The destruction of the great Buddhist statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban militia was as predictable as it was culpable; Saudi Arabia bears ultimate responsibility for this appalling annihilation of the world's heritage.
For it was Saudi Arabia's rigid Sunni Wahabi sect that created the Taliban, and it was Saudi Muslim legal iconoclasm that led directly to the wrecking of the Buddhas.
The ruin of the massive statues in Bamiyan has tell-tale origins in Saudi Arabia. Back in 1820, the much-worshipped statues of Dhu Khalasa, dating from the 12th century, were destroyed by Wahabis.
And 10 years ago, only weeks after the Lebanese professor Kemal Salibi wrote a book suggesting that Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia may have constituted the location of the Bible, the Saudi Sunni authorities sent bulldozers to destroy the ancient buildings in these hamlets.
Saudi organisations have bulldozed hundreds of historic buildings in the name of religion in Mecca and Medina, and former United Nations officials have condemned the destruction of Ottoman-style buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aidagency that decided they were "idolatrous".
When the Saudi Sunnis built the massive Faisal mosque in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad - originally destined for the Afghan capital of Kabul - its construction was followed almost at once by the smashing of a large number of early Islamic figure shrines in the city. Graffiti appeared beside graveyard shrines saying that they must be destroyed and that "there can be no sainthood in Islam".
There is, in fact, nothing "Islamic" in the desecration of the Bamiyan statues. For 1,400 years, as the writer Emran Qureshi has noted, pious Muslims managed to coexist with pagan statuary - from the Sphinx in Egypt to the statues of Iranian Persepolis and the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The latter had survived centuries of Islamic rule with little damage; the Taliban's decision to destroy the statues has thus been at odds with Afghanistan's more tolerant traditions.
In Saudi Arabia,private Christian worship, even at Christmas, is illegal; Christians caught saying communal prayers have been deported. Its kings are buried without even a gravestone.
But no American "demarches" have
been made to the oil-rich princes whose alliance with the United
States is so important and whose dominating Wahabi sect condemned
the Bamiyan statues.