Waging War on the Dead: The Necropoliticsof Sufi Shrine Destruction in Mali

Emily Jane O’Dell, Department of History & Archaeology, American University

of Beirut, Riad el Solh, Beirut, 11072020, Lebanon

E-mail: emily.odell@aub.edu.lb

ABSTRACT________________________________________________________________

The destruction of Sufi heritage in Timbuktu used and abused heritage to

assert sovereignty, terrorize the living, and repudiate materiality.

Archeologists have not analyzed how necropolitics relates to the

desecration of the dead and the torture of the living in Mali, where

‘‘bodies’’ are becoming prime stages for radical performances of

sovereignty, ideology, and materiality. To understand how Sufi shrines are

becoming prime ideological battlegrounds, we must consider the affective

presence and emotive materiality of the dead ‘‘bodies’’ and ‘‘spirits’’ of the

saints being ‘‘slayed,’’ and acknowledge the relationship between the

disturbance of the dead and postcolonial violence on the living.________________________________________________________________

Resume: La destruction des sanctuaires soufis a Tombouctou est une violence

faite au patrimoine dans le but d’imposer une souverainete, de terroriser les

vivants et de rejeter la materialite. Les archeologues n’ont pas analyse

comment la necropolitique est liee a la desacralisation des morts et a la

torture des vivants au Mali, ou les « corps » deviennent les premiers bastions

d’un exercice radical en termes de souverainete, d’ideologie et de materialite.

Pour comprendre comment les sanctuaires soufis sont en train de devenir les

principaux champs de bataille ideologiques, nous devons prendre en compte

la presence affective et la materialite emotionnelle des « corps » et

des « esprits » morts des saints « occis » et reconnaıtre la relation entre la

perturbation des morts et la violence postcoloniale sur les vivants.________________________________________________________________

Resumen: La destruccion de santuarios sufıes en el maltratado patrimonio

de Tombuctu para reafirmar la soberanıa, aterroriza a los vivos y repudia la

materialidad. Los arqueologos no han analizado como la necropolıtica se

relaciona con la profanacion de los muertos y la tortura de los vivos en

Malı, donde los ‘‘cuerpos’’ se estan convirtiendo en escenarios primordiales

de las representaciones radicales de soberanıa, ideologıa y materialidad.

Para comprender como los santuarios sufıes se estan convirtiendo en

campos de batalla ideologicos primordiales, debemos considerar la

presencia afectiva y la materialidad emotiva de los ‘‘cuerpos’’ y ‘‘espıritus’’

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Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (� 2013)

DOI 10.1007/s11759-013-9247-y

muertos de los santos ‘‘asesinados’’ y reconocer la relacion entre la

perturbacion de los muertos y la violencia postcolonial sobre los vivos._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

KEY WORDS

Mali, Sufism, Necropolitics, Terrorism_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Introduction

The attacks on Sufi shrines in Timbuktu from 2012 to 2013 were a primeexample of how heritage can be used to wage war on the already dead, ter-rorize the living, and repudiate materiality. The reductive analyses andmoral denunciations put forward by the vast majority of archeologists, her-itage preservationists, and the media framed these unfortunate attacks asthe result of a ‘‘barbaric’’ and iconoclastic misapplication of Islamic law.Unfortunately, most scholars have ignored the wider context of the ‘‘poli-tics of the dead’’ in Mali, and failed to consider the affective presence andemotive materiality of these ‘‘saintly’’ bodies, the perceived agency of these‘‘spirit’’ subjects, and the close relationship between desecration of the deadand postcolonial violence on the living. Violence perpetrated by the livingon the dead is not a phenomenon limited to Mali, as attacks on the deadin other ‘‘deathscapes’’ in Africa have been used to assert sovereignty overland, ideology and the body—while simultaneously contesting the normalprocesses of commemoration and heritage preservation.

While the violent attacks on Mali’s Sufi heritage by armed rebels weretragic, they were not isolated or unique. Sufi shrines have been underwidespread assault in the past several years in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Paki-stan, and Kashmir—and similar bouts of destruction have occurredthroughout Islamic history to repudiate the materiality of the remains ofrevered mystics, and the perceived immateriality of their souls—to whichsome believers appeal for healing and blessings. Sufi shrines and ‘‘bodies’’have become victims and weapons of war over the past decade for a multi-tude of reasons: to attract media attention, to discourage belief in shrinevisitation and rituals, to garner support among regional and internationalgroups, to resist foreign occupation, to call for national liberation, and toprotest the U.S. funding of various Sufi initiatives throughout NorthAfrica, the Middle East, and Central Asia. While these attacks on Sufi heri-tage have been widespread, it is only in Mali that military forces with theblessing of UNESCO protected Sufi heritage.’’1

By failing to acknowledge the necropolitical underpinnings of theupsurge of attacks on Sufi shrines not just in Mali but throughout North

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Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, archeologists and political analystshave failed to understand how and why Sufi shrines are rapidly being recy-cled into new physical, ideological, political, and existential battlegrounds.

Necropolitics and Heritage

According to UNESCO, 15 mausoleums in Timbuktu, ‘‘the city of 333saints,’’ were destroyed by armed groups from 2012–2013, including atleast nine shrines which were listed as part of the Timbuktu World Heri-tage Site.2 Some of the shrines and tombs allegedly destroyed include thoseof Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar, Alpha Moya, Sidi Elmety, Mahamane Elm-ety, and Cheick Sidi Amar. Armed groups also broke down the door ofTimbuktu’s legendary 15th century Sidi Yahya mosque.3 Other shrines thatwere attacked include two Sufi tombs at the 14th century Djingareybermosque in Timbuktu, and—outside Timbuktu—the shrine of Alfa Moboin Goundam.4 These attacks were condemned by the Organization of theIslamic Conference, the United Nations, and the International CriminalCourt.5 Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor at the ICC, was quick to arguethat these attacks against the ‘‘dead’’ constitute war crimes under Article 8of the Rome Statute.

