 Good evening, everyone, I think we should get underway. Welcome, Hillary, welcome friends of Anthony Hyman, friends of SOAS, distinguished guests and visitors, students and colleagues to the 18th annual Hyman lecture, first delivered in 2003. I'm Scott Newton. I'm reader in the Laws of Central Asia. I'm chair of the Center for Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus and the incoming head of SOAS Law School. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all tonight to hear Jolien Leslie talk to us on the subject of hearts and minds, Afghanistan's contested culture. And I want to thank you all for turning up in the first place tonight amidst all of the epidemiologic and industrial turmoil here, this unfortunate concatenation of circumstances. As you might know, SOAS, along with 70 other higher education institutions, is engaged in industrial action. But we, of course, decided to go ahead and hold this lecture. We had some discussion first. It is a memorial lecture and the picket lines have come down. But I thought it important to note the occasion and to express my solidarity. I've been out picketing. And invite yours with my colleagues who are fighting for important issues, not just pay, but pensions, casualization, equality, and workload. The point of all of this ultimately being our capacity as scholars and as an institution to support and maintain the scholarship which brought Anthony Hyman to SOAS as a student for his training long ago in the first place, and which justified the endowment of this lecture series in his memory. I also take note tonight that we have just marked the 20th anniversary of Anthony Hyman's passing. I had come to SOAS just a few months before and sadly never got to meet him. But over the years through the company he kept and through those who admired and cherished him and those whom he inspired, I feel I've got a very good sense of the kind of man he was. I see him as a shiny example of a very particular kind of engaged scholar gypsy or scholar sojourner with a profound knowledge of place and historical, cultural, and social context to which he dedicated not only his powers of mind and spirit, but which formed a fundamental part of his life and lived experience. This deep sense of place informed everything he said and wrote about Afghanistan and Central Asia, making him one of those rare wanderers in post-imperial parts who speak to contemporary issues and realities, to politics and policy on the basis of a whole of history, whole of culture, and indeed whole of soul engagement. David Page has brought to my attention that we should mark tonight as well the recent passing of Bruce Walnell, a friend and colleague of Anthony and a fellow scholar gypsy of Afghanistan, Iran, and the wider Turkish Persian world of Central Asia who has just died last month. Many of you and our speaker, Jolian, would have known Bruce and his considerable linguistic and art historical gifts. And it is fitting that we remember him tonight as well. I'd also like to thank Routledge and Central Asia Survey who have been involved as co-sponsors of this event for all of the last many years. It's especially fitting that Jolian is addressing us tonight, for I see him very much as yet another exemplar of this singular breed of British scholar gypsies of Central Asia, in Jolian's case by way of South Africa, a breed very much distinctive of this my adopted land and which has inspired me in my own wanderings in the post-imperial East. Though mine had taken me south from the former imperial capital of Moscow since I began as a student of Soviet law rather than north. I have known and been reading and following Jolian for a long while, nearly for as long as I've been here at SOAS, at least since his remarkably prescient, if not prophetic, book of 2004 Mirage of Peace, which meticulously and pitilessly identified and analyzed the conflict resolution and development assistance debacle that had only been underway a few years at that point, but whose melancholy long withdrawing roar, if I can cite Matthew Arnold again, is still resounding. And I say that with the greatest respect to those who valiantly have tried to steer that effort away from folly, among whom are many close and respected colleagues. Now Jolian is not just a scholar gypsy, but a scholar gypsy architect development advisor, a term from which Matthew Arnold might well have shrunk or cringed, but which makes perfect sense in his case. I guess it's fair to say that he is an architect first and foremost by trade and training at Cambridge, but who branched off into development assistance and disaster recovery early on in the Middle Eastern Asia and who for several decades has been involved in Afghan reconstruction, both in the metaphorical and the material sense. He's worked for UNDP, managing a national resettlement program for Afghanistan, promoting the use of vernacular techniques for housing. He served as an advisor to the Afghan government on urban development and cultural preservation and has been intimately and comprehensively involved in Afghan affairs now for more than 20 years. But in line with Anthony and Bruce, he has acquired a profound knowledge of Afghan place and context and like them has demonstrated that a command of local customs and Dari or Pashto and the learned acquaintance with classic Sufi quatrains or Timurid finance is at least as vital a piece of kit for doing development as any contemporary policy or sectoral expertise. And for Jolien, as well as for Anthony and Bruce, post-imperial