The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means.Footnote ¹ As networks of knowledge production and transmission, “lieux de mémoire”Footnote ² are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.

Much has been written about the antagonistic politics, constructed nature, and destructive tendencies of history writing and heritage making. Yet, rarely do these bureaucratized, ubiquitous, everyday forms of violence—which Chiara De Cesari describes in this roundtable as “cultural governmentality”—evoke sustained and broad-based public outcries, even as they directly affect how people live in the present and commemorate their pasts. In fact, state projects of heritage making often receive global recognition from international media outlets and multilateral institutions, thereby perpetuating an understanding of historical preservation as an apolitical, technocratic process. This is as true of the New York Times and National Geographic as it is of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the International Council on Monuments and Sites. Not only are these institutions largely silent on the contentious construction of heritage in places such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States, but they also ultimately serve to legitimize them.

Given the normalization of the violence of heritage construction, it is curious that the recent, sporadic, yet equally brutal destruction of material history by the Islamic State movement in war-torn Iraq and Syria should provoke such public attention globally. This is all the more peculiar given that most media outlets and preservationist agencies have covered and condemned such destruction much more so than they did the pain, suffering, and death that the United States, local governments, and other actors inflicted upon human beings in either country. Such inconsistencies in reporting and advocacy ultimately frame the destruction of material history as more tragic and reprehensible than the loss of (presumably Muslim) life. This is a reality that many in the colonial and postcolonial worlds have long had to contend with, and one that has been increasingly familiar since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

If many in centers of power and across the world have been appalled by the Islamic State's transgressions against statues, monuments, and historical spaces, comparatively few seemed to protest the extensive damage inflicted upon Iraq's cultural heritage since Operation Desert Storm. Until the 1990 Gulf War, strict heritage preservation laws austerely enforced by Saddam Husayn's regime protected Iraq's material history (however curated it might have been). The US war and the attendant UN-brokered sanctions on Iraq caused unprecedented damage to Iraq's material history. These made it much more difficult for archeologists and preservationists to continue their work, let alone protect heritage sites. In addition, the necessary tools, funding, and expertise were no longer available due to the sanctions. With a thriving global market for antiquities from the region, the illegal trade in cultural artifacts—which provided many Iraqis with a primary source of income—proliferated, causing the further deterioration of Iraq's built heritage.

The 2003 US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq further exacerbated this reality. In the first weeks of the war, the US military and political leaderships refused to safeguard Iraq's cultural properties. That this was a question of commitment rather than capacity is made clear by their protection of institutions they considered vital to their own interests, such as the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of Interior—whose archives they thereafter plundered. On the eve of war, the Bush administration refused to heed the various warnings that nongovernmental organizations, professional associations, and independent scholars had issued. These included lists of heritage sites that should be protected along with their geographic coordinates.Footnote ³ When Baghdad fell only three weeks into the war, the looting and destruction of many government institutions and other symbols of Saddam Husayn's Baʿthist regime ensued. US soldiers stood by (and some even participated) as civilians raided the Iraqi National Library and Archive, the National Museum, and other sites of cultural heritage. As the looting spread to the rest of the country, the US government pledged to protect the National Museum and restore its stolen artifacts, neither of which it actually did.Footnote ⁴ Soon after, reports poured in claiming that US troops were ordered not to intervene and were actively encouraging such theft.Footnote ⁵ The reports further undermined common justifications of the looting based on claims of negligence or collateral damage. They showed that the cultural cleansing that took place was central to US political, social, and cultural agendas in Iraq. It was an instrument of war through which the US government attempted to defeat Iraq, subjugate its people, and erase its history (some of which implicates the United States in the Iran–Iraq War and the massacres that Saddam Husayn committed against Iraqis).

