Islamic aniconism, symbolic manipulation, and the control of cognitive space in contemporary conflicts
Abstract: This contribution analyzes the destruction of statues, monuments, and artistic heritage by contemporary jihadist groups, distinguishing it from the broader and historically complex Islamic tradition concerning figurative representation. Episodes such as the Taliban’s demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the devastation of Palmyra by the Islamic State, and the destruction of historic mausoleums in Mali have often been interpreted as a mere radical continuation of Islamic aniconism. Such a reading, however, is reductive, as it overlooks the historical plurality of Islamic visual cultures and the political, media-related, and cognitive function of contemporary iconoclastic practices. Jihadist iconoclasm cannot be explained exclusively in theological terms; rather, it must be understood as a strategy of symbolic control, erasure of memory, and production of ideological adherence. The real issue at stake, therefore, is not merely the elimination of artistic objects, but the transformation of cognitive space into a territory of symbolic domination, in which the control of memory becomes an integral part of contemporary conflicts.
Keywords: #Iconoclasm #Jihadism #CognitiveWarfare #CulturalHeritage #Aniconism #DigitalPropaganda #SymbolicViolence #CulturalMemory #SymbolicManipulation #Radicalization #DigitalRecruitment #SociologyOfReligion #MediaStudies #Extremism #CognitiveSpace #ElhemBeddouda #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasJournal #ScientificJournal #HumanSciences #SocialSciences #ethicasocietasupli
Elhem Beddouda is a professional educator, holding a degree in Educational Sciences and Training Processes from the University of Parma, with a thesis entitled “Islam and the Educational Function: Perspectives on Religious Assistance in Prison.” She is currently enrolled in the degree programme “Global Studies for Sustainable Local and International Development and Cooperation” at the same University.
Introduction
In Western public debate, the destruction of images, statues, and archaeological sites by jihadist groups is often interpreted as a direct manifestation of Islamic aniconism. The demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, the devastation of Palmyra by the Islamic State, and the destruction of the historic mausoleums of Timbuktu in Mali have frequently been presented as inevitable expressions of an alleged intrinsic hostility of Islam toward figurative representation. Such a narrative, however, is reductive and risks producing a culturally simplified reading of the phenomenon, since the Islamic tradition concerning images is plural, historically situated, and marked by fundamental distinctions between aniconism, anti-idolatry, and iconoclasm. Aniconism refers to the tendency to avoid figurative representations, especially in ritual or sacred contexts; anti-idolatry concerns the critique of the cult of images; iconoclasm, by contrast, implies the material or symbolic destruction of images themselves. Confusing these three levels means obscuring the historical complexity of Islam and attributing to religion as such practices that, in reality, belong to specific contemporary political-ideological strategies (Flood, 2002; Grabar, 1987; Noyes, 2013).
Over the centuries, the Islamic world has produced miniatures, figurative decorations, monumental architecture, illustrated manuscripts, court paintings, and highly sophisticated artistic forms. Although legal and theological debates on the permissibility of images have certainly existed, such debates have never resulted in a single, uniform position valid for every historical, geographical, and confessional context. Islamic visual cultures have known restrictions, cautions, and prohibitions, but also broad spaces of figurative production, especially in non-ritual, scientific, literary, and political contexts (Nasr, 1987; Flood, 2002).
The central question, therefore, becomes a different one: does the contemporary destruction of images by jihadist groups truly represent a linear theological continuity with the Islamic tradition, or does it constitute a profoundly modern political, media, and cognitive strategy? In reality, contemporary jihadist iconoclasm cannot be understood solely as a religious phenomenon, but must be analyzed as a practice of symbolic control, propagandistic construction, and cognitive warfare. The destruction of artistic heritage therefore assumes a performative function: it does not merely eliminate material objects, but produces psychological, identity-related, political, and media effects.
The erasure of images thus becomes the erasure of memory, historical plurality, and critical capacity. Symbolic violence does not act only upon physical spaces, but upon the cognitive structure of societies, because it intervenes in what a community is able to remember, imagine, and recognize as part of its own history (Assmann, 2011; Gamboni, 1997).
