New rebel merger off to modest start

[Originally posted at NOW]

The merger of seven major factions has yet to make much impact on the battlefield.

When seven major Syrian rebel brigades announced their merger last week into a unified Jabhat al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Front”), independent of both the al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadi factions and the US-backed Supreme Military Council, a number of analysts speculated the move would translate into significant military gains for the opposition on the ground.

So far, however, while rebel factions have made a number of advances on forces allied to President Bashar al-Assad in recent days, analysts told NOW Jabhat al-Islamiyya’s contribution to these efforts appears to have been relatively modest.

The new super-brigade brings together an estimated 45,000 fighters from some of the most powerful Islamist forces in the country, comprising what were hitherto known as Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, Suqur al-Sham, Liwa al-Haq, Ansar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, and the Kurdish Islamic Front. Over and above the military alliance, Jabhat al-Islamiyya has also explicitly declared a political program. In a marked departure from the more secular rhetoric of the Western-supported Syrian National Coalition opposition body, Jabhat al-Islamiyya calls for replacing the Assad regime with an “Islamic state where the sovereignty of God almighty alone will be our reference and ruler.”

Coinciding with the Front’s formation were several substantive territorial gains for rebel forces, though the overall war continues to stand at a general stalemate. On Saturday, in Deir Ezzor province, rebels captured the largest oil field in the country, effectively bringing an end to the regime’s supply of the commodity. On the day the Jabhat al-Islamiyya merger was announced, rebels captured the town of Deir Attiyeh in the strategic and heavily-contested Qalamoun region along the Lebanese border, though regime forces later re-took it. And in the Damascus suburbs, an intense rebel campaign to break a year-long regime siege overran a number of neighborhoods earlier this week, and has led to a spike in casualties among pro-regime militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

“Hezbollah has already announced around 30 dead for November,” said Phillip Smyth, researcher at the University of Maryland and author of the Hizballah Cavalcade website that tracks the various Shiite Islamist militias active in Syria. “Casualties are [also] coming from the entire Iranian-backed front” of pro-Assad Shiite forces, including the Iraqi Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and the Badr Organization, which recently announced the death of a commander, Smyth added.

For the most part, however, these rebel advances have been made not by Jabhat al-Islamiyya fighters but rather their powerful jihadi rivals.

“The capture of Deir Attiyeh was the work of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which is currently in a joint front in Qalamoun with Jabhat al-Nusra and an independent battalion led by Saudi foreign fighters known as ‘The Green Battalion’,” said Aymenn al-Tamimi, Syria analyst and Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Similarly, “the capture of the [Deir Ezzor] oil field was led by Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Only in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta does Jabhat al-Islamiyya appear to have played a lead role in the recent fighting, where it and a local coalition have outperformed the smaller ISIS and Nusra contingents, according to Tamimi. A video uploaded Sunday showed Ghouta residents celebrating as “victorious” rebel brigades drove through the streets.

In general, though, “It’s still very early days for the Islamic Front so [there have been] no really significant military gains as of yet,” said Tamimi.

Nonetheless, several analysts with whom NOW spoke argued the Front could soon make a noticeably bigger impact on the battlefield, provided it receives sufficient logistical and financial support.

“If they can draw more financial backing and set up a better internal coordination of their forces, funding channels, and resources, I'm sure that the creation of the Islamic Front could have an impact on the military balance,” said Aron Lund, researcher and editor of the Carnegie Endowment’s Syria in Crisis website.

“This coalition is formal and set to last, unlike the Islamic Alliance that translated to no real change on the ground,” said Tamimi. “A change in the rebels’ fortunes might occur if this appeals to the Saudis and potential foreign backers to step up support in the belief it is the only viable rebel force.”

Absent that crucial ingredient of material foreign assistance, said Lund, the Islamic Front’s formation will be “mainly a political event, rather than a military one.”

Note to Turkey: Not everything has to be a mosque

[Originally posted at NOW]

With moderates like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, I often wonder, who needs Islamists?

Having only last week referred to the UNESCO World Heritage Listed Hagia Sophia museum as a “mosque,” the ruling party is now turning its conversionary zeal on the 5th-century Monastery of Stoudios – or the “Imrahor Ilyas Bey Mosque,” as it will apparently soon be known. This follows the unpardonable Islamisation that has already been inflicted on other priceless Byzantine-era churches in the towns of Trabzon and Iznik.

This kind of thing has a long and ugly history, implicating Christians as much as Muslims. No less a structure than the Parthenon of Athens, the finest monument of all antiquity, was irreparably wrecked during its conversion in the 6th century into a Byzantine church (also named Hagia Sophia, as it happens).

