1 Idols

When Muhammad conquered Mecca he set about cleansing the Kaʿba shrine of idols. An authoritative tradition reports, “The Prophet entered Mecca and there were three hundred and sixty idols around the Kaʿba. He started stabbing the idols with a stick he had in his hand and reciting: ‘Truth has come and falsehood has vanished.’”1 Though not recounted in the Qurʾan, the story of Muhammad smashing the idols of the Meccans has become commonplace, appearing in Ibn al-Kalbi’s ninth-century Book of Idols and in popular biographies of the Prophet. When the ISIS spokesman in the Mosul Museum video informs viewers that “the Prophet Muhammad shattered the idols with his own honorable hands when he conquered Mecca,” he appeals to precedent. He imagines cleansing the Mosul Museum as a reenactment of the moment of Islamic origins. The smashing of idols belongs to the Islamic State’s larger program: the revival of an original time of purity.

In fact, it is a reenactment of a reenactment. Just as ISIS hearkens back to Muhammad, Islamic tradition presents Muhammad as having revived the ways of Ibrahim. Throughout the Qurʾan, Muhammad speaks of restoring the faith of Ibrahim, which had been corrupted over the intervening centuries. “Ibrahim was neither a Jew nor a Christian,” the Qurʾan attests. “He was upright and a submitter [muslim], never an idolater” (3:67).1f One way Ibrahim demonstrated his submission was to obey God’s command to build the Kaʿba shrine. The Qurʾan recounts how God “showed Ibrahim the site of the House, saying, ‘Do not assign partners to Me. Purify My House for those who circle around it, those who stand to pray, and those who bow and prostrate themselves’” (22:26). The idols that Muhammad smashes had been brought into the holy precinct after Ibrahim’s death. By cleansing the shrine, Muhammad aims to restore the Kaʿba to its earlier purity.

It is no surprise, then, that as the ISIS video transitions from prologue to main action it cites Ibrahim smashing the idols. A snippet of the Qurʾan appears on-screen: “He reduced them to fragments.” Here’s the passage in full:

Ibrahim said to his father and his people, “What are these images to which you are so devoted?” They replied, “We found our fathers serving them.” He said, “You and your fathers have clearly gone astray.” They asked, “Have you brought us the truth or are you just playing about?” He said, “Listen! Your true lord is the lord of the heavens and the earth, he who created them, and I am a witness to this. By God I shall certainly outwit your idols as soon as you have turned your backs!” He reduced them to fragments, but left the biggest one for them to return to. They said, “Who has done this to our gods? How wicked he must be!” Some said, “We heard a youth called Ibrahim talking about them.” They said, “Bring him before the eyes of the people, so that they may witness [his trial].” They asked, “Was it you, Ibrahim, who did this to our gods?” He said, “No, it was done by the biggest of them—this one. Ask them, if they can talk.” . . . They said, “You know very well these gods can’t speak.” Ibrahim said, “How can you serve what can neither benefit nor harm you, instead of God? Shame on you and the things you serve instead of God. Have you no sense?” (21:52–67)2

The video alludes to this story only through the momentary on-screen appearance of that single line: “He reduced them to fragments.” But an article published in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine, soon after the video was released makes the connection explicit. “Erasing the Legacy of a Ruined Nation” celebrates how “the soldiers of the Khalifah, with sledgehammers in hand, revived the Sunnah of their father Ibrahim (ʿalayhis-salam) when they laid waste to the shirki [idolatrous] legacy of a nation that had long passed from the face of the Earth.”3 The article favorably compares the destruction not only to Ibrahim’s act but also to his attitude. Dismissing outrage about the destruction of ancient cultural heritage, it explains that the Islamic State’s fighters “were not the least bit concerned about the feelings and sentiments of the kuffar [unbelievers], just as Ibrahim was not concerned about the feelings and sentiments of his people when he destroyed their idols.” Like Ibrahim, determined to cleanse the world of idols—violently, if necessary—ISIS would pay no heed to contemporary censures.

