Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum

This article uses the recent controversy regarding the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas as a paradigm to challenge essentializing notions of an “Islamic” response to the image. Beginning with a history of premodern iconoclastic practice in the Islamic world, it explores the reception of the Bamiyan Buddhas in light of evidence for a complex range of responses to Buddhist and Hindu images in Afghanistan. Finally, it relates the destruction of Buddhist antiquities in 2001 not to a timeless theology of images but to the role of the museum as the locus of a secular iconolatry characteristic of the modern nation-state.