has a vast historical resonance. And beyond post-Soviet or post-Raj must mean post-Mughal or post-Timurid or even post-Seljuk or post-Ilkhana or post-Sovavid for that matter as well. So Jolien, unlike many development professionals, a term I use with some hesitation, has both a sense of the entirely suppositious nature of development discourse, it's blithe imagination of a destination and it's blithe disregard of a point of departure and the profound challenges of contextualizing it and making it a sensible and defensible undertaking in particular places with particular histories, traditions and self-understandings. And moreover, unlike most of his fellow development professionals or technical advisors, he works on the material world, the built environment, he does policy with bricks and mortar. And as a testament to the depth of his engagement with Afghanistan and the scope of his sense of place, he will talk to us tonight not just about Afghan building and buildings, but about the post-Taliban discourse of Afghan culture itself, the way in which, in the context of development interventions and reactions and resistance to them, Afghan culture has got essentialized and reified and weaponized over these last two decades. So without further ado, let me turn things over to Albert. I'm sorry, to Jolien. Jolien will speak for approximately 35, 40 minutes, which will leave us ample time for discussion and questions following. Thank you, Scott. I think the word cringe is probably apt in the circumstances to be in the same league as both Anthony and Bruce. I feel deeply humbled. But the most important thing is lovely to see, or you all this evening, thank you so much for coming in these difficult circumstances, as Scott said, and also to see so many familiar faces. This is not going to be a particularly scholarly lecture. I'm a sort of an intensely, almost increasingly practical bot in the field. I try and sort of read my history, but then otherwise it's actually about getting things done. And my thunder was slightly stolen this afternoon on Radio 4 by the chancellor who kept on saying, let's get things done in the view of the budget. So I'm rather sort of pissed off with him, but never mind. Please excuse me if I don't want to sound or look like the chancellor, with all respect. I was actually thinking about this lecture about two and a half weeks ago in Herat in the Congregational Mosque that many of you will recognize here and thinking, yikes, what am I going to talk about? And somebody, a calligrapher friend of mine, said in so many words, culture is not just something that we have, it's something that we should do. And I just thought, my goodness, that is exactly what my subtitle should be. So that's really going to be the thrust of it, is actually how to get things done in complicated and challenging ways, but to try and sort of demystify some of the stuff that goes with culture. And then also to address the issue of what I'm calling weaponization of culture, which I hope isn't too sort of jargon laden, but I think it's an important point to make because I think the political landscape is so fraught at the moment that we need to call it straight and actually call it out when people actually manipulate, whether it's Afghan culture or Syrian culture or whatever, or any issues. But another advance warning is to those who may be averse to uncomfortable truths, as I intend to question the pattern of what I call forgetting and inventing, that to my mind represents as great a challenge to the work that I do on the ground, as do insecurity and apporcity of funds. So with no apology from my plain speak, I'll make a case for lightening up, having the courage to tell it like it is if we are to effectively do culture. What does culture mean to Afghans today? As for members of any society, some notion of a shared culture is an important aspect of national identity. Along with tradition, be this religious, social customs or language, culture serves as a mirror by which Afghans express and understand what it means to belong to what Benedict Anderson in another context refers to as the imagined community that is their nation. From the manner in which ordinary men and women greet and address one another to the songs they sing, to the dances they perform, as in here in the Wachan, both culture and tradition embody the diversity of communities that inhabit the land known as Afghanistan today. But as with so many other aspects of Afghan life today, culture is a site of contest. At the heart of this is a tension between the drive by some members of society to be modern and there's been an amazing amount of scholarship about Afghanistan, modern of late, and the perception that among more conservative groups that their identity is under threat from ideas and behavior that they perceived to be alien. There's nothing new about this. Resistance to social reforms of Aman al-Khan here with his wife Saraya in the 1920s was prompted by the perceived threat that these reforms posed to a conservative social culture and essentially ended his reign. Leftist resumed the fight for the reform in the 1970s with disastrous consequences for the country. As disastrous both in exile and subsequently in power in Kabul between 92 and 96, the Mujahideen leaders pursued the conservative, some would say Arab inspired take on culture that was by implication free of godless, i.e. Soviet influence. The Taliban subsequently imposed what they deemed to be a yet purer form of culture that perceived figurative art and television