These attacks on Mali’s heritage have not yet been contextualized withinthe discourse of necropolitics—a discourse which focuses on the relation-ship between sovereignty and power over the processes of life and death.In his groundbreaking article ‘‘Necropolitics,’’ Achille Mbembe (2003)explores how the subjugation of life to the powers of death reconfiguresthe relationships between resistance, sacrifice, and terror.6 Turning awayfrom traditional conceptions of sovereignty (which are located within theboundaries and jurisdiction of the nation-state), Mbembe focuses insteadon independent ‘‘killing machines’’ whose central project is the ‘‘destruc-tion of human bodies and populations’’ (Mbembe 2003:14)—not unlikethe transnational, roving ‘‘war machines’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) inMali that destroyed the Sufi shrines. Though Mbembe (2003:11) posits that‘‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in thepower and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die,’’ thedestruction of Sufi shrines suggests that the ultimate expression of sover-eignty may also reside in who condemns the already dead to death.

Mbembe’s (2003:26) discussion of the intersection of necropolitics andpostcolonialism is closely related to Frantz Fanon’s (1991:39) work on thespatialization of colonial occupation—the establishment of sovereignty over‘‘space’’ through territorial fragmentation. The recent ethnic, tribal, politi-cal conflicts in the postcolonial landscape of northern Mali are substantiallyrelated to the setting of boundaries and internal frontiers during the

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French occupation. After the French captured Timbuktu in 1894 they con-sequently faced a number of Tuareg rebellions (such as in 1916) for creat-ing arbitrary boundaries to fragment Tuareg groups into different factions,and for refusing to grant the Tuareg their own autonomous zone.7 In fact,most of the recent violence in Timbuktu was waged by opposing elites ofdifferent Tuareg groups—splintered into various tribal components—whoteamed up with regional jihadist and criminal networks in their fight forsovereignty.8 In their recent push for independence, several Tuareg groups9

joined with hundreds of fighters from AQIM, the local al-Qaeda affiliate,as well as Ansar Deine (‘‘Defenders of the Faith’’) and the Movement forOneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO).

According to Mbembe, the dynamics of territorial fragmentation oftencombine with a rapid proliferation of widespread sites of violence thatresist the traditional definition of the battlefield—as happened in Maliwhen rebels turned Sufi shrines into miniature battlefields. Necropoli-tics—in relation to the destruction of Sufi shrines in Mali and other post-colonial landscapes—might be conceptualized as the politics of waging waron the already dead and on landscapes of death to assert sovereignty overpolitics, land distribution and ritual commemorations of the past, and toterrorize the local population in the present.

In Timbuktu, the destruction of Sufi shrines happened within a complexconstellation of transnational alliances and actors—including many fighterswho journeyed to Mali from other postcolonial deathscapes in Africa, suchas Libya, Algeria,10 Tunisia and Nigeria.11 With technologies of killing pro-liferating in parts of Africa and easily crossing porous ‘‘national’’ borders,it is no surprise that ‘‘dead’’ bodies in Mali, along with living bodies, havebecome sites upon which violence is waged by nomadic ‘‘war machines’’composed of groups of armed men that split up, unite and superimposeeach other based on the circumstances (Mbembe 2003:34). On the Africancontinent, neighboring states or rebel movements often lease armies toeach other (Mbembe 2003:32)—as was the case in Libya and Mali. These‘‘war machines,’’ as illustrated in northern Mali, survive through looting,and kidnapping, and they also appeal to transnational networks for addi-tional support.

Though extremist groups have been present in northern Mali for over adecade, it was not until soldiers led by Amadou Haya Sanogo toppled Pres-ident Amadou Toumani Toure and armed rebel groups took control of thecities of Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal that members of Ansar Deine,12 alongwith fighters from Algeria and Nigeria, destroyed the centuries-old mauso-leums of Sufi ‘‘saints.’’13 Attacks on Sufi heritage in Mali happened at thesame time that the Tuareg-led National Movement for the Liberation ofAzawad14 was pushing for independence, and calling for colonial bordersto be redrawn. The Malian army had managed to put down previous

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Tuareg uprisings in 1962–1964, 1990–1995, and 2007–2009. In addition,thousands of young Tuareg men who had served in the Libyan militaryduring the long reign of Muammar Qaddafi had recently returned to Mali,bringing with them mortars, anti-tank missiles, and other advanced weap-onry that they had taken from his armories.15 Thus, in northern Mali, Sufishrines were not considered legitimate battlefields and convenient weaponsof war until Tuareg groups called for independence after the fall of thecentral government, and teamed up with fighters arriving from the postco-lonial deathscapes of Libya who carried with them advanced weaponry anda religious ideology which had prompted the destruction of Sufi shrines inLibya long before any shrines in Mali were attacked.16

The parallels between the international outcry of scholars and the mediaover the desecration of Sufi heritage in Mali and the international hysteriaand politicization of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March2001 illustrate how calls for the protection of heritage in these two conflictspreceded foreign military intervention (Elias 2007). Culture preservationgroups and international organizations, such as UNESCO, criticize attackson structures and objects of the past—like the shrines in Tim-buktu—because they believe that cultural heritage from the past—especiallywhen it is assigned ‘‘outstanding universal value’’—must be preserved.17

Those who are driven to destroy such heritage out of a ‘‘Salafi’’ ideologyalso believe that they are preserving the past—by demolishing all ‘‘idols’’to ‘‘re-create’’ the conditions under which Islam was practiced in the 7thcentury. Thus, the battle on the ground and in the media over Mali’s cul-tural property was not just a battle over ideology or heritage—but alsosovereignty over the past.

