March.
Asefi also knew that the Taliban had recently smashed more Buddha statues in the already gutted Kabul Museum, and he figured the National Gallery would surely be next.
Working alone in a cold room in the gallery, hiding when Taliban officials would happen in, Asefi carefully painted over people, cows, donkeys, birds and other animals. He matched the background colors perfectly; a riverbank filled with grazing cattle was made to look empty when he applied a watercolor mask. He worked on a few of his own paintings, although at least 26 of them had already been stolen or destroyed.
Asefi said the Taliban's religious police came regularly to the gallery to make sure their edicts against idolatry were being followed. The Taliban enforcers never spotted his handiwork.
Had he been discovered, Asefi could have been beaten, whipped, jailed or even executed for so blatantly defying the Taliban's version of Islamic law. The Taliban jailed and tortured many other Afghans for crimes as simple as selling books with photographs on the cover.
"I don't think I was so brave," said Asefi, a slight man who said he developed a chronic nervous cough from the stress. "I thought it was my duty to try to save these paintings.
"I have worked in the arts in our country for 20 years, and I could not be responsible for letting our history and culture be destroyed."
UNESCO officials recently visited Kabul, surveyed the damage to Afghanistan's culture and called it "a loss for the cultural heritage of the world," according to a spokesman for the U.N. agency.
"They left our city vacant of intellectuals," said Shah Mohammad, whose two bookstores are Kabul's most extensive. He said many leading Afghan painters, writers, singers and other artists fled the country.
Those who stayed behind played the dangerous game of trying to constantly dodge the Taliban religious police. Shah said two of his brothers were jailed, one for two months and the other for two weeks of intensive torture that did permanent damage. He said three of his store employees were jailed for four months each for selling forbidden books.
The Taliban police came to his shops every week looking for contraband. Shah still has books on which they scribbled with heavy black marker across jacket photos. On others, he taped his business card over photos to keep the religious shock troops at bay.
One day in 1999, Shah said, the Taliban police came to one of his shops, hauled out $40,000 worth of books and destroyed them in a bonfire on the street. "It was a big blow, but we never gave up," he said.
Shortly after the Bamian Buddha statues were destroyed, Taliban authorities started paying regular visits to Afghan Films, the government-run national film studio and archives. The studio, built with U.S. assistance, has been making newsreels, documentaries and feature films since 1968 and preserving films produced earlier. It had a library of at least 1,000 films until Taliban police showed up and had a bonfire last spring.
A storage hut at the studio is still filled with a spaghetti-like jumble of films that Taliban members pulled from their canisters and tossed on the ground. The ground is still scorched from where the Taliban burned a huge pile of films.
What they didn't know was that the studio's eight remaining employees -- of the 160 who once worked there -- had anticipated the police visit and hidden as many films as possible.
They stuffed them in broken cameras, behind sound equipment, in the far corners of abandoned storerooms.
They destroyed the building's electrical system so there would be no lights to help the Taliban members conduct their search.
"They were all illiterate, and they didn't know how many films we had," said Abdul Jamil Sarwar, 54, the studio's director. "They told us that if they found any more films, they would arrest us and put us in prison. But they didn't find any."
This article includes material from Knight Ridder Newspapers. |
