The Buddhas of Bamiyan

by Pierre's Middle East Issues Blog

Photo Source: John Moore/Getty Images

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, the novel he wrote after The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini has his hero Laila and her childhood love Tariq visit the magnificent, centuries-old Buddha statues in the valley of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, about 100 miles west of Kabul:



The two Buddhas were enormous, soaring much higher than she had imagined from all the photos she’d seen of them. Chiseled into a sun-bleached rock cliff, they peered down at them, as they had nearly two thousand years before, Laila imagined, at caravans crossing the valley on the Silk Road. On either side of them, along the overhanging niche, the cliff was pocked with myriad caves.



On Feb. 26, 2001, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared that “these idols have been gods of the infidels” and ordered them destroyed. By early March, the statues were rubble.

Source: Pierre's Middle East Issues Blog