The Body as Battlefield

Colonial sovereignty in Africa in the past was achieved through the crea-tion and policing of boundaries, and the structuring of new spatial rela-tions—primarily through the establishment of hierarchical zones anddistricts (Mbembe 2003:25–26). Today, however, local militias, privatearmies, and roving war machines can easily transgress national boundaries,and claim the right to kill—thereby seizing this monopoly from the states(Mbembe 2003:31).18 With many African governments unable to claim amonopoly on violence or territorial boundaries (Mbembe 2003:32), itseems only logical that the ‘‘body’’ would become a battlefield upon whichdifferent factions would compete to assert their sovereignty (Baines 2010).By attacking dead bodies, groups in Mali asserted their sovereignty overthe local living populations in and around Timbuktu, as well as the dead.By claiming the right to ‘‘kill’’ the already dead, these groups posed a

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direct threat to ‘‘heritage’’ and the sovereignty of the international organi-zations which aim to police and protect such heritage. As a result,scholars19 and foreign ministers20 denounced these actions as ‘‘bar-baric’’—similar to how academics, politicians and journalists vilified theTaliban as fundamentalists incapable of grasping so-called ‘‘universal’’ con-cepts such as art, history, and World Heritage (Elias 2007). While the Tali-ban were accused of ‘‘cultural terrorism,’’ few scholars or mediacommentators acknowledged the Taliban’s clear critique of the west’s ten-dency in conflict zones to value ‘‘stones’’ over people, the hypocrisy of her-itage preservation during a time of war and famine, and the assumeduniversal value placed on materiality (Elias 2007). As the attacks on heri-tage in Mali demonstrated, the emotive materiality of dead ‘‘bodies’’ canbe easily manipulated by perpetrators of such violence to assert a politicalallegiance and religious ideology. As a result, international organizationslike UNESCO seek to not only disseminate information about suchdestruction but also to de-legitimize and punish extreme performances ofsovereignty (Fontein 2009), such as the destruction of the bodies of thedead and their final resting places.

In Mali, as in other post-colonies in Africa, the potential of dead bodiesto be used for political ends is often connected to postcolonial armedstruggles—and not just ‘‘Islamist’’ ideology. Because bodies andgraves—straddling the physical and spiritual worlds—may be embeddedwith multiple and contradictory agencies (such as saint/heretic and victim/perpetrator)—the final resting place of a ‘‘friend of God’’ is entangled inboth material and symbolic transformations. The ‘‘politics of the dead’’ inMali and other recent deathscapes is informed by far more meaning andsymbolism than just dueling interpretations of Islamic law. While the asser-tion of sovereignty over ‘‘dead’’ bodies is a rebuttal of previous forms ofcommemoration, as well as the symbolic efficacy of dead bodies (Verdery1999), violence on the dead also disturbs the bodies of those who go tovisit these graves and shrines, and are kept from enacting the complex rit-ual, symbolic, and material processes through which the dead are remem-bered (Fontein 2010:438) and the living seek solace.

Attacks on Sufi shrines illustrate how the destruction of heritage confersupon the traumatized living population the status of the living dead (seealso Mbembe 2003:40), and transforms the already dead into the deadagain. Such desecration succeeds in terrorizing the living by suggesting thatnot even death is final or free from terror. Since the dead ‘‘body’’ of thesaint is ‘‘terrorized’’ by those who would seek to destroy it—along with itsmemory and healing efficacy—the waging of war on the ‘‘already dead’’destroys for the living population even the hope of a peaceful and finaldeath of their own. If, according to Foucault (Butler 1989:601), the body isa site where regimes of discourse and power inscribe themselves, then the

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saint’s body—or the memory of that body—would seem to offer a primevehicle through which to attack an unwanted regime, religious ideology, orpolitical system. While any desecration of the dead is a radical display ofsovereignty over the dead and the processes of death, the destruction ofthe body of the ‘‘saint’’ has even more terror potential, since these ‘‘friendsof God’’ are thought by those who visit them to have lived ‘‘perfect’’ livesand to have been afforded a place in ‘‘paradise.’’ Thus, if even dead saintscan be massacred, then even paradise can be penetrated by terror. Byupending the ‘‘traditional’’ material, symbolic, and social processes of com-memoration and ritual, the attacks on Sufi shrines in Mali were as muchan attack on the living, and the idea of security through sainthood—asthey were on the dead.

In addition to failing to link the attacks on heritage in Timbuktu to thestruggle for ‘‘national’’ liberation and its related contestation over sover-eignty and colonial boundaries, scholars and the media also ignored thephenomenological quality of the saints’ ‘‘bones’’ (or memory of them) asboth objects and subjects (Geary 1988; Williams 2004:263–7). If theseattacks, like the attacks on the Bamiyan Buddhas, were an attack on mate-riality and the agency of objects (see Gell 1998; for a critique of hisapproach, see Navaro-Yashin 2009), it seems strange that no scholar hasyet investigated the physical remains or containers of the ‘‘bodies’’ thoughtto have been destroyed within the shrines, or considered whether or notbelievers will still consider these defiled ‘‘spaces’’ and ‘‘spirits’’ to beendowed with symbolic powers of efficacy (Verdery 1999). Further, wemust consider what materials will no longer flow between believers andthese spaces,21 and investigate whether or not the destruction of thesespaces limits what bones and the memory of them can do. Moving beyondour presentist bias, it is essential that we acknowledge the ‘‘absence’’ of dis-course on these ‘‘immaterial bodies,’’ as well as the absence of coverage onthe perceived accessibility of the souls of these ‘‘saints’’ now that theirstructures have been destroyed. What does the absence of concern by ar-cheologists and anthropologists about the ‘‘emotive materiality’’ aboutthese bodies and spaces and their ‘‘affective presence’’ (Williams 2004:66)as spiritual subjects reveal about the regimes of academic discourse andpower which have refused to inquire about them?