and many other aspects of modern life to be un-Islamic and a distraction from a righteous life. Now in armed opposition, they portray their struggle as the defense of the true Afghan values in the face of a puppet regime as they put it dependent on foreign support and advice. And we shouldn't forget how persuasive that message is in the world I inhabit anyway. Ironically, there's an uncanny symmetry in how the government in Kabul now in turn refers to the struggle for cultural survival, which appears in a lot of documents when I started to look. It was quite surprising how persistent it was. The cultural survival in the face of unnamed external forces. At a time when Afghans hoped for the end to conflict are yet again raised, reconciling these different visions may be as significant a challenge for Afghans as issues of basic rights and security. For the time being, the official narrative of a nation is somehow a victim of forces beyond its control seems to prevail in the cultural and in other spheres. As part of this image-making, the notion of a cultural survival has proved to be highly persuasive, judging by the international response to a portrayal of cultural heritage facing an existential threat. Taking a cue from this official line, press coverage of cultural issues frequently refers to threats from dark forces. While the ongoing conflict doubtless risks further loss or damage in certain instances and certainly limits the space for creative expression in many respects, I'd contend that this generalized image of Afghan culture at risk as a kind of trope does not accurately reflect the reality on the ground. On the contrary, it tends to obscure the real challenges which are as often technical or operational as rooted in religion or ideology. This, some of you will recognize, it's a relief from Shatrar, which was alluded to in the museum in return. I'll come back to that in a minute on the nature of the museum. There's little doubt, however, that well-conceived cultural initiatives, and I'm not putting a plug for what I do here, but this is another project, a mobile museum project going out to schools, taking 3D scans of museum objects, and making young women and young men where partners with this project to more aware of the collection and their rich heritage. This has huge potential to bring Afghans together and even foster mutual understanding, and there are some that achieve this today, but this excellent work takes place in a context where there is often significant pressure to align cultural objectives with those associated with the parties to the conflict, be this the regime in Kabul and its military allies or those who oppose them, making it unlikely for any such initiatives to be perceived as neutral by many Afghans, and I think people are, to be honest, I think are more attentive to that than we often acknowledge. As an example, a donor representative recently who was assessing a proposal for training in traditional calligraphy for young people insisted that we prove how such courses would contribute to their image of preventing violent extremism, hardly an issue among young Heratis with whom we wanted to work, this is one of them. We just go too far. By exceeding to or even promoting this type of alignment, and there are those who feel that they have no option in order to secure funding, and I acknowledge that, we risk deepening the cultural fault lines that we claim to be trying to bridge by conjuring an image of us enlightened and them intolerant that deepens distrust and might actually put cultural heritage at greater risk. It also hampers the ability of future generations of Afghans to understand and establish the facts, such as these children, about their cultural heritage if they're getting a distorted view. The whole basis of the political order in Afghanistan immediately after 2001 has arguably been based on the notion that forgetting contributes to peace. As the UN envoy, Lakhtar Brahimi, seems to have believed at the early stages the transition, whatever you think about that, although the state of the country today suggests that this was something of a delusion given the situation we are now. There's a lot of scholarship about that, so we won't go into that. But beyond this political sphere, the tendency to gloss over aspects of a past deemed to be difficult has also had consequences for the country's development. This is a photograph from Bamiyan, where there's been a lot of development aid, some of it very successful. The development over the past two decades, a serious analysis of key issues and challenges has at times been perceived to get in the way of the party line of government and donors alike with their cast of goodies and baddies. The realm I work in in urban development is incredibly stark to actually have to continually speak out and say, no, it wasn't like that. We really need to talk facts. Let's stop talking fantasy. It's a very, very pernicious cycle in rural development, urban development, and not only culture. And it's a very difficult thing to face up because obviously the government in Kabul is on the side of the development agencies who lack this stuff up. In the realm of culture, this behavior goes well beyond simply forgetting, however, as a narrative of loss has led to the language of a nation zachmi, wounded, to borrow David Reef's phrase used in the context of the Balkans, this is risked in fact transforming the wound into the weapon. And that's essentially the thrust of what I will then go on to talk about. Let me briefly