Afghanistans mind-blowing Minaret of

Jam can at last lean towards hope

Catriona Luke
The Taliban and the antiquities trade are the challenges facing Unesco if it is
to stop the worlds second tallest brick minaret tilting into oblivion

A 3.47 degree tilt has left the Minaret of Jam in danger of collapse.
Photograph: Jane Sweeney/Robert Harding/REX

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Thursday 27 November 2014 09.00 GMT

In August BBC Afghanistan reported that the 820-year-old Minaret of Jam

(the worlds second tallest brick minaret) was in danger of collapse. A
combination of high floods in 2013, illegal excavations for archaeological
artefacts nearby, an absence of funds and the difficulty of reaching and
restoring a site that lies in a Taliban-dominated area, had left the tower
abandoned and at a 3.47 degree tilt. This is less than the 5.5-degree tilt that
the Tower of Pisa once endured, but the minaret is 30ft taller and its
foundations much less secure.

Since then things have changed, as perhaps has the fate of the minaret
which has been standing since 1194 in this lonely mountain pass on the edge
of the ancient kingdom of Ghor. Since taking office in September, the
president, Ashraf Ghani, has made known his interest in the preservation of
Afghanistans cultural life and his keenness for working with Unesco in Kabul.
The Unesco team visited the minaret for the first time since 2006 on 18
November to take measurements. Tarcis Stevens, a Belgian conservation
architect who led the team to the minaret, told the New York Times: Its the
very first historical monument of Afghanistan, with an importance far beyond
the borders of Afghanistan.

Unesco defends its relative inactivity by saying that in 2002 and 2003 it
prevented the minaret from collapsing completely by building a new
supporting wall, but the Kabul office still has no clear plan for its conservation.
This is partly excused on grounds of geography.

At the end of the 1960s Peter Levi, travelling with Bruce Chatwin, wrote in his
book about Afghanistan, The Light Garden of the Angel King, that the Jam
minaret was where the

Jam river discharges into the deep waters of the Hari Rud ... The stream of
the Hari Rud is thirty yards across, very fast and chalky green; the
mountains are like cool clinkers; the minaret is a tall, elegant, shadow-cut,
biscuit-coloured pencil magnificently inlaid with turquoise inscriptions, built
where the muezzin could best fill the valleys with echoes. Seen from below,
the obsessional strength of its detail and the depth of its shadows have a
mind-blowing power; seen from above it is a miracle of simplicity and
proportion with the rocks. It stands on a spurt of gravel where the Hari Rud
emerges for a few hundred yards from a labyrinth of ravines ... There are the
ruins of a castle on the opposite bank, high up in the rocks and very badly
eroded ... When we saw it later from the air on the flight from Chagcheran to
Herat, it was obvious that the mountains to the north of the minaret are
extremely rough and there is no easy pass through them.

Nevertheless, conservation in Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, where Unesco

has a number of world heritage sites, is also failing. In late October, Dawn
reported that artefacts from the 10,000-year-old site of Mehrgarh, near
Quetta, had been trafficked for lucrative sale in Rome. Mehrgarh is rightly a
world heritage site: one of the most ancient in the subcontinent, and the first
in the region to be settled for farming in place of nomadic lifestyles, it predates
the Indus valley civilisation by millennia.

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The challenge for Unesco in this region is that it is up against governments
who are unable to defend heritage against their own military and, in
Afghanistan, against warlords and the Taliban. Antiquities represent an
opulent opportunity, but the trade with the west also acts as a way of chipping
away at the cultural heritage of minorities.

What can be done? Unesco needs to pluck up its courage and make a
determined effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to reach the military, the
Taliban and the landowners upon whose estates these sites often sit.

Then there is the matter that, philosophically speaking, the case for the
preservation of world heritage buildings remains fuzzy in 2014. Of course the
preservation of human life is more important; the administration of polio
vaccine in Afghanistan and Pakistan to children has to be worth 10 Minarets of
Jam. It is just that the buildings of the past remind us of our fragile human
story, the skills and genius of the past Jam contains a double helix staircase
unknown in Europe until the Renaissance and the understanding that
civilisations ebb and flow.

Source:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/27/afghanistan-minaret-jam-lean-unesco-
heritage