Though the parallels between the politics of the dead in Mali and otherdeathscapes in Africa are striking, there has been a profound lack of refer-ence in scholarship and the media to the postcolonial and African contextin which these attacks in Timbuktu occurred. The majority of recentattacks on Sufi shrines have been occurring in Africa—a continent that hasalso been marked by the gruesome massacres of human bodies and popula-tions in places such as Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eri-trea, Rwanda, and Burundi.22 For example, violence in Zimbabwe in the

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2000s was ‘‘accompanied by a new wave of disturbances involved in deadbodies’’ (Fontein 2010:434). Violence against supporters of the Movementfor Democratic Change continued long after their deaths. Their graves wereexhumed (Eppel 2001), and their bodies were left in public places withsymbolic significance—a ‘‘performance’’ by the dead produced by the per-petrators of their death. During the war in Sierra Leone, physical amputa-tion replaced immediate death as a technique of torture and cruelty(Mbembe 2003:35). Foday Sankoh, the leader and founder of the SierraLeone rebel group Revolutionary United Front, was trained in Libya andlaunched his ‘‘amputation campaign’’ for control of Sierra Leone’s mineralresources with weapons from Qaddafi.23 Likewise, weapons along withmercenaries used for killing in Libya made their way to Mali—and ampu-tations soon followed.24 During the attacks on the shrines of Timbuktu,some residents had their limbs amputated as ‘‘punishment’’—ostensiblyunder Islamic law—for crimes like stealing. Thus, it is not surprising thatwhile Sufi shrines were being attacked in Mali with the help of fighterswho came to Mali from Libya, body parts were also being amputated inthe so-called name of sharia. However, we must not assume that theamputations in Mali which accompanied attacks on the bodies of the deadwere merely the result of a religious ideology; rather, such amputationswere imported from and related to other deathscapes in Africa, where thistechnique of torture has been used as a ‘‘weapon’’ of war to terrorize andexpress sovereignty over living bodies, as well as dead ones.

Amputations carried out by rebels in Mali introduced a personal dimen-sion to violence in a conflict which has otherwise been dominated by theweapons of modern warfare—including the most recent technologicaladvances in weaponry and mechanization. Accordingly, as more popula-tions throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are becomingalienated by modern warfare—especially through targeted killing and dro-nes—the media has focused on a so-called ‘‘rise’’ in intimate ‘‘bodily’’ vio-lence—in the form of stonings, beheadings, and amputations—which arejuxtaposed with more ‘‘civilized’’ and ‘‘modern’’ methods of killing. Never-theless, while amputations are indeed gruesome, they are also connected tothe refutation of materiality and abstraction promoted by parties like theTaliban and Ansar Deine when Buddhas are bombed and dead Sufi saintsare ‘‘slayed’’. Using machetes and swords to sever the body forges a moredirect connection with the state of nature and being than does the mecha-nized violence of guns, tanks, and drones—weapons which kill from a dis-tance.25 Just as Sufi shrines and Buddhas have been destroyed in the nameof abolishing ‘‘idols’’ so too does personalized violence abolish the idolatryand abstraction of modern weaponry and mechanization. As the dead‘‘bodies’’ of Sufi saints were terrorized in Timbuktu, the living bodies ofsome of the inhabitants of Timbuktu were similarly severed in acts of

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personalized violence—which contrasted greatly with the ‘‘depersonalized’’and hence more ‘‘humane’’ methods of violence being waged by the Frenchand Malian army on the roving ‘‘war machines’’ attacking Timbuktu’sland, heritage, and population.

Another technology of death introduced into the conflict in northernMali was suicide bombing—with the first suicide bombing in Gao happen-ing around the same time that Sufi shrines were being attacked.26 Thedestruction of cultural heritage by armed groups in Mali mirrored the stra-tegic logic of suicide bombing—usually employed as an ‘‘extreme strategyfor national liberation’’ by weak political actors who wish to compel thewithdrawal of a real or perceived occupation of a national homeland (Pape2003:80)—such as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawadattempted in Mali. In this context, the ‘‘dead’’ mystic body was paradoxi-cally transformed into a ‘‘martyr’’ for the political struggle against the cen-tral government, and a ‘‘sacrifice’’ for a religious ideology opposed to thematerial visitation of the dead and the immaterial intercessory powers ofthe dead.27 Nevertheless, in their quest to eradicate these tombs and‘‘bodies’’ as idols and symbols of a national, cultural and social ‘‘past,’’ An-sar Deine and other groups betrayed their own repudiation of material-ity—and illustrated the impossibility of transcending the process ofobjectification. Paradoxically, they made the ‘‘material’’ even more materialthan before—for out of the international outcry over the destruction ofthese shrines emerged an immaterial materiality created from widespreadconcern about the fate of these shrines—leading to more awareness aboutthese shrines than ever before.

