ATS2371 Chap.10 Purification and Iconoclasm
Purification and Iconoclasm
Week 10 takes the materiality argument to its negative limit. Iconoclasm is the destruction of images and sites, and the week's case is the Islamic State's programme against heritage in Iraq and Syria. The lecture is careful about two things at once.
The theological justifications invoked, above all tauhid, the principle that god is one, are not new in Islamic thought, so the shock lay in how far the organisation carried them rather than in their novelty.
And the targets themselves were revealing: Shi'ite sites and Sufi practices of intercession, grave visits included, were singled out, so Isakhan and Zarandona describe the programme as symbolic sectarianism rather than as a simple doctrinal purge.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Iconoclasm as radical opposition to materiality, and how it inverts the arguments of the previous week
- 02
Tauhid and the theological line invoked, and why the lecture insists the reasoning is not new
- 03
Documented destruction in Iraq and Syria, including sites kept standing for centuries by the region's own Muslim communities
- 04
Reading the target list: Shi'ite sacred sites and Sufi practices of intercession, grave visits among them
- 05
Symbolic sectarianism as the analytic term, and the pre-monotheistic strand alongside it
- 06
Heritage as a category, and why destruction shocked Muslim and non-Muslim publics alike
Show that a target list carries an argument
- 1Establish selectivity: if the doctrine cited condemned all such structures, an even distribution of destruction would be expected, and it is not observed.
- 1Read the pattern: sites belonging to one internal current are targeted, which addresses an audience inside the tradition rather than outside it.
- 1Name the concept: this is symbolic sectarianism, destruction that carries a claim about who belongs within the tradition.
- 1State the defeating evidence: a documented distribution matching what the stated doctrine implies, or logistical constraints that explain the pattern without any sectarian intent.
Key terms
- Iconoclasm
- The deliberate destruction of images, monuments or sites, treated here as a position on materiality rather than only as vandalism.
- Tauhid
- The Islamic principle that god is one, invoked in the case studied as the justification for removing objects and practices held to compromise it.
- Symbolic sectarianism
- Isakhan and Zarandona's term for destruction whose target selection carries a claim about which currents belong inside a tradition.
- Sufism
- The current within Islam generally distant from textual literalism, and which commonly prefers to approach the divine through an intermediary, visiting graves and asking the intercession of the Muslim dead.
- Mediation
- Practices that place something or someone between a worshipper and the divine, which is precisely what an anti-materialist purification programme sets out to remove.
- Heritage
- The category under which sites are held to belong to a wider public than their immediate custodians, and whose destruction is therefore read as a loss beyond the local.
Purification and Iconoclasm FAQ
What is the reading for Week 10?
Isakhan and Zarandona's 2018 article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies setting out the layered religious and political iconoclasm the Islamic State practised. The week also lists a recommended reading by Beranek and Tupek.
Is the lecture arguing that Islamic theology causes iconoclasm?
No, and it makes the opposite point explicitly. The justifications invoked have a long history in Islamic thought without producing this outcome, so what needs explaining is the extremity of one organisation's programme rather than the doctrine itself.
What does pre-monotheistic iconoclasm refer to?
The strand of the destruction directed at Assyrian and other ancient sites rather than at rival Islamic currents. The article treats it as a separate layer of the programme, which is why its title speaks of layers in the plural.
How does this week connect to Week 9?
It is the inversion. Week 9 shows people organising religious life around the qualities of objects; Week 10 shows a programme built on removing that possibility. Read together they make materiality a live question rather than a settled position.
Assessment move
Keep the two layers apart in your notes, sectarian targeting and pre-monotheistic targeting, with a case under each. Collapsing them into one story is the most common way this material goes wrong, and the article's own title is the reminder that they are distinct.
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