Images and representation in the Islamic tradition
To understand the contemporary phenomenon, it is necessary to distinguish classical Islamic tradition from modern extremist practices. The issue of figurative representation in Islam has taken different forms over time, influenced by historical contexts, legal schools, political dynamics, and devotional practices. Some hadith attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad criticize image-makers, especially in relation to the risk of idolatry; however, the legal and cultural reception of these traditions has historically been plural and cannot be reduced to a uniform prohibition of figurative representation.
The central problem in classical Islamic reflection was not always the image as such, but the risk that it might become an object of worship, replacing divine transcendence. For this reason, restrictions were particularly intense in sacred contexts, mosques, and liturgical spaces, while they were more variable in palatial, literary, scientific, and decorative settings. The production of Persian miniatures, Ottoman paintings, scientific illustrations, and figurative representations in literary manuscripts clearly shows that the Islamic relationship with the image cannot be interpreted as a simple rejection of visuality (Grabar, 1987; Nasr, 1987).
Classical Islamic civilization also preserved, translated, and reworked cultural heritages from Greece, Persia, and India, especially through the Abbasid translation movement and the great scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions of the medieval Islamic world. This is important because it shows that historical Islam cannot be reduced to a logic of erasing pre-existing memory. On the contrary, many Islamic societies functioned as spaces of mediation, transmission, and cultural re-elaboration.
Contemporary jihadist groups operate according to a different logic: the destruction of images does not merely serve to avoid idolatrous worship, but to produce a totalizing symbolic order in which every alternative memory must be eliminated. Here, iconoclasm is no longer only a religious practice of purifying sacred space, but becomes a political technology of memory that selects what may be remembered and destroys what must be removed, imposing an ideological monopoly over meaning.
From material destruction to media performance
The destruction of artistic heritage by contemporary extremist movements possesses a strong media dimension, since demolitions are not merely carried out, but filmed, disseminated, edited, and transformed into propagandistic content. In the case of the Islamic State, videos showing the destruction of statues, museums, and archaeological sites were constructed through sophisticated audiovisual techniques, including dynamic editing, soundtracks, visual symbolism, and heroic narration. The iconoclastic act thus becomes a global spectacle and is incorporated into a broader doctrine of jihadist communication (Winter, 2017).
This performative dimension is fundamental. The real target is not only the artistic object, which is a means, but ultimately the collective imagination. Destroying a monument means demonstrating power over historical memory and cultural continuity. The destruction of Palmyra by the Islamic State, like the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban, did not have only local significance, but produced a global effect because it struck symbols recognized as part of the heritage of humanity. For this reason, the destructive gesture was designed to be seen, shared, discussed, feared, and remembered (Harmanşah, 2015; Kila & Zeidler, 2013).
From a sociological and anthropological perspective, such practices may be interpreted as forms of destructive symbolic violence. The extremist group presents itself as an actor capable of rewriting the past and redefining what deserves to be remembered. For this purpose, destruction becomes a political language, because it communicates the ability to break with previous history, the interpretive monopoly of the sacred, the subordination of collective memory to the group’s ideology, and the simultaneous production of fear and fascination.
In this sense, contemporary jihadist iconoclasm resembles less a medieval theological dispute than a modern strategy of political communication. It does not destroy only in order to erase; it destroys in order to produce images of destruction. The iconoclastic act itself becomes an image, that is, media content destined to circulate within the global digital space. The destruction of the image generates a new image, more violent, more viral, and more functional to propaganda.
Erasure of memory and symbolic domination
The reference to “cancel culture,” when applied to jihadist groups, requires particular conceptual caution. In contemporary Western societies, the expression generally refers to processes of public delegitimization, symbolic exclusion, or contestation of figures, works, and discourses considered incompatible with new cultural sensibilities. In the jihadist case, however, we are dealing with a radically different phenomenon: not a discursive dynamic of reputational exclusion, but a violent, militarized, and totalizing practice of physical and cognitive erasure. It is therefore more accurate to speak of the erasure of memory, avoiding an improper equivalence between Western phenomena of symbolic delegitimization and the terrorist destruction of cultural heritage.