Though the Ottomans later turned this too into a mosque, they had enough reverence for it not to make alterations beyond painting over the Christian mosaics, which were anyway disfigurements in the first place. One wishes one could say the same of the Istanbul Hagia Sophia, where the Ottomans placed lugubrious black calligraphy discs like crude stickers over the still-visible and colourful artwork with which the building had originally been decorated. Of course, to this day, a crackpot Christian fringe still dreams of knocking down the minarets there and restoring it as an Orthodox place of worship. Not for nothing did Ataturk decide to do away with the building’s religious significance altogether and make it a museum.

That his secularizing project looks to be under redoubled and fortified threat in today’s Turkey is already very clear. Yet the notion of purifying or “conquering” (fetih in Turkish) every last pebble of non-Muslim heritage is a much larger issue than the domestic secularist/Islamist debate. It is, in fact, nothing short of an aesthetic and cultural crime; the spoliation of unique and irreplaceable remnants of world history; and for these reasons demands the attention – and if, necessary, intervention – of the international community.

Hezbollah's opponents divided over Iran deal

[Originally posted at NOW]

Despite March 14 officially welcoming US-Iran agreement, several MPs expressed reservations to NOW, though no broader strategic response is apparent.

When Iran reached a landmark deal with six major world powers this weekend to obtain partial relief from economic sanctions in exchange for temporarily freezing its controversial uranium enrichment program, the Islamic Republic’s allies in Lebanon’s March 8 coalition were quick to declare a victory.

“This is a victory for […] the resistance of Iran in the face of international pressure for more than 10 years,” sources close to the Tehran-backed Hezbollah told a local newspaper Monday. “Iran has managed to extract an international concession that it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.”

At the same time, March 14, the longstanding rival of the Hezbollah-led March 8 bloc, also claimed the outcome as a success on the grounds that it imposes new constraints on Tehran’s activities. The former’s General Secretariat Coordinator Fares Soueid said via Twitter that “[t]he ‘resistance’ has given in to the rules of the new international order, and this is a great achievement for all of us.”

However, conversations NOW had with members of various March 14-affiliated parties suggest a more complicated, indeed uneasy reaction; with many doubtful that Iran would amend what they see as its disagreeable policies in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Arab world.

“I’m a little worried,” admitted MP Bassem al-Shab of the Future Movement. “What worries me is that this move has not been linked to a behavioral change in Iran. It is assumed that this goodwill will translate into an evolution in the policy of Iran, but what if it does not? What if Iran has more resources to pursue the same old policies? Frankly, we haven’t heard anything from the [Obama] administration, nor from the Secretary of State, nor from the European Union, to say that this deal will take into consideration Iran’s posture in the Middle East.”

“The main concern in the Arab region and in Lebanon is that [the agreement] gives Iran a kind of relief regarding normalization with the international community while it is still interfering in an aggressive and unacceptable manner in Syria, and more subtly in Lebanon, through Hezbollah,” said Antoine Haddad, secretary-general of the Democratic Renewal (Tajaddod) Movement. Tajaddod is not formally part of the March 14 alliance, although Haddad told NOW it was “sympathetic with their overall objectives.”

Hardliners within the Saudi Arabia-backed Future Movement were even more skeptical of the deal’s merits, arguing that the international community was being deceived by a disingenuous Tehran.

“I am almost certain that Iran will not give up on its nuclear program,” said MP Khaled al-Daher. “The nuclear program of Iran represents its ambition of widening its power in the region. Iran’s attempts to expand and dominate in the Arab region are clear. They are part of Iran’s [ideology].”

Other parties, while also striking a cautious note, said it was too soon at this stage to form an opinion either way on the matter.

“We are waiting for tangible outcomes of this deal because there’s an immense difference between talks and walks,” read a statement sent to NOW by the Lebanese Forces, March 14’s leading Christian component.

Similarly, the Kataeb’s Central Committee Coordinator Sami Gemayel told NOW last week that his party would oppose the deal if it turns out to “contravene Lebanon’s interest and hand the country over to Iran.”

Despite his reservations about the agreement, Shab told NOW that it was unlikely to have much of a material effect on Lebanon, and thus he did not foresee any significant strategic response from the Future Movement. Indeed, there was no indication from anyone in March 14 with whom NOW spoke that the deal would affect their broader political calculations.

“I don’t think it will change anything on the ground,” said Shab. “We’ve long seen an American and Western disengagement [from Lebanon]. It’s not like there was this massive support that’s going to be withdrawn.”

Haddad, however, took a somewhat more upbeat stance, arguing that the deal could be turned against March 8 if handled properly by the latter’s rivals.