The Politics of Sufi Shrine Destruction

Just as suicide bombings have a contagion effect, so too does the destruc-tion of Sufi shrines—as militias from one deathscape cross national bordersto wage war and consequently destroy Sufi shrines in another. Though thedestruction of the shrines in Mali followed on the heels of the desecrationof Sufi ‘‘spaces’’ and ‘‘bodies’’ throughout North Africa, attacks on Malianheritage were not framed by UNESCO or other international bodies as partof a larger regional trend of Sufi shrine destruction. Sufi ‘‘spaces’’ in Libyawhich were attacked include the Sidi Abdussalam Mosque, the shrine ofSidi Al Makari, the shrine of al-Shaab al-Dahmani, the shrine of Abdel Sa-lam al-Asmar,28 the Zawiyat Blat in Zlitan, the shrine of Abdullah al-Shaab,the 500-year-old Al-Andalusi Mausoleum in Tajoura, and the OttomanQaramanli graves of the family of Yusuf Pasha Qarmali.29 The Union ofSufi Brotherhoods in Tunisia also reported in early 2013 that over 30shrines had been attacked since Tunisians forced President Zine El Abidine

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Ben Ali into exile—including the legendary 13th century mausoleum ofSidi Bou Said (where several manuscripts were destroyed as well).30 Fur-ther, since January 2011, at least 25 Sufi shrine attacks in Egypt in al-Min-ufyia, Aswan, al-Buharya, and al-Qalyubia (including the shrine of SidiAbdel Rahman) were reported to the Ministry of Islamic Endowments,prompting public prosecutors to ask the state for protection of Sufi struc-tures.31 Thus, we must question why politicians and heritage expertsrefused to draw the obvious link between the destruction of Sufi spaces inLibya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Mali, especially since many of the rebels andmilitias in northern Mali participated in conflicts in Libya and Tunisia.Despite these widespread attacks, the international community has notrushed to the aid of these desecrated shrines throughout North Africa, asthey did in Mali. It is unlikely that Mali’s shrines received more attentionthan others because they are part of a World Heritage Site, since shrines inother North African countries—like that of Sidi Bou Said in Tunisia—arealso part of or connected to World Heritage Sites.

While the ‘‘logic’’ of suicide bombing is a war of the body on body(guerre au corps-a-corps), the demolition of the Buddhas in Afghanistan(a war on stones) and the destruction of Sufi shrines in Mali and beyond(a war on buildings and bones) were acts of war waged on ‘‘objects’’ whichcould not fight back—yet these ‘‘idols’’ were not the intended target. Theintended and indirect target of such attacks on ‘‘material’’ objects and‘‘immaterial’’ beliefs is often the living—the local populations who visitthese centers, and the other ‘‘war machines’’ and great powers competingfor sovereignty on contested land. Nevertheless, in many of the recentattacks on Sufi shrines in Southeast Asia, especially in Kashmir and Paki-stan—where over fifty shrines have been attacked (such as those of Rah-man Baba,32 Sakhi Sarwar, Shaykh Nisa Baba, and Shaykh BahadurBaba)—visitors to the shrines have also been massacred along with thebuildings.33 While no Malians died in the shrine attacks in Timbuktu, theattacks in Mali received much more media attention than deadly shrineattacks in Southeast Asia—where Sufi slaughters have not yet promptedany calls for military intervention.

While the internationalization of these attacks on Sufi spaces may atfirst glance suggest conformity of message or intent, attacks on Sufi heri-tage often come coded, like suicide bombings, with different motivationsand agendas. For instance, an attack on the Sakhi Sarwar shrine in Punjab,which killed 41 people, was explicitly framed as an act of revenge by Ehsa-nullah Ehsan, the Taliban’s spokesman, for a government offensive againstmilitants in Pakistan’s northwest province.34 Further, in a video in whichmembers of Ansar al Sharia (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s politicalfront) demolish Sufi tombs in Yemen,35 senior AQAP official IbrahimSuleiman al Rubaish states, ‘‘So, just as they [the mujahideen] fought

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democracy and representative councils which make laws alongside Allah,they are destroying the domes which are being worshipped other thanAllah, along with the graves and mausoleums, which people try to get closeto other than Allah the Great and Almighty.’’36 The conflation of the fightagainst democracy and Sufism is another common symptom found in thestrategic and perverted logic of suicide bombing.

Receiving almost as much attention as the destruction of the shrines inMali was the erroneous report by multiple media outlets on 29 January2012 that Islamist extremists fleeing the French and Timbuktu had torchedthe Ahmed Baba Institute—a state of the art archival, conservation andresearch facility containing tens of thousands of historic Medieval manu-scripts on subjects as diverse as math, physics, chemistry, astronomy, medi-cine, history, botany, and geography.37 Just as artifacts like the Buddhas ofBamiyan or the Sufi shrines of Mali have been framed as being in need of‘‘rescue’’ by the media and cultural heritage experts, the texts of thelibraries of Timbuktu were similarly discussed in terms usually reserved for‘‘bodies’’ in danger. For instance, Samuel Sidibe, the director of Mali’sNational Museum, appealed to the Red Cross to evacuate the manu-scripts38—yet the Red Cross refused. Though the sensationalized mediacoverage claimed that tens of thousands of these manuscripts—written inArabic, Songhai, Tamashek, and Bambara—had been destroyed, and whilethousands were lost, no entire library or collection was torched.39 An esti-mated 285,000 manuscripts were evacuated to Bamako.40 Nevertheless, themedia’s misreportage—whether intentional or not—revealed a hysteriaabout the susceptibility of the written word itself to terror. In the complexinterplay of necropolitics and postcolonial landscapes, susceptibility to tor-ture and death by terror is projected not only on to the living/dead, body/spirit, and material/immaterial, but also onto the inanimate and writ-ten—where meaning, materiality, and heritage can also be contested andcombatted.

