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IN the year 2009, after Iraq had been thoroughly wrecked and pillaged and items from museums and excavations were in the hands of people they should not have been, an American company was on the hunt. Hobby Lobby, a big-box chain store that sells Made in China kitsch and art supplies, wanted artefacts and antiquities that would make good additions for the Bible museum that it had long been planning.
They were particularly on the lookout, obviously, for Bible-related artefacts, tablets, tiles, anything really that connected to the lands that were the birthplace of the Christian faith and that now fell within the territory of a Muslim and embattled Iraq.
Where there is demand, there is also inevitably supply. Around the same time, perhaps a bit before or a little after, art dealers in the United Arab Emirates had caches of Iraqi antiquities for sale. They included artefacts that were thousands of years old, and of just the kind that would attract the interest of a purchaser like Hobby Lobby — old manuscripts and tiles that could go in the Bible museum that the company was planning.
The homes of the wealthy in Pakistan are often adorned with priceless antiquities that should be the property not of individuals, but of the public.
In 2010, the company, subject as it is to US laws, hired an expert in cultural property law to see if it was feasible for the company to purchase antiquities of this sort from a dealer in the UAE. That expert informed Hobby Lobby executives that they should not purchase items unless they were properly labelled as being from Iraq (where looting is known to have taken place) and that incorrect labelling would lead to serious legal consequences.
Excited at the prospect of obtaining biblical antiquities, Hobby Lobby ignored the advice of the expert and went ahead and bought a whole trove of antiquities for its Bible museum. In order to be shipped to the US, the artefacts (over 3,000 in number) were falsely labelled ‘ceramics’ and ‘samples’. To further deflect attention, their destination address was listed as one or another Hobby Lobby store to suggest that they were simply samples of items that the company was planning to carry.
The US Customs and Border Protection, however, did not fall for it. The boxes of shipments were pulled and Hobby Lobby was sued by the US Justice Department. Earlier this month, the company agreed to pay a $3 million fine after being sued in a civil action and was forced to give up all the artefacts it had purchased in the shady deal to display in their museum.
Justice may have been done in the Hobby Lobby case, but the easy parameters of fines and forfeitures largely hide the complexities of who owns antiquities and whether much of the material on the shelves of museums in the Western world is art or loot.
Antiquities belonging to the subcontinent have also been subject to looting. Many Mughal art objects and manuscripts that are on view at many of these museums reveal procurement dates that are right around the time of Partition. The looters, who are taking advantage of the instability in Iraq and Syria today, took similar advantage of the slicing and dicing of the subcontinent back then. A search for the manuscript pages of the Akbarnama, for instance, will find many of the original pages of the resplendent manuscript on display, not in the cities of the subcontinent but in the institutions of the American Midwest, in university museums in Pennsylvania and other such places whose riches have purchased history which is now on display for all to see.
At the same time, few tears can be shed over this predicament. A visit to one of the museums in the very cities or towns of the subcontinent (or the Middle East) will reveal empty shelves, dusty tablets and items stored in general disarray. That is, of course, if the items are there at all. More often than not, if one can even find a staff member to talk to, one learns that this or that missing piece was either damaged or taken home by some old director or present director or middling interim director.
If the shady dealers in Iraqi antiquities were willing to sell them to Hobby Lobby, the equally shady dealers of Peshawar or Lahore or wherever are willing to do the same and for much less. Many are willing to buy from them; the homes of many wealthy scions in Pakistan are adorned with priceless antiquities that should be the property not of individuals and locked up in their mansions, but of the public who can view them, enjoy them and learn from them.
This is, of course, not the case or the current condition. Its consequence is that the art (and possibly loot) on display in Western museums need not claim legitimacy of procurement because its very availability and careful preservation makes the argument that it has been ‘saved’. There is truth in this: the sellers or looters may once have been colonial governments, but more lately, are locals eager to make a buck, uninterested in the place of the artefact in any sort of historical continuum or portion of civilisational heritage.
There is no history in the looted lands of recent times. The publics of Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan and now Syria have been divested from history by the post-colonial confusions that make their own slicing and dicing seem natural and important and crucial. But they have no idea how their present identity connects in some integral or crucial way with those who came before them. Without history and with dogma they plod along, repeating past mistakes with the zeal and vigour of the very first time.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2017
