[BRIEF NOTE] On the latest unpleasantness
Feb. 23rd, 2006 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI hate it when beautiful, important things are destroyed for senseless and/or iconoclastic reasons.
The bombing or the Al Askari Shrine seems to be the trigger event that finally precipitated the Lebanonization of Iraq, or at least of non-Kurdish Iraq. (Kirkuk will, as I noted yesterday, be Southern Kurdistan's only exception.)
Back in the spring of 2003, I thought that even though the intelligence motivating the invasion of Iraq was flawed that something decidedly good and positive would be made out of the affair. I thought that it didn't matter if a thing's origins were contaminated, that ends could be used to justify the means. What a fool I was.
The huge complex was first developed during the 10th and 11th Centuries by the Shia Hamdanid and Buyid dynasties, and soon became an important place of pilgrimage.
The complex was rebuilt several times, most recently in 1905, when a gold-plated dome was erected above the tomb of the two imams. The dome was covered by 72,00 golden pieces and measured roughly 20m wide and 68m high.
A blue-tiled dome also marks the sirdab where Imam al-Mahdi disappeared.
Robert Hillenbrand, the professor of Islamic Art at Edinburgh University, told the BBC that the shrine may not be of enormous architectural importance, but is of immense spiritual importance for hundreds of millions of Shia Muslims.
In a Christian context, he said, the shrine would equate in spiritual importance to the burial place of St James at Santiago de Compostela.
"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.
The bombing or the Al Askari Shrine seems to be the trigger event that finally precipitated the Lebanonization of Iraq, or at least of non-Kurdish Iraq. (Kirkuk will, as I noted yesterday, be Southern Kurdistan's only exception.)
Back in the spring of 2003, I thought that even though the intelligence motivating the invasion of Iraq was flawed that something decidedly good and positive would be made out of the affair. I thought that it didn't matter if a thing's origins were contaminated, that ends could be used to justify the means. What a fool I was.