describe an example of the consequences. The National Museum of Afghanistan lay at the front lines of the battles waged by the Mojidean factions after they liberated Kabul in 92, as they would put it. In the ensuing fighting, the museum building was repeatedly rocketed, causing a devastating fire. You all know the history of this. At the same time, the collection was systematically, these are my photographs from the time, systematically looted by the fighters who then controlled the area. Despite the dangers of traversing multiple front lines to reach the museum in southern Kabul, we welded steel bars and put up bricks, as you can see here, over the windows and placed sandbags in a vein attempt to protect the storerooms on the ground floor, only for looting to resume as soon as darkness fell, because we couldn't stay there after dark. It's often claimed that this looting was directed by foreign dealers who knew the value of the collection. But the fact that stone and Buddhist heads were openly on sale, and I can attest to this, between piles of onions, potatoes, and other domestic items that were taken or looted from private homes at the time, in the bazaar close to the city, suggests that there was quite a trade in not only probably a fairly range of objects were on sale just on the street, almost like simple commodities. The availability for stale at the time of important objects from the collection, here is one being returned with museum numbers still visible in central Kabul, which were duly returned, also suggests that a lot of this trade, this trafficking wasn't necessarily totally provoked by inspired by foreign, dark forces, dark foreign hands. Having witnessed this continuing trafficking since, this object was returned by an anonymous donor. Some of you will recognize it as that fabulous piece of silver from Tepufulul, which was in the museum and looted, came to London, was anonymously donated back. I carried it back in my hand luggage in 2009. As a result of this, I have little doubt that this looting and trafficking still bears primarily Afghan fingerprints. We have to be very clear about it. It's so easy to turn around and say, it's the other, it's the other. In this case, particularly in the neighboring country, Iran, Pakistan, Iran, Pakistan all the time, we have to somehow challenge that. And yet, despite ample photographic evidence of the looting and many fruitless dimash by myself and others to the factional leader whose fight has controlled the area at the time of the 93, 94, and who made many empty promises to reign in his men, responsibility for these crimes has since been glossed over. Instead, the official account of events at the time effectively absolves the commanders, many of whom are now senior politicians in Kabul, while deftly laying the blame elsewhere. It's now routine to hear the government officials blithely claim that our collection was destroyed by the Taliban. This is not the work of the Taliban. This is the work of, well, I won't go into which commander, his fighters, but it lies elsewhere. While the National Museum website, which I checked a couple of days ago, refers to a dark era that caused the collection to be looted and destroyed, as though it was somehow inevitable. It just happened. Clearly taken in by the official narrative, the US ambassador, at an event at the National Museum in 2017, roundly condemned the Taliban for their barbaric destruction of the collection with no mention of other crimes from 93 and 94. Recent BBC TV coverage of the ongoing conservation of damaged objects played up the imminent threat to the collection if the Taliban were to return to Kabul, ignoring the clip that I saw, the destruction wrought by the Mujahideen in the first place in 93 and 94, well before the Taliban had even formed. Only last year, press coverage of the planned return to Kabul of a number of stucco-gandaran heads thought to be of Afghan provenance. This is another similar head. It's not the ones that are going to be returned. They're thought to be from Hada in eastern Afghanistan. The press coverage included a claim, with not a shred of evidence that I found plausible, by those handling the restitution that they had, these objects had been caught up in the most intense period of Taliban iconoclasm in early 2001. Some of the surviving figurative objects in the museum collection were indeed damaged by the Taliban, and that's one of them being put back together again, so we can't deny that. Here is one during conservation. But to assert that the group of these heads is, the group, sorry, the Taliban is somehow responsible for trafficking gandaran heads to London nearly two decades later is pure conjecture. If indeed they are such evil iconoclasts, wouldn't they have simply destroyed the sculptures? We really should know better. Such distortions have consequences on the ground today. Now I'm going to move on to two practical examples. The first is in Parwan, which is the red dot to the right, just north of Kabul. It's about an hour and a half north of Kabul. And then we'll move on to Jam in Ghur province, which is to the left between Kabul and Herat, just so you can locate. Ongoing conservation at Topdara in Parwan province illustrates how a low-key approach risks being compromised by the willful manufacture of threats. I've been visiting the site for decades. It's an idyllic place for some of picnics, but it wasn't until 2016 after a lot of many, many of proposals that we secured funding from the US State Department to embark on