While cultural heritage is almost always a casualty of war, it is onlywhen such destruction is placed under the banner of Islam—especially as aprelude to foreign military intervention—that it garners widespread inter-national attention and outrage. If cultural heritage is damaged by dronesor in the digging of military trenches, it is framed as collateral damage, butif it is framed as a target or a victim of religious ideology, its damage islamented in the nightly news, and it becomes a rallying cause for globalconsternation. Recognizing that war is the greatest threat of all to culturalheritage, UNESCO, in anticipation of military operations in Mali, providedthe topographic features relative to the location of World Heritage Sites tothe General Staffs of the French military, and disseminated individual bro-chures and information for soldiers, the police and aid workers—to pre-vent further damage to Mali’s cultural heritage.41 Director-General of

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UNESCO, Irina Bokova, asked all armed forces to respect the Hague Con-vention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of ArmedConflict of 195442 and also mobilized UNESCO’s Emergency Fund forfuture operations related to the assessment, rehabilitation, and reconstruc-tion of destroyed relics. As was the case in Afghanistan, the military inter-vention in Mali was linked very closely in rhetoric to the necessity ofpreserving Mali’s cultural heritage against extremists, as illustrated in Bok-ova’s observations that the ‘‘destruction of World Heritage Sites in Mali in2012, especially the mausoleums in Timbuktu, sparked a wave of indigna-tion across the world, helping to raise awareness of the critical situationfacing the Malian people’’ and ‘‘the current military intervention must pro-tect people and secure the cultural heritage of Mali.’’43 In this recent‘‘iconoclash’’ (Latour 2002) in Mali, we must wonder if, like in the case ofthe Bamyian Buddhas, there were other political, ideological, existential, oreconomic ‘‘messages’’ attached to the destruction of these Sufi shrineswhich were not shared or translated in the media—since virtually none ofthe articles covering the destruction included any statements from the per-petrators of the violence.

Readings of heritage which strip the material of meaning, value, andhistoricity arouse a strong sense of threat to so-called ‘‘universal’’ conven-tions about what has value and what ‘‘heritage’’ is worth preserving.44 Thetendency in the media and by cultural preservationists—especially in thecase of Sufi shrine destruction in Mali—to frame competing notions ofmateriality and the ‘‘value’’ of heritage as not just different but inherentlywrong has produced reductive analyses that overemphasize the moraldimension of these attacks in an attempt to protect and assert the ‘‘appro-priate’’ and ‘‘acceptable’’ relationship between the material and immate-rial—which is assumed to be stable and universal. Thus, what is often atstake in these rallies for heritage protection is not just heritage preserva-tion, but self-preservation—of what it ‘‘means’’ to have a body and soul.When already dead ‘‘bodies’’ and shrines are destroyed, what is also attack-ed—for those who believe that cultural heritage has universal significanceand meaning—is the notion of what it means to have a contained ‘‘mate-rial’’ body and to have that body respected after death. Thus, these attackstrigger an emotional, visceral, and terrorized response—bordering on thehysteric—because they rupture so-called universal notions about the sanc-tity and sovereignty of the body and spirit.

Conclusion

As Sufi shrines are being destroyed across the Muslim world, we mustponder what made the Mali case unique and deserving of all the media

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attention it received. Was it the scale of the attacks on cultural heritage inTimbuktu, valorized by the assignation of ‘‘outstanding universal value’’through the World Heritage label, or does the destruction of cultural prop-erty in the context of wider armed conflict serve as a convenient rallyingcry for a military incursion? If so, will this pretext—the destruction of cul-tural property and specifically Sufi shrines—be used for further militaryaction in North Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia? While think tankslike Rand Corporation (Rabasa et al. 2007), the Nixon Center (Baran2004) and Carnegie (Olcott 2007) have been urging US policymakers foryears to support Sufism as an antidote to ‘‘extremist’’ Islam by offering aidto support the construction of Sufi places of learning, the publication ofSufi materials, and the renovation of Sufi shrines, it appears that the per-ceived alignment of US policy interests with Sufism has backfired—withmany Sufis having been placed directly in the line of fire.

The dead and their memorials, as markers and containers of religious,national, cultural, and intellectual heritage, are easy and involuntary pawnsfor multiple sides to claim sovereignty, terrorize the living, attack ideology,and justify military action. When battlegrounds are hidden among andeven within the dead, the ‘‘dead’’ are inscribed with meaning not only forcultural heritage preservationists and the believers who visit them for bless-ings—but also by those who consider them heretics and ready-made weap-ons—to combat perceived ‘‘imperialism’’ and display ideological andpolitical affiliations with outside actors in related conflict zones. While thedestruction of shrines in Mali as privileged centers of spiritual access to thesouls of Sufi saints was, in effect, a rejection of both the material natureand immaterial essence of the shrine, it was also a necropolitical responserelated to other postcolonial deathscapes which have been shaped by thenecropolitical acts of foreign armies and roving ‘‘war machines’’ in placeslike Libya. Much like suicide terrorism, ‘‘sacrificial’’ terrorism that targetsheritage serves as an act of necropower against the state, as an act of resis-tance against the necropolitics of foreign intervention, and as an existentialattack against the perceived power of the already dead—and even deathitself. Waging war on the already dead attacks the heritage of the past, ter-rorizes the psyches of the living in the present, and restricts the rituals ofthe future.

As the number of conflicts involving non-state actors and ‘‘culturcide’’is growing, international treaties like the Hague Convention that bind onlystate actors are failing to protect cultural and religious heritage—especiallyin Africa, where massacres on the body have an especially disturbing his-tory and momentum. With nothing legally enforceable standing in the wayof these attacks on Sufi heritage, these attacks, sadly, will likely continue,for what is at stake is not just a battle of religious ideologies—but a battleover sovereignty, meaning and materiality within a landscape whose

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borders are porous and central governments weak. As the case in Maliillustrates, shrines, corpses, and texts serve as convenient weapons withwhich to attack unwanted regimes, terrorize local populations, protest for-eign intervention, and repudiate materiality. It is essential that instead ofdismissing these atrocious attacks on cultural heritage as ‘‘barbaric’’ orframing the destruction of material culture as merely as an extremist inter-pretation of Islamic law ‘‘gone wrong,’’ that archeologists and anthropolo-gists engage in more nuanced discussions regarding the relationship ofnecropolitics, (im)materiality, postcolonialism, terrorism and the body tounderstand the internationalization of these debates in places as diverse asMali, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Dagestan,45 Kashmir, and Pakistan.