Jihadist erasure operates on several levels: on the artistic level, it manifests itself in the destruction of statues, monuments, and historical heritage; on the historical level, it aims to eliminate collective memories incompatible with the extremist narrative; on the identity level, it suppresses religious, ethnic, and cultural plurality; on the cognitive level, it reduces critical capacity through the control of narratives and the radical simplification of the world.
The cognitive implication is particularly relevant, since symbolic destruction does not aim merely to eliminate objects, but to transform the way people perceive reality. Cultural heritage is not only a set of material goods, but a narrative structure through which communities understand their own history. Striking such heritage therefore means striking the very possibility of plural memory (Assmann, 2011; Gamboni, 1997).
Contemporary warfare is not limited to territorial control; a growing part of conflicts extends to the control of attention, emotions, and interpretations. The destruction of images therefore becomes an act of governing the imagination. It does not merely eliminate a statue or an archaeological site, but seeks to impose a new mental geography in which the past must be purified, the present militarized, and the future absorbed into ideology.
Cognitive warfare and the production of ideological adherence
In contemporary strategic studies, the concept of cognitive warfare describes the set of operations aimed at influencing perceptions, beliefs, emotions, and collective behaviors. Unlike traditional propaganda, cognitive warfare does not merely seek to transmit a message, but to modify the processes through which individuals interpret the world. It therefore operates at the level of attention, identity, trust, and judgment (Claverie & du Cluzel, 2022; NATO ACT, 2020).
Contemporary jihadist groups have demonstrated a significant capacity to use sophisticated cognitive tools: the internet and social media have enabled them to transform propaganda into an immersive experience. The content they produce does not merely transmit ideological messages, but constructs collective identities, feelings of belonging, heroic narratives, simplified representations of conflict, emotional polarization, and an aestheticization of violence (Winter, 2017; Berger & Morgan, 2015).
The destruction of images fits into this framework as a highly symbolic gesture that produces visual shock, media amplification, and a sense of irreversibility. The implicit message is that the extremist group possesses the power to redefine reality itself. The destruction of a historical site does not merely say, “this object must not exist”; it also says, “we decide what may exist, what may be remembered, and what must be erased.”
Cognitive warfare does not operate only through fear, but also through identity-based fascination. Many processes of contemporary radicalization do not occur through direct coercion, but through indirect forms of attraction, identification, and symbolic adherence. Jihadist propaganda offers belonging, meaning, role, moral purity, and a simplified narrative of social complexity, making it particularly effective among individuals exposed to marginality, identity crisis, social frustration, or the search for meaning (Roy, 2004; Kepel, 2002).
Digital recruitment and symbolic seduction
Contrary to an exclusively military image of jihadism, numerous studies show that contemporary recruitment often operates through emotional, aesthetic, and symbolic dynamics. Extremist groups produce content capable of offering a sense of belonging, strong identity, moral simplification of the world, a promise of meaning, symbolic community, and the heroization of marginality.
Contemporary digital propaganda uses increasingly adaptive visual, linguistic, and psychological techniques. Short videos, emotionally powerful images, cinematic narratives, motivational texts, and viral content contribute to creating an emotional ecosystem in which the subject is progressively immersed. Cognitive warfare operates here as an invisible infrastructure: it is not simply a matter of rational persuasion, but of shaping the imagination and making a new belonging desirable (Castells, 2009; Winter, 2017).
The destruction of statues and images therefore assumes a ritual function: it communicates a break with the past and the possibility of accessing a new purified identity. In anthropological terms, the extremist group presents itself as the producer of a symbolic rebirth achieved through the erasure of historical complexity. The destructive act becomes a rite of passage: those who witness it, share it, or approve it are symbolically included in a community founded on the radical separation between pure and impure, believer and enemy, order and contamination.
This dynamic helps explain why the destruction of cultural heritage is so significant in jihadist propaganda and why it does not constitute a secondary gesture in relation to armed war, but rather part of the construction of an ideological world. To destroy means to teach people to see the world according to a binary grammar: what belongs to the group must live; what bears witness to plurality must disappear.
The aesthetics of purity and the simplification of the world
One of the most important elements of extremist propaganda is the construction of an aesthetics of purity. Historical complexity is perceived as contamination; cultural plurality as a threat; stratified memory as deviation. The destruction of images therefore assumes a cathartic value, insofar as the elimination of monuments, artistic works, or symbols of the past constructs the illusion of a return to an uncontaminated origin.