conservation. It's one of a string of Buddhist religious complex along a key pilgrimage route that ran between the lowlands now in Pakistan to the east and Bamian in the central highlands to the northwest. A stupa was erected here in the fourth or fifth century in this narrow valley above the Shamali plain, not far from what is now the provincial capital of Cherica just to locate it for those who know the geography. Mountains to the north separate the site from the Gorban Valley, these mountains, from the Gorban Valley that is today largely out of government control. So it's a tricky area to work in. Unlike many other sites of the period, the structure of the stupa was relatively intact. This is how we found it in 2016. Although very little of the sculpture that would have adorned those niches around the edge would have survived, have survived. It was opened in 1833. You can see that the aperture down at the bottom right by in 1833 by Charles Masson, a British adventurer with an insatiable urge to collect relics, which thankfully are all now sitting in the British Museum and very well documented. He described the stupa as perhaps the most complete and most beautiful monument of the kind in these countries. Despite damage to the drum by those working for Masson, the abundance of stone in the facility seems to have limited the plundering of the stupa for construction materials that so many other sites have experienced. And here are some village, some young village quarriers who actually help us from time to time. Also young girls and young boys come and help us to harvest rocks from the hillside for the work. Its location in the valley also seems to have shielded somewhat the stupa from the elements judging by the amazing condition of its stonework. The intervention that we've embarked on since aims both to restore the surviving fabric of the stupa whose dome rises nearly 30 meters above the ground. This is after the, you'll see, this is what the dome looked like before. And it was seriously re-roading. And this is what it looks like. It doesn't look like now. It looks better now. And we needed to establish the extent and the layout of the wider religious complex of which it's part. There's an area up there to the top right where we're still excavating. I'll show you slides of that. This is the platform around the stupa beginning to take shape again. Excavation of material around the stupa revealed significant sections of the original stone masonry made up of tiny pieces of schist. Schist is a kind of a friable stone quarried from the hillside. The original builders had employed, this is part of the original fabric once we excavate. So we document that very carefully and then decide how we're going to consolidate it. The original builders had employed the distinctive diaper masonry technique of that period with intricate architectural details that echo the classical orders of Greek temples. I could go on all night about this site so I'm going to skim. Each of the niches around the arcade of the drum would have held at the sculpture with the larger niche to the east. The stone masonry is very pleasing to the modern eye and quite often it's very seductive in these kind of photographs but in fact it would originally have all been plastered and in all likelihood painted or gilded in order to attract passing pilgrims. So the aesthetic is very different from what we find now. During the course of excavation it became clear that the site had at some stage experienced a damaging flash flood but there's no evidence of deliberate destruction at least since Massen's venture. In order to stabilise the structure this is a bit further on resolved after phased excavation to reconstruct the platform around the stupa which Buddhists would have circumambulated around as you're probably familiar with. Much of the other ritual associated with it we're still learning about. We're mainly reusing material found in the rubble. The dome alone entailed lifting by hand because we couldn't get a crane anywhere near this 40 tonnes of stone to complete that dome and it was all done by chance up that scaffolding, up the side by the chaps from the village just singing and singing and singing and lifting these huge great stones it was just extraordinary, it was an amazing site. As is the case with our previous projects this bore out this experience bore out the continuity of craft skills among Afghans through a process of trial and error the Masons at Topdara were able to very effectively match the original masonry as one of our foremen explained if our Buddhist ancestors could achieve the standard of work so can we. A reminder that claims that craft skills have disappeared during the conflict and therefore need rescuing are often misplaced. What tends to be required are the right materials, tools, a lot of patience and limited some resources rather than self-serving generalisations. All is lost, all is lost. Excavation continues, this was from a couple of months ago before the winter in the area to the west of the stupa where there seems to have been a monastery complex with a series of overlaid enclosures and some finds of fragments of sculpture are coming out but very very little of that at the moment. This is ongoing, this will be carrying on this spring. During the course of the works we've tried to explore what the stupa means for the villagers who make up the bulk of our workforce on site. Clearly it has no religious significance for today's Muslims but it seems instead to have been almost assimilated into