“The very spirit and logic of this agreement is that Iran won’t deal anymore with the United States or the West as a ‘Great Satan.’ I think that Lebanese, Syrians, and other Arabs need to deal in a realistic manner and try to […] take advantage of this new climate in which Iran has to deal more responsibly and become more accountable to international law.”

“It’s a matter of concern, but at the same time, it’s a test for Iran.”

Luna Safwan contributed reporting.

British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.

Who are the Abdullah Azzam Brigades?

[Originally posted at NOW]

I wager that not too many people who aren’t unusually interested in militant Islam had heard of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades when the group’s spokesman took to Twitter to claim the twin suicide bombings that killed 23 people outside Beirut’s Iranian embassy yesterday. Who, then, are these supposedly al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists?

The short answer is that nobody really knows. The slightly longer answer is that “Abdullah Azzam” may be more of a brand name than a single, identifiable organization (rather like al-Qaeda itself, in that respect). Abdullah Azzam himself was a Palestinian contemporary of Osama bin Laden’s, or rather a mentor of his. It was as Azzam’s guest than Bin Laden first arrived in Afghanistan shortly after 1979 to wage jihad against the Soviets – a campaign for which Azzam remained an important proselytizer and recruiter throughout the 1980s. By the time of his 1989 assassination in Peshawar, al-Qaeda as we know it today had already taken shape in embryonic form.

While some sources, including the US State Department, cite the founding year of the Brigades as 2009, attacks by groups calling themselves the “Abdullah Azzam Brigades” have been carried out across the Arab world for almost a decade. These include the 2004 truck bombings of the Hilton in Egypt’s Taba; the 2005 car bombings of hotels in Sharm al-Shaikh; the 2005 launching of rockets at US warships in Jordan’s Aqaba; and the 2009 launching of rockets at Israel from south Lebanon in the name of a sub-faction, the Ziad al-Jarrah battalion (named after the Lebanese national who was among the 19 hijackers on 9/11). They also took credit for the 2010 bombing of a Japanese oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. More recently, they have claimed responsibility for a roadside bomb targeting a Hezbollah convoy in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley this July and the firing of four rockets at Israel from south Lebanon in August, having previously denied conducting a similar rocket attack in December 2011 and bombing an Italian UNIFIL patrol in May 2011. Adding to the general murkiness is that yesterday’s attacks were carried out by the previously-unknown ‘Hussein bin Ali’ sub-faction, named (sarcastically?) after the grandson of the Prophet whose death in the Battle of Karbala was commemorated by Shiites just last week during Ashura.

Like almost all Islamist groups, the Brigades’ principal focus has shifted to Syria since the outbreak of the war. According to Jihadology’s Aaron Zelin, the Brigades have been actively engaged in the fighting there since at least August 2012, though they don’t appear to have anything like the prominence of other jihadist outfits like the Islamic State of al-Sham or Jabhat al-Nusra.

Nonetheless, there have for some time been indications that the group might attempt an ‘operation’ such as yesterday’s. In the summer of 2012, they released a “Message to the Shia of Lebanon,” imploring members of the sect to abandon the “criminal” Hezbollah and Amal leadership and cease their alliance with the “oppressive” Assad regime that threatened the “Sunni people,” warning that the “consequences” of siding with Damascus would “intensify upon you.” Similarly, after the roadside bomb in July the Brigades released a statement warning it was but one of “a series of attacks [to come] against Hezbollah that will include every part of Lebanon.”

Few took these threats seriously at the time. But after yesterday, when the group’s spokesman pledged that such “operations in Lebanon will continue” until the “withdrawal of [Hezbollah] from Syria” and the release of the Brigades’ members from Lebanese jails, Lebanon’s security agencies may well start paying them much closer attention henceforth.

Suicide slaughter at Iranian embassy

[Originally posted at NOW]

NOW reports from scene of blasts, which analysts say are likely linked to Syria developments.

There was still a bloodied body squirming on the ground when NOW arrived at Jerusalem Street Tuesday morning, surrounded by rescue workers frantically trying to lift the semi-conscious man onto a stretcher. The Lebanese army, in tandem with plain-clothed security forces including some wearing yellow armbands bearing the Hezbollah logo, had sealed off an adjacent fifty-meter stretch of the street outside the Iranian embassy in Beirut’s predominantly Shiite Jnah suburb, where earlier two suicide bombers had detonated over 50kg of explosives, killing 23 and wounding over 150.