Ibrahim leaves the largest idol standing. If Ibrahim intended merely to destroy idols, why would he do this? As the rest of the story makes clear, smashing the idols’ bodies appears to have been only the first act in a well-calibrated performance aimed at changing minds. Unlike ISIS, Ibrahim is much concerned with his neighbors’ thinking. He seeks to free the minds of his contemporaries, but adolescent that he is, his ploy betrays a certain naïveté.

The story begins with Ibrahim asking the people about the images to which they appear so devoted. The people, evincing a conservative practical wisdom, tell him they serve the images as their fathers did. Though the verb ʿibada is often translated as “worship” when used with reference to gods, its basic meaning is “to serve”—as a slave serves a master or a subject serves a king. If we resist our modern tendency to consign religion and politics to separate, autonomous spheres, we will be better attuned to the term’s political connotations. The images the people serve are intimately connected to the political regime under which they live: to “serve images” (the literal meaning of the Greek idol-latria, idolatry) is to serve the sovereign who rules through them. By advocating submission to “your true lord, the lord of the heavens and the earth,” Ibrahim does not simply criticize the people’s theology; he subverts their politics. He is calling for regime change.

It is significant that the Qurʾanic story uses the terms “image” and “idol” interchangeably. Ibrahim makes no distinction between the two. His anxiety applies not only to some subset of images considered illicit—that is, “idols”—but to images generally. Why? Because Ibrahim knows that all images fall short of the truth. And so he rejects them all. He leaves no room for a regime to sidestep the problem of political images by claiming that its images (as opposed to others’) are true. If all images are false, any politics grounded in images will be idolatrous. To avoid idolatry, Ibrahim demands a regime without images.2f

When ISIS went on its rampage in the Mosul Museum, many accused the group of hypocrisy since videos, too, are images. If ISIS were sincere in its opposition to idolatry, this line of reasoning maintained, it wouldn’t visually record members’ iconoclastic acts. Some scholars responded casuistically that Islamic law permits video but not sculpture. Treating idolatry as a legal issue, however, fails to recognize the depth of the problem as Ibrahim presents it. Juristic debate about the illicit status of a particular kind of image (called an “idol”) presupposes allegiance to the law itself. Such allegiance, I shall argue, cannot exist without other images that provide the law’s foundation. Ibrahim worries that the images that ground the law get in the way of submission to God.

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Islamic exegetical tradition embroiders the political context of Ibrahim’s iconoclasm, which is only hinted at in the Qurʾan. In his History of Prophets and Kings, the polymath Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839–923) collects numerous traditional accounts that set the story during the reign of Nimrud—the legendary king of Babylon, associated in the popular imagination with the monumental Mesopotamian civilizations.

As al-Tabari reports, astrologers tell Nimrud that “a boy will be born in this city of yours who will be called Ibrahim. He will abandon your religion and break your idols.”4 Nimrud responds by commanding that in the foretold month every newborn boy be killed. Yet Ibrahim survives and lives to fulfill the prophecy. When Ibrahim is found guilty of destroying the idols, Nimrud tries once more to execute him—this time by burning him alive. That attempt, too, fails, and an astounded Nimrud declares his willingness to offer a sacrifice to Ibrahim’s god. “God will not accept anything from you as long as you keep any vestige of this old religion of yours,” Ibrahim tells the king. “You must leave it for my religion.”5

Nimrud’s reply is revealing: “O Ibrahim! I cannot abandon my kingship, but I will slaughter the cattle for Him.” Nimrud understands that the idols constituted a fundamental feature of his regime: abandoning his religion would be equivalent to forsaking his position as king (an equivalence implied earlier when the astrologers refer to “your idols” and “your religion” rather than “our idols” and “our religion”). Though impressed by Ibrahim’s god, Nimrud is not prepared to dismantle his regime.

Ibrahim wishes to replace a regime that relies on images with one that does not. His imageless regime will be grounded in the logic of creation. “Your true lord is the lord of the heavens and the earth, he who created them,” he tells the townspeople, “and I am a witness to this.” If the people would forsake their idols, he believes, they too could relate directly to nature’s God, and serve without the mediation of human-made images.