their mental map of the landscape that they know intimately, including this farmer. There's very little doubt that it's a source of local pride. We're aware that the conservation on such a remote site and such a visible structure would draw attention so have adopted a very low profile approach relying on the villagers to keep us informed of casual visitors who may show undue interest in the project and there'd been a handful of these so far who come over the mountains and want to know what's going on. Fine, why not? What we'd not bargained for however was the attention of government officials from whom permissions have been obtained because this is a joint project with the Ministry of Information and Culture. Having initially shown very little interest in the site as the work proceeded, representatives of the local and carbon administration have held a succession of very high profile ceremonies. This is a small one with banners, flags, TV crews and loudspeakers blasting the national anthem across the valley. As with any such event in Afghanistan today, proceedings are ringed with heavily armed security personnel who tend to view our workers with a great deal of suspicion, which adds to the tensions. It seems that these events are part of a campaign to promote an inclusive cultural policy which is very laudable. Some mandarins have gone as far as to portray in media interviews that the conservation of toptera represents the government's response to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. At the same time, asking us to secure resources to build car parks, restaurants for the tourists and all the things that they will associate with future crowds, which has completely compromised our low profile approach. I describe these incidents in order to illustrate how official behavior in some circumstance can pose as great a threat to work in the field as any crazed fundamentalist. The European ambassador who recently visited the site expressed surprise at our investment in restoring a monument that he had assumed might be destroyed due to its association with Buddhism. He seemed unconvinced by my explanation that the stupor had stood for the better part of 1,500 years and there's no evidence that it might become a target. Perhaps my optimism about the fate of toptera is naive, but unless we challenge this attitude by actually doing culture and getting on and testing the bounds of these attitudes and elements of manufacture as well and desist from exaggerating or even manufacturing threats, we risk becoming part of the problem. For this reason, we're now embarking on a similar conservation initiative at this stupor in Shewaki, south of Kabul, which is thought to be roughly contemporary with toptera and as I speak, my colleagues are working on that side. The exaggeration of threats from the other, along with a dose of institutional lethargy, characterizes the last example that I'd like to describe, the Minerate of Jam in Gore. Many of you will recognize it. One of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Afghanistan, the site is eloquently described by a scholar of the period as a triumph of strange and proud excess and is of huge significance for the history of the region. They have over time been a number of attempts to protect the base of the Minerate, which is at risk from seasonal snowmelt along the Harry Road and the Jam Road rivers. You can see the confluence of the rivers there. The Minerate is actually here, so you get the flood waters coming down by these two rivers every spring, and it creates quite a site. Despite the base of the Minerate, the actual work on the structure itself has been minimal. The 65-meter, it was built in 1174, 75. The 65-meter structure stands in a narrow defile. This shows how narrow it is. It gives an idea of how narrow it is. At the key coordinates of the power of the Gorid ruler, Riyazuddin, who ruled for a period of about 40 years, we think the occupation of the valley was about 40 years. The valley seems to have been chosen for its relative isolation from attack with a series of fortified outposts along key strategic routes. As such, it was an appropriate site at which to erect an emblematic monument. The adjoining mosque at the base, which is actually in the foreground here, was destroyed in a flight in 1192, we think. The monument embodied the ruler's assertion of power in the aftermath of a military victory, which explains the use of honorific titles around the drum of the Minerate, which I won't go into in detail, but it basically extols him as a defender of Islam, which is fairly significant. As the scholar Barry Flatt has pointed out, the decorative work around the shaft of the Minerate would have required mathematicians, geographers, astronomers, theologians, along possibly with the patron, to work with craftsmen to achieve such a level of ornamentation. There are in all five bands of inscription, all of which terminate on the east side where they would have been visible to worshipers facing the Kibla. This is the top band. What distinguishes the Minerate is the sheer virtuosity of its decorative work with geometric and floral patterns, you can see those there, from both plain and carved brickwork. There's hundreds of techniques have been used, which is extraordinary, with stucco inserts and an inspired use of turquoise glazed tiles. You can see here perhaps the earliest use of this technique in a textual inscription around on a building. It might be disputed. The content of the epigraphy suggests that the structure, as