Why ISIS Vandals Destroy Ancient
Temples at Palmyra and Bel
KEN CHITWOOD 8/31/15
newsweek
Slamming
sledgehammers. Toppling statues. Decimated artifacts. Detonating
charges that flash in an instant, but destroy centuries of
history.
The
images coming out of Palmyra, Syria, Mosul, Iraq and other
locations in the Levant viscerally illustrate how ISIS
is destroying
shrines, statues and
sundry other artifacts as they seek to establish their version of a
caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
A
flood of reports and live
video over the past
few months show ISIS militants wrenching artifacts from museum
walls, imploding sacred
shrines and churches
and reducing historic effigies to rubble.
In
their official publications and online rhetoric, ISIS
representatives affirm these actions as typifying the group’s
commitment to combating “shirk”—the
sin of practicing idolatry or polytheism: in this case, the
reverence of anything other than Allah.
While jihadi-Salafi grandiloquence
and Islamic terminology may undergird these acts of vandalism, I
argue that they are perhaps indicative of “modernist” or
“skeptical” streams of thought rather than solely and strictly
“Islamic.”
The Islamic State and the concept
of shirk
As violent Salafi
jihadis, ISIS is trying
to cleanse Islam through the establishment of a caliphate, which
would be enforced by violence and coerced adherence to their
doctrines.
They
view their movement as a return to the roots of Islam (although
this claim is contested by Muslims throughout the world), but this
perception involves a built-in brutality toward non-Muslims and a
definition of shirk as any form of innovation
(or “Bid'ah”) in
Islamic belief, theology, worship or custom.
In the overarching scheme to
“command right and forbid wrong,” ISIS militants will often
physically destroy all material artifacts and edifices they define
as shirk.
In
their own media (YouTube videos, Twitter, the Dabiq magazine) ISIS
officials praise the efforts of other Salafi groups for their zeal
in eradicating material testaments to polytheism and idolatry,
including the Taliban’s March 2001
destruction of Buddhist statues in
Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda’s
toppling of the Twin Towers in New York City (considered a
pronouncement against the idolatry of “Western” capitalism) and the
demolition of shrines and altars in Mali, Ethiopia and
Nigeria.
ISIS
militants, as outlined in their publications, seek
to emulate their
forerunners and
praise those “visionary leaders” who “minted coins to avoid imagery
and shirk” and take their example to heart. Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi—the leader of IS—enjoins his followers to “strike the
apostate’s shirk with your tawhid, and Allah will break
their strength.” ISIS also proudly displays a
multi-page“Photo
Report” of the
“Destruction of Shirk in Wilayatninawa (the “Left-side” of Mosul,
Iraq).”
Demolishing
the “Grave of the
Girl” and admonishing the
people for paying homage at tombs and for not recognizing “the
different shades of shirk they’ve fallen into,” ISIS sees itself as
the all-encompassing educator about, eradicator of and
enforcer against
shirk. Indeed, its members even critique the Taliban and others who
did not totally erase shirk in their wake and left some centers of
reverence, ritual prayer and devotion, or amulet production
behind.
The
solution for ISIS? A stronger sense of takfir—the excommunication,
and declaration, of another Muslim as apostate—and
a harder
line concerning
shirk.
All of this emphasizes that for
ISIS, shirk is a central aspect of the heterodoxy and faithlessness
they seek to combat and destroy. The very public displays (online
and in print) of shirk destruction in the form of destroyed shrines
and museum artifacts are grandiose and definitive gestures of
supposed IS orthodoxy and a validation of strength.
Yet, pursuing such a hard line
against shirk ISIS may be, instead, revealing an underlying secular
modernism, or even iconoclastic atheism, that lies at the heart of
their ideology. Indeed, do their hard-line actions reveal a
potentially deep unease or even doubt among what appear to be
devout religious fanatics?
The meaning of simulacra and
salafism
To
answer the question, we must draw on the question of how we create
our own realities. In his work “Simulacra et
Simulation,” French
sociologist Jean Baudrillard contends that we no longer are able to
distinguish between reality and constructed representations of
reality—what he calls “simulacra.” Today, simulations are not even
reflections of reality, nor even points of reference, but
constructions of a new real; what he calls the “hyperreal,” in
which the difference between map and territory
disappears.
Baudrillard writes:
“The Byzantine
Iconoclasts wanted
to destroy images in order to abolish meaning and the
representation of God.” However, in Baudrillard’s opinion, the
Byzantine Iconoclasts were aware of how retaining and revering
icons was the best way of letting God disappear and destroying the
images was a means of contesting unbelief—not that of others, but
their own.
Likewise, ISIS militants exhibit the
same metaphysical anxiety. They are caught between identities,
territories, spaces and places both physical and philosophical;
they are told that they cannot blur the boundaries constructed
between Islam and “the West” or “religion” and “modernity” or
“faith” and “secularism.” In an effort to combat the furious war
inside themselves, they lash out in violent and visceral
expressions of radical belief that serve simultaneously as
articulations of a blistering deep-seated skepticism.
Living in a globalized world and actively
encountering the West and other cultures, many Muslims
undergo a destabilizing
process that
isolates the individual from former identity markers.
In
contact with global currents, everything that used to define
them—their family, culture, dress, class, political affiliation—is
awash in a sea of competing claims and they choose Islam as the
strongest source from which to rebuild themselves. In this process
is offered what social sciences professor Olivier Roy calls,
“therealization of the
self.” Islam becomes
the way that the marginalized and lonely Muslim in the West
attempts to reconstruct his
identity.
Of
course, this self cannot be rebuilt alone. A community is needed
within which the self can be resurrected. Enter ISIS,
which offers
answers to what ails
secluded Muslims across the globe.
Finding release through
destruction of icons
One of the ways ISIS does this is
through its brutal and iconoclastic campaigns of destruction. As
these men struggle with what it is to be Muslim in a global age and
wrestle with the secular identities, they find release and a salve
for their tormented souls in destroying the images and icons in
which God hides in a modern world where all images are, in effect,
simulacra.
With this frame it is possible to
posit that some ISIS members are not driven by a heightened sense
of religiosity, but instead by the fear that their religion is just
as relative as so many other variables in their life.
ISIS militants and leaders are not
thoughtless iconoclasts; they possess an internally sound reasoning
for destroying shrines and images that is set within a wider nexus
of Salafi thought. But it must be realized that in their efforts to
destroy shrines, statues and heritage sites, ISIS is attempting to
defeat the tumultuous flood of secular skepticism in their own
souls.
This means we should consider ISIS
within a wider context of discussions of modernity and religion. To
understand ISIS, we cannot cast them out to the periphery as solely
the product of bombastic Islamic rhetoric. Instead, as iconoclasts,
ISIS—along with other jihadi Salafi groups such as Boko Haram,
Al-Shabaab and the Taliban—should be considered as representing
inherently modern philosophies, just as the West produces and
consumes modern philosophies.
This
perspective does not deny the Islamic elements of ISIS thought. But
it also connects modernist, even postmodern, sensibilities to
interpretations of ISIS actions and illustrates that ISIS is
wrestling with questions of self and identity that we all struggle
with—whether we admit it or not.