This dynamic does not belong exclusively to jihadist groups. Many modern totalitarian movements have sought to control art, rewrite history, and symbolically purify public space, because the plurality of the past represents a threat to every ideology that claims to possess a monopoly on truth (Foucault, 1980; Gray, 2003).
The contemporary specificity lies, however, in the integration between physical iconoclasm and the global digital infrastructure, which allows destruction not to remain local but to be immediately transformed into transnational media content. Amplified by the network, this gives the symbolic act a global cognitive dimension. A monument destroyed in Syria, Afghanistan, or Mali simultaneously becomes a world event, an object of indignation, a recruitment tool, and visual proof of the group’s destructive power.
The aesthetics of purity functions as a violent simplification of the world, eliminating ambiguities, hybridizations, mixed cultural inheritances, historical stratifications, and interpretive pluralities. The past is reduced to what confirms the ideology, and everything else is condemned to destruction.
Cultural memory as a space of resistance
In the face of these dynamics, the issue of cultural heritage assumes a decisive political and anthropological dimension, in which monuments, artistic works, and historical sites do not merely represent aesthetic objects, but living archives of collective memory. Destroying such symbols means striking the narrative continuity of a community and depriving it of the tools through which it can think its own identity.
Classical Islamic reflection on images, despite its complexity, did not necessarily aim at the erasure of historical memory or cultural plurality. By contrast, contemporary jihadist iconoclasm operates as a project for monopolizing meaning. For this reason, defending cultural heritage today also means defending cognitive plurality.
Memory becomes a space of resistance against the totalizing logics of symbolic warfare. Preserving, restoring, documenting, and transmitting heritage does not mean merely protecting material goods, but keeping open the possibility of a plural history. The protection of cultural heritage is also the protection of interpretive freedom, preventing the past from being reduced to raw material in the hands of those who seek to rewrite it according to a logic of domination (Kila & Zeidler, 2013; Assmann, 2011).
The response to destruction cannot be limited to material reconstruction, but must include historical education, cultural literacy, public access to memory, digital documentation, and the strengthening of local communities. Every destroyed site requires not only restoration, but the restitution of meaning.
Beyond the security paradigm
Many institutional responses to contemporary jihadism focus primarily on military security, territorial control, and criminal repression. Such approaches are necessary, but they risk underestimating the cognitive dimension of the phenomenon, since contemporary radicalization does not develop exclusively in training camps or clandestine networks, but also within digital ecosystems, identity processes, and the symbolic crises of contemporary societies.
Addressing cognitive warfare therefore requires different tools: media literacy, critical education, protection of cultural plurality, the production of credible counter-narratives, the strengthening of social communities, and the valorization of historical memory. It is not enough to remove content or prosecute radical networks; it is necessary to understand why certain contents are attractive, which symbolic needs they intercept, and which identity voids they claim to fill (Roy, 2004; Sunstein, 2017).
The fight against extremism cannot be reduced to the physical neutralization of armed groups, since an exclusively security-based response risks combating the effects without understanding the cultural, social, and cognitive conditions that make radicalization possible.
Prevention, from this perspective, is not only control, but the construction of symbolic alternatives and non-violent forms of belonging, non-totalizing narratives, inclusive communities, and critical tools capable of resisting the seduction of extremist simplification.
Conclusion
The destruction of images and statues by contemporary jihadist groups cannot be interpreted simply as a linear continuation of classical Islamic aniconism, but rather as a profoundly modern political, symbolic, and cognitive strategy.
Contemporary iconoclasm operates as a technology of power: it destroys memories, simplifies identities, controls narratives, and produces emotional adherence.
Cognitive warfare emerges as one of the central instruments of contemporary conflicts, in which wars are not fought only with weapons, but also through the capacity to shape perceptions, emotions, and cognitive structures. The erasure of the image thus becomes the erasure of complexity.
Understanding this transformation is essential in order to avoid orientalist simplifications that reduce the phenomenon to the Islamic religion as such. The central issue is not Islam’s relationship with art, but the way extremist movements use religious symbols within modern strategies of cognitive control.
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