well as being a place from which to call the faithful to prayer, served as a form of billboard, glorifying the Asidun. The vertical strokes of this band stand more than three meters high, so he was evidently keen to get his message across. The use of Quranic verses that imply divine praise aimed, stretch all the way around the drum, the lower drum, imply divine praise. They aim to project an image of protection while the inclusion of the 94 verses of the 19th Surah of the Quran, which has particular religious resonance with the warrants, are woven through a decorative scheme. You can see here. It's woven all the way around. I can't remember how many meters long it is, but it's tens of meters, an extraordinary achievement. Key verses emphasized on the east side of the shaft, which again worshipers would have seen when facing the Qibla. It would be tempting to continue to wax lyrical about Jam, but my aim is to question why even such a significant monument remains largely neglected to this day, this despite the existence of many volumes of analytical reports on possible protective measures and investments required. In 2013, I went with a group of Afghan colleagues to Jam, where we spent a week camping, well, camping in the village, trying to determine priorities for the conservation of the minaret to cut through some of this sort of stasis, this what we saw as paralysis, while listening to ideas from our village host who ensured our security during the week-long visit. We realized during this time that establishing how the decoration is assembled is key to understanding its deterioration and therefore determining an appropriate technical strategy. While most of the upper sections are integral, built into the structure, those of the lower sections tend to be made in prefabricated panels, which have come off in toto and smashed when they hit the ground, either because they've been prized off, but generally I think it's natural deterioration. While a certain amount of information can be gleaned from photography, it requires hands-on access to the decorative material that's only possible from scaffolding in order to identify precisely how to stabilise it. In order to achieve some progress, we offer to mobilise experienced tile workers, these are some of our staff working on a previous project in Hurrah, and to send scaffolding to the site so that a doughnut structure could be erected around the shaft to enable a closer examination. The idea was that shared results from this investigation with international experts would enable us to agree on a technical approach. As it turned out, however, the nurturing of the cultural wound, to my mind anyway, has proved to be more convenient than a low-key practical approach for jam, and I think that's a scandal. A range of arguments have been put forward by the Afghan authorities in UNESCO as to the fragility of the minaret as if we were unaware of that, and the insecurity in the area, likewise. Despite our proposal for a phased process of investigation, so not actually going in and doing anything just trying to come up with something more concrete. And assurances that the villagers would provide us protection on site. Without official permission, it's, of course, impossible to secure funding for any measures that we feel are urgently needed if the decorative work is to survive. All the well-considerable resources are being spent on quite often day trips by helicopter to assess the situation, usually in response to online footage posted by activists in Gore when the floods are high. It's a very reactive process. Nastia officials in Kabul claimed that Taliban had captured the site, adding to the sense of alarm that it generates. I'd contend that the neglect of jimes is in part a consequence of the narrative of cultural survival that I referred to earlier, whereby the image of heritage under threat from the other becomes almost a default portrayal that, in our world, poses a real challenge to attempts to safeguard heritage in a practical manner. On a more positive note to conclude, I return to Herat, where excavations two weeks ago, that was my starting point, continue around the Masala of Sultan Hussein Beykara, of which these minarets are formed part. This is actually a street scene just to show how beleaguered the site is right now, how it's been hemmed in by development. It used to be in a rural, a semi-rural area. The minarets are the most visible standing elements of a complex that was destroyed in 1885, allegedly as part of efforts to deter Russian military advances on Herat. They're contradictory accounts by British and Afghan sources as to who ordered this destruction, but it does provide an early example of the weaponisation of cultural heritage, albeit for strategic rather than ideological reasons. Despite being a conspicuous element in Herat's urban landscape, the surviving minarets have, like Jum, suffered from neglect for almost 40 years now. The last work was done in the 1980s. In recent weeks, however, Afghan archaeologists have started excavating in the area of the east-facing Iwan that houses Beykara's grave, where fragments of the tiles, these are some that have just come to light, have begun to emerge. With the support of the provincial governor, discussions are on the way how to conserve and safeguard these, along with ruins of the complex. We're well aware of the challenges that this task poses, and perhaps doing too much, but hope that we can stick to the facts and use this as a way of also getting culture done. Thank you.