What gives Ibrahim the impression that such a regime is possible? Accounts of his early childhood suggest an intriguing answer. Al-Tabari reports that to avoid Nimrud’s murderous scheme, Ibrahim’s mother gave birth to him and raised him in a cave. Unlike the cave in Plato’s allegory in the Republic—which stands for life within the city, subject to the city’s images—Ibrahim’s cave shelters him from receiving a political education. Upon leaving the cave as a young adult, Ibrahim looked at the world and deduced that only the creator of the heavens and the earth could be the true lord. Unaffected by the political commitments Nimrud’s regime inculcates through its idols, he is, al-Tabari writes, “free of the religion of his people” and thus free to imagine an alternative.

But is Ibrahim’s “regime without images” feasible? His neighbors remain rightly skeptical.

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Abu Nasr al-Farabi (ca. 870–950) thought deeply about the relation between images and politics. A younger contemporary of al-Tabari, al-Farabi was born in Central Asia, on the periphery of the Islamic world, but spent much of his adult life in Baghdad—the cosmopolitan center of the Abbasid Caliphate so colorfully depicted in the pages of The Arabian Nights. He seems also to have traveled to Byzantine lands, possibly to Constantinople itself, to study Greek philosophy with Christian scholars who had inherited the traditions of the Hellenistic philosophical schools. Al-Farabi wrote numerous works on topics such as logic, politics, and music theory. While “all his writings are faultlessly excellent” (as the Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote in 1199) his political treatises in particular shed light on Ibrahim’s iconoclasm.

Al-Farabi adapted the insights of ancient political philosophers—especially Plato and Aristotle—to make sense of prophetic religion. Although the Greek philosophers had never encountered prophetic religion in its fleshed-out monotheistic form, their writings provided a basis for understanding prophetic religion as fundamentally political—concerned with establishing the conditions under which human beings can harmoniously live together. As al-Farabi writes in The Attainment of Happiness, “an isolated individual cannot achieve all the perfections by himself and without the aid of many other individuals.”6 Such mutual assistance rests on agreement about what is good and what is evil. Left to themselves, individuals of differing appetites, faculties, and experiences won’t naturally arrive at such agreement. If a political community is to take shape—and if it does not, al-Farabi warns, human happiness is impossible—individuals’ natural inclinations will have to be redirected so that their opinions become shared. Religion, al-Farabi teaches, is what makes this possible.

“Religion is opinions and actions,” al-Farabi writes in his Book of Religion, “determined and restricted with stipulations and prescribed for a community by their first ruler.”7 This definition is thoroughly political. Religion, for al-Farabi, concerns not merely that part of life set apart as sacred (as we might define it today) but rather that which determines what is considered sacred in the first place. When applied to Islam, al-Farabi’s definition of religion emphasizes the Prophet’s great accomplishment as a lawgiver: establishing a community by instituting shared opinions about the good and designating actions that conform to it. But the definition does not restrict itself to Islam; all political communities with shared opinions and actions possess religion in al-Farabi’s sense. They, too, have prophet-lawgivers.

How does a prophet-lawgiver establish religion in a polity? This is where images come into play.

Most of us don’t think about matters in purely abstract or conceptual terms. Our opinions often take the form of images. We model our actions on concrete examples of virtue, justice, and beauty. So a religion that strives for consonance among citizens cannot impart its teachings solely by means of abstract concepts. Instead, the prophet-lawgiver must invent compelling images. Thanks to his well-honed imaginative faculty (it is the excellence of this very faculty that distinguishes him as a prophet), the prophet-lawgiver creates images that help citizens “imagine everything that is in the city—kings, rulers, and servants; their ranks, the relation between them, and their subordination to one another.”8 He converts theoretical knowledge of natural and political things into descriptions that seize the imaginations of ordinary people—descriptions of God and the universe, prophets and kings, saints and sinners. Such images offer members of a polity a common understanding of nature, morality, and human happiness.