In the minutes following the explosions, television stations aired disturbing footage of charred corpses sprawled before blazing rows of cars, the air thick with clouds of black smoke. By the time NOW arrived, the fires had been doused, but pools of blood still dotted the street, dyeing the countless shards of glass blown out of hundreds of windows from the surrounding apartment blocks. At least a dozen cars lay mangled and squashed. The residences nearest the blast had entire chunks of their balconies ripped off even five stories above the ground.

As the crowd of aid workers, journalists, and onlookers gradually thinned, residents headed indoors to begin the task of repairing their homes, and the sound of glass fragments being swept up could be heard for several blocks. “I heard both explosions very well, they were very powerful,” said one young man with a broom, who declined to give his name. Asked who he thought carried out the attack, he replied, “The terrorists, of course,” a generic reference to the various Sunni jihadi outfits opposed to Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as its ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

Indeed, the attacks were later claimed by exactly such a group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda affiliate whose spokesman said on Twitter that such “operations in Lebanon will continue” until the “withdrawal of [Hezbollah] from Syria” and the release of the Brigades’ members from Lebanese jails. The group has previously taken credit for a roadside bomb targeting a Hezbollah convoy in the Beqaa Valley in July and a series of rocket launches at Israel in August.

Accordingly, some analysts told NOW the Jnah bombings were likely linked to recent developments in Syria, particularly the ongoing battles in the strategic Qalamoun region, one town of which was captured by Syrian regime forces Tuesday after three days of intense fighting.

“Recent Syrian government gains around Damascus, Aleppo, and in the northern Qalamoun have resulted in a further escalation in sectarian sentiment among Syria’s insurgent opposition,” said Charles Lister, analyst at IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Counterinsurgency Centre. “The apparent involvement of one or both of Hezbollah and Iranian military personnel in recent military gains makes the targeting of those actors’ assets abroad much more likely. As such, attacks like this one are likely to continue on a sporadic basis.”

Others, however, saw in the attacks a message intended more for Iran than Syria.

“My opinion is that it’s not related to Qalamoun. This is bigger than the Syria issue,” said Qassem Qassir, a Lebanese analyst specializing in militant Islamist movements. “These explosions targeted the Iranian embassy on the eve of the negotiations with Iran on the nuclear file. It’s clear that this is a message to Iran and to the role of Iran in the region as a whole. If the negotiations reach an agreement, we are going to witness a lot of changes in terms of the relationship between Iran and world powers,” which the attacks aimed to forestall, Qassir told NOW.

Qassir also treated the Abdullah Azzam Brigades’ claim of responsibility with caution. “I don’t know, I don’t have any information on this. They took responsibility, but any Islamist group could be part of this plan.”

Assuming the Brigades’ claim is accurate, however, Lister told NOW it could bolster the relatively little-known group’s profile, further fuelling the level of violence in Lebanon.

“A ‘spectacular’ attack like this will be highly likely to encourage further recruitment into the group’s cause. This attack is a significant escalation – after months and months of speculation, an al-Qaeda-linked group has now underlined its involvement in the Syria-related Lebanese theatre. Short-term stability in Palestinian refugee camps” – from which the Brigades primarily recruit – “could feasibly suffer, as could the situation in already unstable towns such as Arsal on the Syrian border.”

Indeed, signs of greater pressure on Arsal – the key remaining crossing point for anti-regime militants between Lebanon and Syria – have already manifested in the hours following Tuesday’s bombings. In the late afternoon, regime warplanes launched air-to-surface missiles at the nearby village of Akabat al-Moubayda. Casualty figures were unavailable at the time of publishing.

Maya Gebeily contributed reporting.

Holy Wisdom: The other Parthenon marbles scandal

It has for years been something of a custom for visitors to the Acropolis and its accompanying museums to take the occasion to comment on the enduring dispute over what were once called the ‘Elgin marbles’, named after the British ambassador to Constantinople who in the early 19th century took a saw to the Parthenon – the crowning glory of 5th-century-B.C. Athens – and shipped the best part of its sculptures back to Britain, where they remain in the national museum to this day. I won’t go into this old and tired debate except to say that, as someone who was already convinced of the case for returning the Parthenon marbles (as they are properly called) to Athens on principle alone, to see the consequences of Elgin’s surgery first-hand at the new Acropolis Museum at the base of the temple last month was to appreciate also the irrefutable aesthetic argument for restitution.

It dawns on you the moment you realize, when examining the panels of the frieze (which once ran along the outside of the naos, or inner temple) and the metopes (the high-relief sculptures carved into the outermost rim), that only the sand-coloured marbles are real, while the white ones – which are the majority – are merely replicas of the originals kept in Bloomsbury. It’s as if the Louvre were to exhibit only a torn-off half of the Mona Lisa, the remainder having been painted on in different colours a couple of years ago. One sees instantly that, even more than the duplicity and injustice and avarice of Elgin’s crime, it’s the absolute vulgarity of it all that is so singularly embarrassing. As the 19th-century travel writer Edward Daniel Clarke put it, “Could any one believe that this was actually done? and that it was done, too, in the name of a nation vain of its distinction in the fine art?”