By and large, US media coverage blamed Iraqis themselves for committing these crimes and being unable to protect their own heritage. Such critics also argued that what artifacts had been secured—including those that were stolen—would be better safeguarded in the United States. Thus, while the US government was at once downplaying the looting and providing justifications for it, its officials were planning the transfer of millions of Iraqi archival documents and various artifacts to the United States.Footnote ⁶ The stolen archive of the Baʿth Party headquarters in Baghdad was one among many repositories that occupation forces transferred to the United States. With secrecy shrouding the millions of other documents that are currently in the possession of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, the Baʿth Party collection received almost exclusive media attention.Footnote ⁷ Kanan Makiya, the 2003 Iraq War enthusiast who once described the bombs terrorizing the capital as “music to my ears,” had secured the documents at the onset of war and struck a deal with the US government in 2005 for their transfer to the United States via a US naval facility.Footnote ⁸ In 2008, these stolen documents were moved to their final destination in one of the most prestigious (and exclusive) repositories in the Unites States, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The extent of the theft, however, ran much deeper than that one collection. Researchers estimated that “as much as 80 percent of the former regime's documents were spirited away by the US military during those first months of the occupation.”Footnote ⁹

So extensive was the damage to Iraq's heritage, so prevalent the sale of cultural property in the underground market, that by 2005 the UK World Monument Fund unprecedentedly designated the entire country of Iraq as an “endangered site.”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, beyond the initial media frenzy, the US government received little criticism outside of scholarly and preservationist circles for the plundering of Iraqi archives and the damage its invasion and occupation inflicted upon Iraq's heritage. This starkly contrasts, both quantitatively and qualitatively, with the global condemnation of the theft and destruction of heritage committed by the Islamic State, which, emerging as a powerful political actor in 2014, found a thriving and lucrative illicit market for Middle Eastern cultural artifacts. At the same time, the language used to criticize the Islamic State's approach to heritage took on civilizational undertones: while the destruction that the United States caused was portrayed, if at all, as collateral damage, a necessary evil in the pursuit of democratic progress, that of the Islamic State was barbaric, irrational, and backward, an affront to human civilization.Footnote ¹¹ Such indignation was not enough to halt the lucrative trade in artifacts that the Islamic State (and other groups) had stolen and then sold on world markets. Indeed, many such objects continue to appear in Berlin, London, and New York City, to name but a few examples, providing the Islamic State with a major source of income.

The media and public discourse depoliticize the violence that the Islamic State commits against heritage and instead depict it in religious and civilizational terms. However, like various cultural projects, these attacks are both calculated and political instruments of war and state formation. Disseminated in meticulously and professionally choreographed video footage aired online and across television networks, such violence aims to project the group's power and to challenge and delegitimize its opponents. In various instances, the Islamic State directly targeted heritage sites slated for economic redevelopment as a way to politically and financially disadvantage its opponents by depriving them of investment opportunities. The targeting of heritage for political and economic reasons, and not simply for religious ones, is not new. In the modern Middle East, for instance, it was practiced by, among others, Wahhabi fighters in the Arabian Peninsula starting in the 18th century. While the Shiʿi shrines of Najaf and Karbala as well as Sufi houses of worship in the Hijaz constituted prime idolatrous targets for these fighters, such acts of destruction were equally motivated by economic and territorial conquest. As such, the Wahhabi religious establishment took up places of religious importance as sites of material and discursive contestation against those they considered non-Orthodox Sunni Muslims—a flexible term that was used for those who opposed Al Saʿud's state-building projects.

Practices of memorialization counter official Saudi Arabian religious beliefs. But the Saudi regime has, since the 1928 Ikhwan Revolt, managed the iconoclastic desires of religious zealots, using them for political purposes when necessary. This was the case when, at the turn of the 21st century, state-allied religious leaders bestowed their blessings on the regime's secular multibillion-dollar commemoration projects in Riyadh. In 1996, the regime passed a royal order declaring 16 January 1999 the beginning of the yearlong hijri centennial celebration of Al Saʿud's 1902 takeover of Riyadh.Footnote ¹² It was the first official nonreligious holiday in the country's history, yet the regime was not in the least concerned about official religious opposition. The centennial centered on the production of source material for Saudi Arabia's revised, secular history—which significantly sidelined the role of religion in state formation—and the archives that would house them. It also heralded the territorialization of the revised narrative in the built environment—namely, in state archives, the National Museum, Governance Palace, Dirʿiyya, and other sites of heritage production in the capital.

