The Islamic State (IS) has engaged in the greatest threat to the Middle East’s cultural heritage and religious sites since World War II, writes Michael Danti in Anthropology News (May/June). Danti, who was part of a U.S. Department of State team assisting Syria in preserving its cultural patrimony, writes that while other extremist Muslim groups, such as the Taliban, have destroyed pre-Islamic art, the IS “has since elevated cultural cleansing…to the level of a systematic pogrom.” The IS believes that each act of destruction of “shirk” (sites and art associated with “idolatry” and polytheism) as well as sites of non-complying Muslims “advertises their Salafist power and primacy.” The IS’s “methods for exploiting heritage for propagandistic purposes have morphed as new acts are formulated to outdo the last,” Danti adds. The organization has conducted its public executions on well-known heritage sites, and sometimes executions are carried out simultaneously with destruction of these sites.
These images and messages are promoted in an “iconoclastic multimedia blitz” in social media, exhorting followers to embrace cultural cleansing. These IS “actions have set the script for the launching of affiliates elsewhere and have steadily raised the extremist bar for other organizations competing for territory, followers, media exposure and bandwidth,” Danti writes. At the same time, the IS displays a “brutal pragmatism regarding its financial bottom line,” including theft and sale of portable cultural property to fund its operations and its failure to staunch looting among its fighters. “Much as it was with the organization’s failed predecessors, such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the inevitable internal contradictions in pairing violent jihad with parasitic organized crime have fueled growing anger in the ‘caliphate.’”
(Anthropology News, http://www.anthropology-news.org/)
