Aslam’s buried Buddha reverses the Bamiyan destruction into survival and triumph

Evidence

Aslam has commented that his novel was a response to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, an imaginative replaying of attempted destruction but in this case ending in survival and triumph. In the novel, legend has it that the Taliban have tried to destroy Marcus’s Buddha with bullets but retreat terrified, having succeeded only in loosing streams of golden light from the stone wounds. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 413

Categorization

• FICTION: Fiction rewriting real iconoclasm so the icon survives and wounds emit golden light — a template for counterfactual art responding to erasure.
• XREF: Directly answers the guiding hinge-problem: Aslam’s novel contests rather than reinforces by converting destruction into continued presence — the sharpest tool offered for reading Hamid and Naqvi.