Despite these realities, regime-allied religious leaders in Saudi Arabia were visiting sites of commemoration by the early 2000s, with some hailing them in various Saudi media as exemplary modernization projects. A few years later, the regime, under the auspices of the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, or the Darah, even attributed the country's “unenviable cultural state” to a century of religious intolerance. This state, the regime argued, was brought about by the official religious establishment, which considered the preservation of archeological and historical sites and artifacts to be heretical acts of un-Islamic innovation (bidaʿ). Armed with this justification, the Darah embarked on a multimedia national campaign to raise awareness of the importance of historical documents and artifacts, and the memorialization of the past, to the “modernizing and civilizing of the nation” itself.Footnote ¹³ Without the documentary and material evidence of the past, the nation could not achieve the proper levels of modernity that befit a petrostate with the financial resources and geopolitical importance of Saudi Arabia. The modern Saudi citizen thus needed material history to become part of “History” itself.

Outside of the capital, the Saudi regime altogether ignored material heritage that did not evince Al Saʿud's own past. The regime ensured that those parts of the peninsula's rich heritage that it did not deliberately destroy would deteriorate on their own. It also prevented interested parties and regional councils from preserving or developing them at their own expense. In Central Mecca, site of the Muslim pilgrimage, where real estate is among the most expensive in the world, the regime relied on its discourse of iconoclasm to justify the wholesale destruction of historical as well as religious sites. The city's historical landscape offered new opportunities for Saudi Arabia's real estate- and fledgling tourism-based development. Accordingly, official religious leaders found common cause with developers, contractors, and other economic elites in the razing of historical landmarks a stone's throw from Mecca's Grand Mosque and the construction of megaprojects in their place.Footnote ¹⁴ Historical sites associated with the prophet and various eras in Islamic history were thus replaced with upscale hotels, condominiums, and shopping malls in the name of both iconoclasm and modernizing the infrastructure of the yearly pilgrimage. Saudi Arabia's belated multibillion-dollar turn to heritage making in Riyadh was thus anchored by the destruction in Mecca of religious and historical sites that revealed competing temporal and spatial orders.

The archeological sites that recorded the temporality of Islam and political, economic, and cultural life before the reign of Al Saʿud are today nothing but demolished remains. What little has survived risks demolition at the stroke of a pen. While the destruction in Mecca attracted global media attention starting in 2010, it was only after much of the neighborhoods circling the Grand Mosque were already razed to the ground. World powers, however, have yet to condemn Saudi Arabia's systemic destruction of heritage sites in Mecca and elsewhere in the kingdom. This is to say nothing of Yemen, where the kingdom is actively cleansing that country's cultural heritage. As Lamya Khalidi points out in this roundtable, Saudi-led forces have been deliberately destroying Yemen's heritage with great impunity. They are able to do so because of the support of world powers and a largely pro-Saudi mainstream media that often turns a blind eye to the kingdom's actions. Whereas the Islamic State conjures power through turning its destructive acts into visual spectacles for global consumption, Saudi rulers have gone to great lengths to prevent media coverage of the historical cleansing they commit. Unlike the Islamic State, they rely on discretion and the passage of time, gradually curating the landscape to evince their own, exclusionary historical narrative. So successful was the Saudi regime that even its use of dynamite to bring down Mecca's historic mountains escaped the world's attention for many years. Given Saudi Arabia's economic and geopolitical power, “political amnesia,” or what political scientist Michael Rogin describes as the “forgetting of what one continues to see,” has naturalized the violence that Al Saʿud commits against people and things.Footnote ¹⁵

State formation broadly construed necessitates both the production of selective histories and the effacement of heritage for its own success. In this context, construction and destruction are inseparable. As with the cultural cleansing that the Islamic State has committed, that of state projects of heritage making—with all the symbolic and material violence they entail—deserve scrutiny and condemnation. To do so is to probe the ongoing violence that undergirds the modern state and the violence committed in history and unto it for the sake of the future. It also disturbs predetermined notions of temporality (of past, present, and future), subjectivity, and spatiality while rendering heritage a site and particular order of violence. To speak of heritage as war is, then, not to ignore, downplay, or justify the spectacular damage that the Islamic State has committed against the histories, heritage, and bodies of the peoples of Iraq and Syria. On the contrary, it is to de-exceptionalize it and attempt to understand its fundamental logic by placing such acts in a critical historical comparative perspective.