Images superimpose a layer of collective meaning on a natural world that could not otherwise sustain political life. Without the political “second nature” that images inculcate in us nearly from birth, allegiance to an otherwise abstract and impersonal law would be impossible. The law on its own isn’t lovable. It is through images that we come to identify with what the law stands for and protects. “For traditional laws to become firmly established in the hearts of the inhabitants of the city,” al-Farabi writes in his Summary of Plato’s Laws, “preludes must be made prior to setting them down.”9 Just as a prelude introduces and sets the tone for the main musical work, prophetic images prepare citizens to accept and adhere to the law. Images provide the foundation on which the law is built. Through images, the solitary world of an individual face to face with unmediated nature becomes a common world of shared expectations and aspirations in which law can take root. Images, in short, are what make political life possible.

The evocation of music raises the question of what counts as an image. Al-Farabi’s discussion encompasses both visual and literary representations. An epic poem about heroic deeds counts as an image just as much as a painting depicting the same subject. I would argue that his account of images even applies to the non-mimetic arts. Arabesque design and the muezzin’s call do more than decorate a building or tell a person when to pray; they cultivate particular moods and create an environment—visual or aural—that multiple individuals can collectively identify as their own. The prophet-lawgiver has all of these arts at his disposal. Those who claim that Islamic law does not depend on human-made images do not conceive of images broadly enough; al-Farabi was able to adapt Plato’s image-making lawgiver to his Islamic world because he knew that even the most emphatic disavowal of images cannot sustain itself politically without deploying other images.

So the fact that regimes regularly prohibit images should not distract from the more basic point: the legal proscription of images depends on images. Laws proscribing images presuppose other images already grounding those laws. Al-Farabi’s assertion that preludes must be made prior to setting down the law nicely captures this necessity. Ibrahim’s “regime without images” could only come into being if it used images to cultivate a commitment to its law of no images.

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As the externalized form of communal longings and ideals, prophetic images hold the power to bind a community together and inspire a shared conception of the good. Without images, the townspeople whose idols Ibrahim shatters could not survive as a community. Despite Ibrahim’s assertion that their images “can neither benefit nor harm” them, those images are hardly impotent. Elsewhere in the Qurʾan, he appears to admit as much.

Ibrahim tells the people, “You have only taken to yourselves idols, apart from God, as a mark of mutual love between you in the present life; then upon the Day of Resurrection you will deny one another, and you will curse one another, and your refuge will be the Fire, and you will have no helpers” (29:25). Ibrahim objects to images, then, not because they are powerless, but because they exert the wrong kind of power. They direct the people’s concern to the present earthly world rather than the world to come. He predicts that communal cohesion will dissolve on the Day of Resurrection—precisely when political life as we know it comes to an end. This reinforces the conclusion that the people’s images do work under present circumstances. But from Ibrahim’s eschatological perspective, that work is counterproductive. His frightening talk of hellfire aims to persuade the people to abandon images that direct their attention to their well-being in the present world. Of course, Ibrahim doesn’t admit that hell itself is an image. Consciously or not, he substitutes new images (which direct attention to the world to come) for old ones (which focus on the here-and-now).3f

Whether a set of images is beneficial or harmful depends on whether the goal, imagined as a common good, is actually good. Images may be powerful and yet harmful. Alluding to the “age of ignorance” (jahiliyya) said to have preceded Islam, al-Farabi calls a city founded on harmful images an ignorant regime.4f

What is unsettling about Ibrahim is not his opposition to Nimrud’s regime so much as his denial of politics. Since no political regime can exist without images, the critic’s task is to evaluate the images a regime employs—not simply to denounce the fact that it employs them. Ibrahim, however, refuses to recognize the prerequisites of politics. Though his opposition to Nimrud’s rule is rooted in a commendable concern for truth, his impulse to trump the king by appealing to God’s superior power risks shattering the possibility of human politics, which remains our only access to justice, however imperfect.

