The name, an acronym, has variations: ISIS is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while ISIL is the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and IS is simply the Islamic State. All three acronyms are found in publications.
The word ‘Levant’ refers to the area of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
In addition to setting up a worldwide caliphate and slaughtering people who follow Jesus, ISIS hopes to purge world cultures of what it finds to be ‘immoral’ or ‘degenerate’ influences, primarily artistic.
To this end, ISIS has undertaken large-scale destruction of sculptures, architecture, and paintings. This is based on an Islamic belief that any form of representative art is evil.
Representative art is an image or sculpture which depicts people, plants, animals, or inanimate objects. Non-representative art, such as abstract patterns, is allowed by Islamic law.
Museum curators and conservators of art around the world are concerned about the priceless works of art being destroyed by Islamic groups. CNN reports that
Sturt W. Manning is director of the Cornell Institute of Archeology and Material Studies and chair of the Department of Classics at Cornell University.
Like other historians, Manning laments the loss of historic artifacts. He notes that ISIS is not only motivated by the Islamic hatred of images. ISIS is also motivated by a desire to destroy history itself: to destroy the record of the past. Manning writes that ISIS
seeks to destroy the record of the past. In the past week, video has circulated showing absurdly dressed figures wielding rather new-looking sledgehammers and destroying archaeological objects in the Mosul Museum.
By destroying information about history, ISIS hopes to keep the populace in ignorance. People who know about the past are able to view the present in an informed context.
ISIS hopes, borrowing a tactic from the North Korean government, to keep the population in an ‘information vacuum.’ An uninformed population is easier to manipulate. Thus, for example,
ISIS has been busy trying to damage the famed Nergal Gate entry to the ancient city of Nineveh - a city with a history reaching back thousands of years - and most recently it is reportedly bulldozing the site of Nimrud, capital of the 9th-century B.C. Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II, and source of the famed Nimrud ivories. These ivories were first cleaned by none other than Agatha Christie while accompanying her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, during his excavation.
The Taliban, an ideological cousin of ISIS, destroyed 1500-year-old Buddhist sculptures in Bamyan in Afghanistan. ISIS destroyed the tomb of Jonah in Iraq. Islamic detestation of art, and Islamist enforcement of Sharia law, is responsible for the loss of these historic Bamiyan Buddha carvings and for the loss of Jonah’s tomb.
ISIS and its Islamo-fascist ideology control people most effectively when they live in a historical vacuum: when they have little or no information about other people, other times, and other cultures. Sturt Manning writes:
All attacks on archaeological sites and artifacts are brutal assaults on our collective human memory. They deprive us of the evidence of human endeavors and achievements.
The memory that Iraq was once Babylonia, home to the rich cultural heritage of Babylon and its empire, is a threat to ISIS. The heritage of the civilization which inhabited this region before Islam invaded in the 700s is a heritage which ISIS wants to forget.
Likewise, Persia was a great empire, a civilization with a magnificent culture, prior to Muslim invasions which began to erase that artistic and literary tradition. ISIS wants to erase the humanistic traditions of the Ancient Near East.
The destruction eloquently speaks of the human folly and senseless violence that drives ISIS. The terror group is destroying the evidence of the great history of Iraq; it has to, as this history attests to a rich alternative to its barbaric nihilism.
Through a long and winding historical development, the intellectual foundations of legal systems laid in the Ancient Near East led to modern Western Civilization. The law codes of Hammurabi and Moses led to English Bill of Rights of 1689 and to other documents about the rule of law and individual political liberty.
The general Islamic prohibition against representative artworks is merely a special case of a broader desire to erase a collective human memory of a long struggle toward individual freedom.
Ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, is at the heart of the human story: home of the first cities, states and empires. The law Code of Hammurabi, king of Babylon over 3,700 years ago, is the first great legal text of the world; it begins a heritage leading to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.
Yet ISIS is willing to betray its own ideology, and violate its own Islamic law: the few artworks it does not destroy, it is willing to sell on the black market to raise funding for weapons. Sturt Manning notes that the activities of ISIS
are dishonest and hypocritical: the same ISIS also is busy looting archaeological sites to support its thriving illegal trade in antiquities, causing further incalculable harm.
ISIS has explicitly stated its goals for forming a caliphate, and has targeted Greece, Spain, and Austria, among other nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. If ISIS should succeed in its goals, then the outcomes would be predictable: the destruction of paintings and sculptures by a range of artists from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Botticelli to Caravaggio, from Dürer to Dali.
In July 2014, French police detected, and foiled, an Islamist plot to bomb the Louvre and destroy it. ISIS will certainly continue to target art museums and other cultural treasures.
