1 Minoru Inaba The Narratives on the Bāmiyān Buddhist Remains in the Islamic Period 1 Abstract: Recent scholarship has revealed that the early Muslim iconoclastic narratives by conquerors, such as Maḥmūd of Ghazna, were often magnified through inflated reports of the triumph of Islam over the infidel (kāfir). Yet, this does not explain all Muslim encounters with non-Muslim communities or with “idols.” This paper explores the case of the Bāmiyān Buddhist statues to see how those statues appear in the Muslim literature of the premodern period. This reveals the curiosity of Muslim visitors to the Bāmiyān site and demonstrates various aspects of early Muslim perceptions of Buddhism, especially in the frontier regions where various cultures have been in contact. Keywords: Bāmiyān Buddhas, iconoclasm, Afghanistan The region that corresponds to the present-day Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has been a zone of contact between South Asia, West Asia, and Central Asia since ancient times. The eastern part of it was, especially, one of several places where Islam encountered Buddhism, for the first time in the second half of the seventh century and continuing into the next century. In such a location, the monumental Buddhist complex of Bāmiyān in the Hindukush Mountains, which included two well- known colossal Buddhas and still contains more than seven hundred cave temples, has been recognized as one of the most remarkable consequences of the amalgamation of diverse cultural and religious traditions in pre-Islamic times. From the beginning of the nineteenth century when European travelers embarked on voyages there, the site has drawn the attention of westerners (see below). In the twentieth century, beginning with the research activities of the Délégation Archélogique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA), 2 several surveys and preservation projects were carried out in Bāmiyān 3 ; these inspired significant research and scholarly works. 4 The character of the site and associated relics naturally led scholars to recognize its importance to archaeological and art history studies of the pre-Islamic period. 5 In 2001, the destruction of the two Buddhas by the Taliban regime evoked various considerations about the existence of idols in an Islamic milieu and iconoclasm, about which plenty of criticism and a variety of arguments have already been put forth. 6 Once destroyed, the Buddhist remains of Bāmiyān, especially that of the colossal Buddhas, 1. I would like to thank Prof. D. Klimburg-Salter for kindly reading through the draft and providing various important suggestions. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for the content of this paper. 2. Cf. Godard et al. 1928; Hackin / Carl 1933; Hackin et al. 1959. 3. Cf. Sengupta 1973; Kotera et al. 1971 (in Japanese); Higuchi 1983–84; Petzet 2009; Yamauchi /Suzuki 2013. 4. For instance, cf. Tarzi 1977; Klimburg-Salter 1989. 5. Cf. Klimburg-Salter 1989: 9–17. 6. Flood 2002: 641–659.