{"id":579,"date":"2001-03-11T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-03-11T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/03\/11\/2001-03-11-giant-buddha-statues-lost-forever\/"},"modified":"2001-03-11T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-03-11T12:00:00","slug":"2001-03-11-giant-buddha-statues-lost-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/03\/11\/2001-03-11-giant-buddha-statues-lost-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant Buddha Statues Lost Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/hi\/english\/world\/south_asia\/newsid_1214000\/1214384.stm\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN, March, 11, 2001: The two giant Buddha statues had stood guard over the Bamiyan valley for centuries until they were destroyed by Afghanistan&#8217;s ruling Taleban. Foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Pakistan that demolition was still continuing, and all the country&#8217;s moveable statues had been destroyed. While the Taleban say they acted because the statues were &#8220;un-Islamic,&#8221; a delegation from the world&#8217;s largest Muslim body, the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) had travelled to Afghanistan to try to change their minds. The statues were once a big tourist draw and dated back to between the second and fifth centuries AD, before the coming of Islam, when Afghanistan was a centre of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage. Egypt&#8217;s top religious leader, Mufti Sheikh Nasr Farid Wassel, who is travelling with the OIC delegation, said: &#8220;The proof that these statues have no negative impact on Islam is that throughout Islam&#8217;s history in Afghanistan they were preserved and no Muslim doctrine has suggested their destruction.&#8221;<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN, March, 11, 2001: The two giant Buddha statues had stood guard over the Bamiyan valley,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}