Then they looped their weapons’ black fabric slings around their necks and shoulders, stepped out of the car, looked left and right, waited for a gap in the traffic and began walking across Boulevard du Montparnasse in the direction of the café.

Chapter 25

Françoise Schell leaned her elbows on the table. ‘Muslim terror groups, in particular Daesh, or the Islamic State, ISIL or ISIS or whatever you want to call them, have been taking an unhealthy interest in ancient antiquities for years,’ she explained. ‘It started for purely ideological and religious reasons, a quest to destroy the relics of pre-Islamic cultures as being something idolatrous, meaning the worship of supposedly false gods.’

‘I do know what idolatrous means.’

She shrugged. ‘These acts of deliberate cultural vandalism date right back to the earliest days of Islam. In fact it goes all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad himself, with his treatment of the pre-Islamic religious idols that were kept at the holy Kaaba in Mecca, in 630 AD. These represented ancient Arabian deities like Hubal, who were worshipped by the Quraysh tribe and others. Muhammad had decided to seize the Kaaba for his own purposes and turn Mecca into a place of Islamic worship. He could have asked the pagan worshippers to remove their idols to some other place where they could carry on their religion in peace. Instead he and his followers went in and violently smashed them to smithereens, all 360 of them, with the aim of wiping out the whole religion of the Qurayshi people. Later on he did all he could to wipe them out too, but that’s another story.’

Françoise Schell gave a dark smile and paused for a sip of coffee. ‘Anyhow, the Prophet of Islam’s destruction of the Kaaba idols established the precedent for countless similar acts of cultural destruction throughout their fourteen hundred years of supremacist conquest. As far as they were concerned, any and all artifacts of pre-Islamic civilisation were the products of jahiliyya, societies of unbelievers, and had no value whatsoever. When the first jihadist naval expedition into Europe conquered Rhodes in the mid-seventh century, they came across the site of one of the wonders of the ancient world, the giant statue called the Colossus of Rhodes that had been built in 280 BC to honour the sun god, Helios. Needless to say, there was no room for such blasphemous pagan idols in any new territory falling under Islamic rule. Muawiya, the expedition commander, who later became caliph, had its remains carted away and sold off as scrap metal.