A Taliban fighter takes an image along with his cell phone on the Nationwide Museum of Afghanistan, in Kabul, Monday, December 6, 2021.
Credit score: AP Photograph/Petros Giannakouris
The Nationwide Museum of Afghanistan is open as soon as once more and the Taliban, whose members as soon as smashed their approach by means of the ability destroying irreplaceable items of the nation’s nationwide heritage, now seem like amongst its most enthusiastic guests.
The museum in southwest Kabul, which hosts artifacts from the Paleolithic interval to the twentieth century, reopened simply over per week in the past for the primary time because the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in mid-August amid the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops.
Its director, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, and his employees have up to now been allowed to proceed of their positions though they, like lots of Afghanistan’s civil servants, haven’t acquired salaries since August. Solely the safety guards have modified, Rahimi mentioned, with Taliban now changing the police contingent who used to protect the constructing and offering ladies safety guards to verify feminine guests. At the moment about 50-100 folks go to the museum every day.
Energy cuts are frequent and the museum’s generator has damaged down, leaving lots of the exhibition rooms plunged into darkness. On Friday a number of Taliban, some with assault rifles dangling from their shoulder, had been amongst guests utilizing the lights of their cellphones to look into show circumstances of historic ceramics and 18th-century weapons.
“That is from our historic historical past, so we got here to see it,” mentioned Taliban fighter Mansoor Zulfiqar, a 29-year-old initially from Khost province in southeastern Afghanistan who has now been appointed as a safety guard on the Inside Ministry. “I’m very pleased,” he mentioned of his first go to to the museum, marveling at his nation’s nationwide heritage.
Zulfiqar mentioned he had spent 12 years in Kabul’s infamous Pul-e-Charkhi jail, Afghanistan’s largest. Whereas there, he mentioned, somebody had advised him in regards to the museum and he dreamt of the day when the Taliban would rule Afghanistan once more and he would have the ability to go to the museum.
However when Zulfiqar was only a boy in 2001, the Taliban ransacked the museum, smashing priceless statues, particularly ones thought of un-Islamic. One in all them, the remnants of a limestone statue believed to be of a king relationship from the 2nd century, stands on the entrance to the museum constructing, now restored by consultants from France and the museum’s personal restoration division.
In the identical yr, the Taliban dynamited two large Sixth-century Buddha statues carved right into a cliff-face in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan on orders from Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, a transfer that was met with worldwide outrage.
In order the Taliban swept by means of Afghanistan this summer time, taking province after province, there have been grave considerations {that a} comparable destiny awaited the nation’s cultural heritage, particularly something from pre-Islamic occasions. To date not less than, this has not gave the impression to be the case.
Saifullah, a 40-year-old Taliban member from Wardak province and trainer in a madrassa, an Islamic spiritual faculty, mentioned he believed the 2001 destruction of artifacts within the museum had been carried out by decrease rating Taliban members with out orders from top-ranking officers.
Touring the museum for the primary time, Saifullah, who goes by one title, mentioned he would encourage his college students, a few of whom had been now guards on the museum itself, to go to the Nationwide Museum of Afghanistan.
“Generations can be taught from this, and what we had up to now,” he mentioned. “We have now a wealthy historical past.”
Maybe Afghanistan’s new rulers now agree with the inscription engraved on a plaque exterior the museum constructing’s entrance: “A nation stays alive when its tradition stays alive.”