Al-Tabari reports a conversation between Nimrud and Ibrahim that illuminates this game of one-upmanship:

Then Nimrud said to Ibrahim, “Have you seen this God whom you serve and to whose service you call others, and of whose power you speak, and whom you glorify above any other? Who is He?” Ibrahim replied to him, “My Lord, who gives life and causes death.” And Nimrud said, “I, too, give life and cause death.” Ibrahim asked, “How do you give life and death?” He replied, “I shall take two men—two were condemned to death by my order—and I’ll kill one of them, so I will have caused him to die, and I’ll pardon the other and free him, so I will have made him live.” But upon hearing that, Ibrahim said to him, “God causes the sun to rise in the East, so can you make it rise in the West?” Knowing that it was as Ibrahim said, the disbeliever was dumbfounded and he gave no answer; he knew that he was not able to do that.10

Ibrahim assumes that sovereignty belongs to the most powerful. Simply put, if God is more powerful than Nimrud, then God deserves to rule. The question of what regime might best suit conflicting demands for justice is never raised. Instead of being dumbfounded by Ibrahim’s appeal to God’s supernatural power, Nimrud might have replied that to demand that a ruler change the course of nature is to misunderstand the scope of political power.

So, too, to demand that a ruler rule without recourse to images. If images are a prerequisite for producing willing obedience to the law, then rule without images implies rule by force alone. The exegetical tradition is wrong to present Nimrud as a tyrant simply because he used idols to rule. By using images, Nimrud’s regime sought to cultivate willing obedience among the population and thus avoid reducing politics to the mere exercise of force. Of course, tyrants also exploit the power of images—but that doesn’t make images the mark of tyranny.

And yet, even without knowing the substance of Nimrud’s images, their pervasiveness raises alarms. The sources tell us that the king of Babylon ruled over the entire earth. Were Nimrud’s images well suited to all of mankind? Both the nature of human beings and the nature of images suggest otherwise. In Political Regime, al-Farabi remarks that any group of people necessarily develops distinguishing characteristics due to its particular historical and geographical situation. People are never blank slates when a prophet arrives, and so the prophet must invent images that correspond to the distinctive character of the group for whom he legislates. Truth must be “represented to each group or nation by things of which they are more cognizant.”11 Images adequate to inspire Britons—an island people with a history of common law and naval empire—would be ineffective for a group of nomadic Bedouin or Tyrolean mountaineers.

For an image to be truly universal, it would have to speak to a part of us that we unchangingly share with all other human beings—and only that part. Our basic bodily needs might serve as such a common denominator. But what of loftier communal aspirations? Because these normally take form in conjunction with a group’s distinctive characteristics, an image meant to be universal must leave them aside. A regime that aspires to ground its rule in universally applicable images risks failing to address people’s deepest desires and hopes, leading to alienation and perhaps even revolt. At worst, such a regime would try to eradicate distinctive characteristics in order to produce a homogenous population.5f

The nature of images similarly suggests that a world-state is inadvisable. According to al-Farabi, although the truth is “one and immutable, the things by which [it is] represented are many and different.”12 Images, as approximations of the truth, are multiple. None is exhaustive. Because images must emphasize some aspects of a thing at the expense of others, alternative representations are always possible. “Therefore,” he writes, “it is possible to represent [the truth] to one group and one nation by objects other than those by which they are represented to another group and another nation. Thus it may be possible for the religions of virtuous nations and virtuous cities to differ even if they all pursue the very same happiness.”13 Al-Farabi thus argues, not only for the multiplicity of images, but for the possibility of multiple, equally legitimate religions.

Only the truth, al-Farabi maintains, is properly universal. But the truth itself cannot ground a political order. Images used by a regime with universal pretensions would necessarily fall short of the universality that they claim. They would always be vulnerable to challenge from alternate images. To remain in power, the ruler of any regime with universal pretentions would have to use force to suppress challenges to the regime’s claim to universality.

What about God’s universal rule? According to Ibrahim, serving God doesn’t entail idolatry because the creator of heaven and earth does not rule the world through images. The earnest enlightener seems unaware of the implications of his position. If God doesn’t rule through images, then he must resort to force. Ibrahim’s imagined ideal renders consent irrelevant and politics impossible. Human beings would, at best, submit as automatically to God’s rule as plants and animals do. At worst, we would suffer under a superhuman tyranny far greater than any mortal has been able to devise. Nimrud’s regime, however tyrannical, looks good by comparison.

The story of Ibrahim has served Muslims as a powerful image throughout the history of Islam. Nonetheless, it is important not to confuse the regime Ibrahim imagines in the Qurʾanic story with the religion as it has been practiced.