And yet, for all the opprobrium rightly directed at Elgin, his was not the only deliberate disfiguration of the Parthenon in its two and a half millennia of existence. As I learnt with fascination from the information panels accompanying the marbles – or, more accurately, the gaps in them – the Parthenon lost 6 of its original 115 frieze slabs, as well as several metopes and a major chunk of its eastern pediment (the largest and perhaps most dramatic group of sculptures, comprising a 30-metre-wide triangle atop the 10-metre-tall columns) when in the 6th century A.D. it was converted into a Church of the Holy Wisdom. This involved destroying three frieze panels on each side to create windows; cutting three doorways through the walls of the naos; and demolishing the centre of the eastern pediment along with the adjacent metopes to construct the signature Byzantine Christian apse, or half-dome; all of which amounted to “irreversible damage”, according to Prof. Charalambos Bouras, now director of the Acropolis’ restoration committee.

Having amended the structure of the pagan temple to their satisfaction, the Christians proceeded to redecorate the interior, painting the walls and installing the necessary altar, benches, etc. According to the late Prof. Robert Browning, who contributed an electrifying introduction to Christopher Hitchens’ The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (which I happily picked up at the Acropolis Museum’s gift shop), there was even “occasional, apparently deliberate, defacement of sculptured figures [by] over-zealous Christians at this time”, although this wasn’t “systematic”. Up until its conversion into a Catholic church in 1204, “notices of the deaths of the bishops and archbishops of Athens were carved high up on some of the peristyle columns”.

Thereafter, the damage inflicted tended to be basically secular in nature. Even when the Ottomans made the Parthenon a mosque after capturing Athens in 1458, and erected a minaret on the Acropolis, actual alterations were limited to whitewashing or plastering over the Christian mosaics and frescoes, which were of course anyway disfigurements to begin with.

Yet the parties of God were to play one final, and central, role in the ruin of the Parthenon, this time in direct collaboration with its most famous vandal. At every moment of Elgin’s looting campaign, his chaplain at Constantinople, one Reverend Philip Hunt, was to be his inexhaustible fixer and accomplice: delivering saws to his workmen; procuring the necessary paperwork from the Ottoman occupiers, by bribery when necessary; impelling him to take ever more precious sculptures, such as the priceless caryatid porch of the Erechtheion; and even indulging in some not insignificant plunder all of his own. As Hitchens puts it, “Reverend Hunt seems to have been a most worldly chaplain”.

Perhaps it will be said that it’s unfair to blame today’s Christians for the sins of their fathers (though I can’t help thinking the whole sorry history rather undermines the argument that a world without faith would be poorer in art and beauty. Among the first acts of restoration carried out on the Parthenon after Greece attained independence in 1832 was the removal of the Byzantine apse, in recognition that the alien appendage had no business spoiling the finest monument of antiquity). But the Church’s hands are by no means clean even now. Though it loaned one of them to the Acropolis Museum in 2008, the Vatican still claims ownership of three Parthenon marble fragments it acquired in the 19th century – one from the western pediment, one from the northern frieze, and one from the southern metopes – two of which it continues to display in its Gregoriano Profano museum.

Is this, too, not shameful? Does it not warrant at least some fraction of the international outrage reserved for Elgin and his present-day apologists at the British Museum? Those who think Downing Street’s covetousness is the only obstacle to the sight of a reunited set of Parthenon marbles might recall that the Greek Culture Minister Georgios Voulgarakis asked in 2006 that “all foreign museums that possess sculptural elements of the Parthenon” return them, and that in the same year the late Athenian Archbishop Christodoulos explicitly requested the return of the Vatican’s holdings in a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI. The Parthenon, as is often pointed out, is no ordinary temple, built simply to glorify the tyrant of the day. It is instead the greatest remnant (much more than a mere “symbol”) of the most extraordinary intellectual and cultural awakening of all time – the age of Socrates, Sophocles and Herodotus, which gave us philosophy, ethics, logic, physics, history and of course democracy (all of them Greek words). “It was to be”, in Browning’s words, “an everlasting monument to a unique and dazzling society”. If the new Pope Francis is indeed the generous and compassionate maverick we’re so often told he is, he might reflect on what his co-religionists have done over the centuries to impair this monument, and make the necessary gesture of atonement.