Notes

1. UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova said in a statement: ‘‘The currentmilitary intervention must protect people and secure the cultural heritage ofMali’’ (14 January 2013), http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/la_directrice_generale_de_lunesco_exhorte_les_forces_militaires_a_proteger_les_sites_culturels_au_mali_lors_des_raids_aeriens_et_interventions_terrestres/#.Un_ezrTH0cg (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

2. ‘UNESCO expert mission evaluates damage to Mali’s cultural heritage’ (7June 2013), http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/resources/unesco-expert-mission-evaluates-damage-to-malis-cultural-heritage (last accessed on 10November 2013).

3. ‘Timbuktu’s destruction: Why Islamists are wrecking Mali’s cultural heritage’(2 July 2012, I. Tharoor), http://world.time.com/2012/07/02/timbuktus-destruction-why-islamists-are-wrecking-malis-cultural-heritage/#ixzz2fLqY6Qws(last accessed on 10 November 2013).

4. ‘Mali Islamists destroy saint’s tomb’ (29 September 2012), http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hnZQviybTo8ZpXGXswix5_Y0z74A?docId=CNG.a551c28ad49b39e82248ee4f3ed7d4fc.471 (last accessed on 10November 2013).

5. ‘ICC Prosecutor opens investigation into war crimes in Mali: ‘‘The legalrequirements have been met. We will investigate’ (16 January 2013), http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/press%20and%20media/press%20releases/news%20and%20highlights/Pages/pr869.aspx (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

6. Mbembe based his concept of necropolitics on Michel Foucault’s critique of‘‘sovereignty’’ and its relation to war and biopower in Il faut defendre la soci-ete: Cours au College de France, 1975–1976, Seuil, Paris, pp. 37–55, 75–100,125–48, 213–44.

7. ‘The crisis in Mali: A historical perspective on the Tuareg people’ (1 February2013, Devon DB), http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-crisis-in-mali-a-historical-perspective-on-the-tuareg-people/5321407 (last accessed on 10 November2013).

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8. ‘The danger in the desert’ (26 January 2013), http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21570720-terrorism-algeria-and-war-mali-demonstrate-increasing-reach-islamist-extremism (last accessed 10 November 2013).

9. Of course, not all Tuareg are in support of separatism, as illustrated by anonline petition signed by a number of Tuaregs in Mali which states: ‘‘Wehave been, remain, and will always be full-fledged Malians.’’ Seehttps://www.lapetition.be/en-ligne/Nous-Touareg-Maliens-12542.html (lastaccessed 10 November 2013).

10. ‘Mali’s tomb raiders’ (8 July 2012, B.F. Soares), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/opinion/timbuktus-tomb-raiders.html?_r=0 (last accessed10 November 2013).

11. ‘Timbuktu training site shows terrorists’ reach (1 February 2013, D. Hin-shaw), http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323926104578278030474477210 (last accessed 10 November 2013).

12. This Malian Islamist group formed in 2012 is led by Iyad Ag Ghali. See‘Iyad Ag Ghaly - Mali’s Islamist leader’ (11 July 2012, S. Metcalf),http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18814291 (last accessed 10 Novem-ber 2013).

13. ‘Islamist militants in Mali continue to destroy shrines’ (01 July 2012),http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/world/africa/militants-in-mali-continue-to-destroy-shrines-of-sufi-saints.html (last accessed 10 November 2013).

14. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) is a Tuareggroup that launched its offensive in northern Mali in January 2012. It uni-laterally declared the independence of ‘‘Azawad’’ on 6 April 2012 and thensplintered into a number of different groups. It signed a ceasefire with thecentral government on 18 June 2013 that was then subsequently broken. See‘Tuareg rebels rejoin peace process in northern Mali’ (5 October 2013, D.Flynn and P. Cooney), http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-05/news/sns-rt-us-mali-rebels-20130929_1_kidal-mnla-azawad (last accessed 10 Novem-ber 2013).

15. ‘Mali’s Tuareg rebellion: What next?’(20 March 2013, J. Keenan),http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123208133276463.html(last accessed 11 November 2013).

16. ‘Libya officials seem helpless as Sufi shrines are vandalized’ (28 August 2012,D. D. Kirkpatrick), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/world/africa/in-libya-extremists-vandalize-sufi-shrines-with-impunity.html (last accessed 11 Novem-ber 2013).

17. ‘Director-General of UNESCO urges respect for the preservation of WorldHeritage site of Timbuktu (Mali) (5 April 2012), http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/director_general_of_unesco_urges_respect_for_the_preservation_of_world_heritage_site_of_timbuktu_mali/#.UoCe2I3rYcg (last accessed 10 November 2013).

18. In Mali, AQIM (Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb—which has been activein northern Mali for a decade) succeeded in accomplishing what no otheral-Qaeda franchise has done by temporarily ruling over a large sweep ofland of a sovereign country.

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19. See ‘‘‘A priceless heritage destroyed by Islamic barbarians’’: Atheist ProfessorDawkins outrages Muslims with comments over Mali extremists wreckinglibrary’ (31 January 2013, M. Duell), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271092/Richard-Dawkins-outrages-Muslims-comments-extremists-damaging-library.html (last accessed on 10 November2013).