Al-Farabi rarely refers to the particulars of one religion or another, yet his view on images takes on particular significance when read with Islamic tradition in mind. In Political Regime, he writes:

Most people who pursue happiness pursue what is imagined, not what they form a concept of. Similarly, the principles such as are to be accepted, imitated, extolled, and exalted are accepted by most people as they imagine them, not as they form a concept of them. Those who pursue happiness as they form a concept of it and accept the principles as they form a concept of them are the wise, whereas those in whose souls these things are found as they are imagined and who accept them and pursue them as though they are like that are the believers.14

The juxtaposition of the wise and the believers is unusual here. Al-Farabi usually contrasts the wise with the vulgar masses. “Believers” (muʾminin) is the standard term for Muhammad’s followers in the Qurʾan—where it appears over a hundred times, and its cognates (like the verb “to believe”) many hundreds more. By calling those who rely upon images for their happiness “the believers,” al-Farabi signals that reliance upon images—including images of God—applies as well to Islam. His comment implies that the heroes of the Qurʾan and those who have followed them have themselves never submitted to God without the mediation of images.

Ibrahim in the story may be naïve, but the story of Ibrahim is not. If believers believe they can serve God without the mediation of images, it is prophetic images that help them to do so. The story of Ibrahim and the idolaters is itself one such image. Whether disseminated verbally or visually (as in figure 3), this image of image destruction allows believers to imagine themselves, like Ibrahim, rejecting images that obstruct direct submission to God. The story instills the belief that life without images is possible. This belief is reinforced by other images: “The most grievously tormented people among the denizens of hell on the Day of Resurrection will be the makers of images,” announces one hadith.15 Since this punishment would be manifestly unjust if images were necessary for human life, the hadith propagates the belief that life without images is possible. It does so by making an image of hell. These are images that cultivate a forgetting of images.

The story of Ibrahim and the hadith’s image of hell belong to a larger field of prophetic images that have helped establish Islam as a form of communal life over the centuries. Rather than offering believers a path to God devoid of images, the Qurʾan and subsequent Islamic traditions provide their adherents with new images in place of older ones. Only with images can Islam be political. And yet, false prophets still periodically arise with seductive visions of a world unsullied by the realities that come with being political beings.

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“Demolish! Demolish! the state of idols,” repeats the chanted nashid that accompanies the video of destruction in the Mosul Museum. When Ibrahim smashed the people’s idols, Nimrud understood the performance as a direct attack on his sovereignty. Whose sovereignty is ISIS targeting?

The spokesman in the video somewhat inaccurately identifies the images under attack as having belonged to “the Assyrians, Akkadians, and others.” Though he doesn’t name Nimrud, it is tempting to see these ancient Mesopotamian objects through the lens of Islamic tradition as belonging to Nimrud’s kingdom. This clarifies the video as a symbol of the Islamic State’s obsession with reenacting the past, but it also leaves open the question of the political target. Nimrud and his kingdom are long vanished; what good comes from attacking the images of a defunct regime?

Later, the video’s nashid suggests a contemporary adversary: “Demolish the statues of America and its clan,” the song intones. It comes as no surprise that ISIS would target the United States “and its clan,” but in what sense can ancient Mesopotamian sculpture be considered American?

The term jahiliyya might encode an answer. In its most constricted sense, the term refers to the century or so of Arabian history that predates the arrival of Muhammad. The era is best remembered for its highly stylized poetry celebrating the virtues of kin, lampooning enemies, recalling lost loves, and lamenting the dead. (The nashid that accompanies the Mosul Museum video has roots in this traditional poetry, which, as Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel describe, ISIS militants rework to “articulate the fantasy life of jihad.”)16 With time, the term’s meaning expanded to include the epoch before the establishment of Islam. In this sense, as peoples of the pre-Islamic past “the Assyrians, Akkadians, and others” belong to the period of jahiliyya.

