“When over 100 cultural heritage sites and museums sustain deliberate or negligent destruction in a matter of weeks, we are confronting something far more calculated — the systematic dismantling of a civilization’s physical memory,” said Zoghi, who holds a doctorate in Islamic art and is a civilization specialist at the Asia West East Centre, a research center based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“As someone who has spent decades studying Iranian artistic traditions, I can tell you that these are not empty buildings. Every tile-work panel, every inscribed archway, every manuscript cabinet represents a node in a living network of human knowledge that took centuries to construct and cannot be reconstructed in any lifetime,” Zoghi said.
She said that Iranian artistic heritage is deeply layered. A single mosque may contain brickwork, calligraphy, tile mosaics, and painted interiors, and each layer has a different conversation.
“When such a structure is damaged, you do not lose one thing. You lose many things simultaneously, each irreplaceable,” Zoghi said.
“The international community must understand: these sites are not symbols of the current political order. They predate it by centuries or millennia.
“The targeting of such spaces constitutes a form of cultural violence that international law has specifically named and prohibited. And yet here we are.”
“Perhaps the deepest misconception is that the destruction of Iranian cultural heritage harms only Iranians, or only Muslims, or only those who sympathize with Iran’s current government. This is profoundly wrong,” said Zoghi, the Iranian artist.
She noted that Persepolis, for instance, is not an Iranian nationalist monument. It is a world monument — the ceremonial capital of an empire that issued the first known human rights declaration, a decree by Cyrus the Great now held at the UN as a symbol of universal dignity.
Heritage sites such as the cave paintings of Lorestan, the ancient city of Susa, and the stepped gardens of Pasargadae represent the shared story of human civilization.
“When they are damaged or destroyed, every schoolchild in Tehran, every art student in Berlin, every archaeologist in Cairo loses something. Heritage destruction is always a crime against the future, not merely against the present,” Zoghi said.
Zoghi, the Iranian artist, said the drafters of the 1954 Hague Convention understood something essential: that cultural property belongs not to the state that happens to hold it, but to all of humanity. That is why “the protection it affords is unconditional”.
“What we observe today is a troubling pattern of selective enforcement. When Iran retaliates — and one may debate the proportionality or wisdom of that retaliation — resolutions are passed with remarkable speed,” said Zoghi.
Yet, she said, the original strikes that triggered those responses, strikes that damaged mosques, synagogues, historic bazaars, archaeological museums, and pre-Islamic Zoroastrian sites, “receive no equivalent international censure”.
“This asymmetry is not merely politically inconvenient. It is legally corrosive. It teaches every future aggressor that the Convention is a shield available only to the powerful,” she added.
Zoghi said this is “not to justify any particular military action”, but because the “integrity of international humanitarian law depends on its universal application”.
“The moment it becomes a tool selectively deployed against one party, it ceases to function as law and becomes instead a form of geopolitical rhetoric dressed in legal language. That is dangerous for every civilization on Earth, not only for Iran,” Zoghi said.
