Digital Iconoclasm

ISIS has captured the Syrian city of Palmyra.  This UNESCO World Heritage site was a thriving multicultural metropolis, boosted into prominence during the reign of Emperor Trajan in 105-06 c.e. Known most for its impressive Roman colonnades, the market and caravan city of Palmyra also exhibits Greek, Persian, Iranian, and Indian architecture and artifacts. Its desert environment has preserved the site remarkably well.  Until, well, yesterday.

People around the world fear that ISIS will destroy Palmyra like they destroyed the ancient Iraqi city of Nimrud and wrecked the museum in Mosul.  It’s doubtful that Palmyra's antiquities were the primary reason it was seized:  it occupies a central position among Syria’s gas fields and is the nodal point of desert roads (just as it had been when it became important to the Roman Empire, two millennia ago). It also houses Tadmur Prison, where anti-Assad Syrian dissidents have been confined, making it a politically resonant target.  And of course ISIS makes tidy chunks of change selling off looted antiquities.  

Obliterating ancient Nimrud (2015; near Mosul, Iraq), with particular attention paid to destroying the lamassu, hybrid protective deities now symbolic of Akkadian/Sumerian/Assyrian culture

That said, why would ISIS not be content with capturing the city and adding to the territory it controls?  Why is destroying cultural heritage a part of the program? 

Many commentators tend to explain this destructive urge as a form of Islamic iconoclasm based in what is believed to be a fundamentalist understanding of the prohibition against graven images and artistic representations not only of Allah and the Prophet but also of any living beings, human and animal.  Others see it as an attempt to destroy traces of other, even more ancient Middle Eastern cultures — a type of scorched earth policy that creates a blank slate for a new Caliphate, rather like the French Revolutionary calendar which, to banish all taint of the ancien regime, designated 1792 as Year One.  Or, more recently, like the Taliban’s dynamiting of the colossal Bamiyan Buddhas— an attempt to purify Afghanistan’s history by erasing material signs of heterodoxy and readable signs that Islam was not the region’s ‘first’ religion. 

The rock-cut Buddhas in Bamiyan, before and after the Taliban’s iconoclastic 2001 attack

Originally, the terms iconoclasm [image-breaking] and iconomachia [war on images] referred to Byzantine Emperors’ attempts to discourage the use of religious images within the Eastern Christian Church.  These artistic purges occurred in the 8th and 9th centuries c.e., when the Western Christian Church was regaining power and was using religious imagery to proselytize and teach, sometimes incorporating ‘pagan’ visual culture and ritual in order to better appeal to the newly converted.  Christian iconoclasm erupted again during the Protestant Reformation in Europe and, later, during the Cromwellian interregnum in England.  

Christian iconoclasm: a damaged relief from the Utrecht cathedral, desecrated in 1566

Most Christian iconoclasm went hand-in-hand with political power struggles.  So has Islamic iconoclasm, or aniconism (prescription against creating images of sentient beings, from the divine to the animal); its foundational event was Muhammed’s destruction of the idols in the Ka’aba.  Although all forms of Islam (as well as Christianity and Judaism) condemn idolatry, the Sunni branch is much more stringent in regard to images and related practices.  A fairly recent instance can be found in Saudi Arabia, when after World War I, fundamentalist Sunni forces (Wahabi, Salafi) wrested control from the Shia Hashemites and destroyed many Shia shrines and tombs in the process.

Fast forwarding to ISIS’s programmatic iconoclasm, we should note that most ISIS ‘foreign fighters’ are Salafi/Wahabi Sunnis, and that one reason they’ve been successful is that Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis, long feeling and probably being oppressed by Shia dictators, have welcomed the largely Sunni ISIS military.  We should also note that most of the Islamic holy sites smashed by ISIS have been Shia.  An example is Mosul’s Tomb of Jonah, surrounded by a 14th-century Shia mosque, which ISIS blew up last year.

The 2014 eradication of the Tomb of Jonah was accomplished with explosives — not a particularly compelling telegenic narrative

Sunni /Shia enmity does not explain everything, though.  If we revisit the vandalism at the Mosul museum, we notice a couple of things.  First, it was carefully videotaped, with attention given to men with sledgehammers and chainsaws whacking away at ancient statues.  Second, some of the smashed artifacts seem to be made of plaster of paris.  In other words, the whole episode looks staged.  For the camera.

This is what makes ISIS’s iconoclasm distinctive.  Like the carefully directed and filmed executions that seem to be trying to outdo themselves in medieval horror, the annihilations of religious and cultural artifacts are produced for digital distribution and maximum outrage.  Whatever sectarian religious or caliphate-building agenda might at least in part have motivated these performances, the overwhelming rationale seems to be to shock the rest of the world, Islamic and non-Islamic, and thus to entice young fundamentalist Muslims into a romantic video-game (real) world of religiously justified carnage. This is politico-theocratic iconoclasm on a grand scale, made possible by the internet and its ever-expanding mesh of social media. 

Choreographed destruction at the Mosul museum, 2015; ISIS could have blown up the place, but that would have pulverized salable objects and not shown the heroic battle of men against stone (or gypsum)

It used to be that iconoclastic acts were localized:  hack off a saint’s face from a cathedral facade, burn heretical books (or just books that have been saved by a competing sect, like the ruination of some of Timbuktu’s libraries), parade a formerly revered professor in a dunce cap (iconoclasm can work in officially non-religious societies as well), raze a tomb of one of Muhammed’s family members (Salafi/Wahabi Muslims do not believe in venerating the Prophet’s family or close associates).  Now the local has truly become the global.  Production and shock values are paramount, and even more so are digital distribution strategies. 

Don’t be surprised if Palmyra bites the dust, spectacularly and soon.

References:

Al-Salhy, Suadad. “The full story behind ISIL’s takeover of Mosul Museum.”  Al Jazeera Online 9 March 2015. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/03/full-story-isil-takeover-mosul-museum-150309053022129.html

Barnard, Anne, and Hwaida Saad.  “ISIS Fighters Seize Control of Syrian City of Palmyra, and Ancient Ruins.” The New York Times Online 21 May 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/middleeast/syria-isis-fighters-enter-ancient-city-of-palmyra.html?_r=0

Crosette, Barbara.  “Taliban Explains Buddha Demolition.” The New York Times Online 19 March 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/19/world/19TALI.html 

Ford, Dana, and Mohammed Tawfeeq.  “Extremists destroy Jonah’s tomb, officials say.”  CNN Online 25 July 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/24/world/iraq-violence/ 

Hall, Matthew. “Iconoclasm and the Islamic State” (in three parts).  Atlantic Council. 26 September 2014; 2 October 2014; 16 October 2014. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/iconoclasm-the-islamic-state-whither-the-caliphate

Movsesian, Mark.  “Why Did ISIS Destroy the Tomb of Jonah?” First Thoughts 28 July 2014. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/07/why-did-isis-destroy-the-tomb-of-jonah 

Saul, Heather, and Henry Austen.  “ISIS ‘bulldozes’ Nimrud: UNESCO condemns destruction of ancient Assyrian site as a ‘war crime.’”  6 March 2015.  The Independent Online http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-militants-bulldoze-ancient-assyrian-site-of-nimrud-10089745.html

Shinkman, Paul D.  “ISIS Destruction of Antiques at Mosul, Nimrud Hides Sinister Moneymaking Scheme.”  US News Online 9 March 2015.  “http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/03/09/isis-destruction-of-antiques-at-mosul-nimrud-hides-sinister-moneymaking-scheme