The term’s meaning has broadened in other ways too. As we have seen, al-Farabi used it to refer to any regime that falls short of the virtuous city—regardless of its chronological place in history. Thinkers like Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) used the term to censure what they saw as the persistence of pre-Islamic customs among the Muslims of their own day. In modern times, the reformers Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) and Rashid Rida (1865–1935) also compared aspects of contemporary Muslim life with aspects of jahili society. A. Yusuf ʿAli (d. 1953), in a gloss on the word jahiliyya in his English translation of the Qurʾan, comments, “The Days of Ignorance were the days of tribalism, feuds, and selfish accentuation of differences in man. Those days are not really yet over. It is the mission of Islam to take us away from that false mental attitude.”17 In the 1960s, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), whose writings remain influential in radical circles to this day, popularized the term jahiliyya in his attempt to articulate what is wrong with modern life.

Born in a village in Upper Egypt, Qutb participated in Cairo’s literary scene from the mid-1920s through the early 1950s. Repulsed by the loose mores he encountered during a government-sponsored study trip in the United States, Qutb began to develop the hard-line brand of Islam for which he is best known. Returning to Egypt, Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He became a fierce critic of the Egyptian government and the lingering influence of the imperial powers despite the country’s nominal independence. When the Muslim Brotherhood failed in an attempt on the life of Egyptian president Gamal Nasser in 1954, the group was banned and Qutb imprisoned. He spent most of the rest of his life in jail, where he wrote a massive Qurʾanic commentary called In the Shade of the Qurʾan; his best-known book, Milestones, which is a call for Islamic revolution; and numerous other works. In 1966 he was executed for plotting against the Egyptian government. (As Roxanne Euben has suggested, Qutb’s heroic life story—with its conversion narrative and martyrdom—has played an important role in fostering commitment to his ideas.)

Jahiliyya is a central concept in Qutb’s more radical later writings. A society that fails to follow God’s guidance in all areas of life, he argues, is jahili and engaged in the usurpation of divine sovereignty. Jahili societies are human-made imposter sovereignties—whether they take the form of tribes, clans, kingdoms, empires, or, today, nation-states. “The true character of Islam,” he writes in Milestones, “is a universal proclamation of the freedom of man from servitude to other men, the establishment of the sovereignty of God and His Lordship throughout the world, the end of man’s arrogance and selfishness, and the implementation of the divine law in human affairs.”18

In his commentary on the Qurʾan, Qutb elaborates: “Jahiliyya means that people are ruled by people, because this signifies that they submit to one another. They refuse to submit to God alone and reject His Godhead, acknowledging instead that some human beings have qualities of Godhead and hence they submit to their authority.” Qutb insists that jahiliyya is not a time but a condition: “In all ages and places, people may implement God’s law, yielding no part of it for any reason, submitting to it willingly. As such, they follow the religion chosen for them by God. Alternatively, they may acknowledge and implement a man-made law in any shape or form. As such they follow ignorance.”19

As objects dating to the historical jahiliyya, the artifacts in the Mosul Museum function as emblems of jahiliyya in its nonhistorical sense. As objects in a museum, they contribute to instituting jahiliyya in its modern form. The museum, after all, is an institution linked to the humanism Qutb rails against. The modern museum emerged in the eighteenth century in conjunction with the rise of the nation-state and the social and political upheavals of the European Enlightenment. Since then, museums have played a central role in cultivating modern mores. According to philosopher Raymond Geuss, museums have been particularly valuable for fostering “a certain kind of secular, cosmopolitan enlightenment, a cultivation of the imagination, and of the faculty of judgment.”20 In her book Civilizing Rituals, art historian Carol Duncan likewise describes museums as quintessentially modern sites for “publicly represent[ing] beliefs about the order of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it.”21 Al-Farabi might have called them prophetic institutions. “To control a museum,” Duncan continues, “means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.”

Since the beginning of their rediscovery in the vicinity of Mosul in the 1840s, ancient Mesopotamian sculptures have been incorporated into museum collections throughout the world—and so into the work those museums do. Though the famed lion hunt scenes from Nineveh no longer arouse allegiance to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, they have never been politically impotent while on display in the British Museum. In the next chapter, I consider the scope of meanings that museums have bestowed on ancient Mesopotamian objects over the past century and a half. Turning attention from the objects that ISIS designated as idols worthy of destruction to the stage on which that destruction took place, I ask, What is significant about the museum as the site of the Islamic State’s video of destruction?