20. See ‘Mali Islamists smash Timbuktu relics, plant mines’ (2 July 2012, S.Daniel), http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iI0RiR65hRnZ3euUCW6P56tzFolg?docId=CNG.6f878c182c6a436ae1afb52697286a56.2b1 (lastaccessed 11 November 2013).

21. For a discussion centered on the flow of materials between bodies, land-scapes and artifacts, see Ingold (2007).

22. Appadurai (1998), Taylor (1999), and Scott (2005) discuss how ontologicalspecific notions of ‘‘chaos’’ can be linked to uncontrollable ‘‘postcolonialethnic hybridity’’ (Appadurai 1998), ‘‘blocked bodies’’ (Taylor 1999), and‘‘body maps’’.

23. Sankoh trained in the guerrilla camps of Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya—wherehis companions included Charles Taylor, the president of neighboring Libe-ria accused of war crimes. After training in Libya, Sankoh returned to Libe-ria, where he took part in the early stages of the rebellion in 1990 thatbrought President Taylor to power. See ‘Foday Sankoh: The cruel rebel’ (30June 2003), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3110629.stm (last accessed on10 November 2013).

24. See Libya arms fueling conflicts in Syria, Mali and beyond: U.N. Experts’ (9April 2013, M. Nichols), http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/09/us-libya-arms-un-idUSBRE93814Y20130409 (last accessed on 11 November 2013).

25. This logic is related to the argument articulated by Martin Heidegger(1982), in which he suggests that a windmill allows for a more direct rela-tionship with ‘‘Being’’ than the hydroelectric power plant.

26. See ‘Mali conflict: ‘First suicide bombing’ in Gao’ (8 February 2013),http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21381379; ‘Suicide bomber attacksMali’s Timbuktu’ (31 March 2013), http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/03/2013331549692449.html; ‘Suicide bomber botches attack inMali’ (4 June 2013, T. Diallo and A. Diarra), http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/04/us-mali-bomber-kidal-idUSBRE95318L20130604 (all last accessedon 10 November 2013).

27. The link between suicide terrorism and cultural terrorism is not restrictedto the Sufi shrine context. For instance, the Taliban compared their destruc-tion of the Bamiyan Buddhas to the ‘‘sacrifice’’ and icon smashing acts ofAbraham; further, they aligned the timing of their destruction with Eid aludha—a holiday to commemorate when Abraham was ready to ‘‘sacrifice’’his son. Accordingly, the Taliban followed the dynamiting of the Buddhaswith a ‘‘sacrifice’’ of 100 cows—during a time of horrible famine. Neverthe-less, these symbolic and literal acts of ‘‘sacrifice’’ were completely ignored bythe western media (Elias 2007:20).

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28. In fact, the destruction of the shrine of Abdel Salam al-Asmar was cele-brated on a Facebook page called ‘Together for the Removal of the AbdelSalam al-Asmar Shrine’, which praised supporters of the ‘‘successful removalof the Asmar shrine, the largest sign of idolatry in Libya’’: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444230504577613260789607638 (lastaccessed 11 November 2013).

29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agHfAml18lI (last accessed 11 November2013).

30. ‘Arson attack sends Tunisia’s Sidi Bou Said mausoleum up in smoke’ (15January 2013, Y. Seddik), http://observers.france24.com/tunisia-sidi-bous-said-mausoleum-fire-destructino-salafists-radical-islamists-ben-ali-touenza-wahhabis (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

31. ‘Egyptian extremism sees Salafis attacking Sufi mosques’ (11 April 2011, I.al-Alawi), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/salafis-attack-sufi-mosques (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

32. ‘Revisiting Rahman Baba’s shrine’ (26 June 2010, S. Imtiaz), http://tribune.com.pk/story/23782/revisiting-rahman-babas-shrine (last accessed on 10November 2013).

33. ‘Pakistan Sufi shrine attack kills 41’ (3 April 2011), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12951923 (3 April 2011) and ‘Extremists pulldown two shrines in Khyber’ (11 December 2011, I. Firdous), http://tribune.com.pk/story/304941/attacking-spirituality-extremists-pull-down-two-shrines-in-khyber (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

34. ‘41 killed in Sakhi Sarwar shrine blasts’ (4 April 2011), http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011/04/04/story_4-4-2011_pg1_1 (lastaccessed 10 November 2013).

35. The al Ja’dani shrine in al Tareyyah was attacked, in addition to shrines inthe villages of Al Tareyyah, Al Darjaj, and Sayhan near Jaar in Abayan prov-ince.

36. This video was posted by the Arabic-language al-Madad News Agency (towatch the video, see: http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/06/aqap_destroys_shrine.php) (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

37. See, for example, ‘Ahmed Baba library in Timbuktu torched by Islamists inpictures’ (28 January 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2013/jan/28/ahmed-baba-library-torched-islamist-pictures (last accessed on10 November 2013).

38. ‘Scrolls under threat’ (6 October 2012), http://www.economist.com/node/21564266 (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

39. ‘From Timbuktu, reports that most manuscripts were saved’ (30 January2013, G. Myre), http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/30/170680222/from-timbuktu-reports-that-manuscripts-have-been-saved and ‘Asextremists invaded, Timbuktu hid artifacts of a Golden Age’’ (3 February2013, L. Polgreen), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/world/africa/saving-timbuktus-priceless-artifacts-from-militants-clutches.html?_r=0 (last accessedon 10 November 2013).

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40. ‘How Timbuktu’s manuscripts were smuggled to safety’ (3 June 2013, N.Kottoor), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22704960 (last accessed on11 November 2013).

41. ‘The Director-General of UNESCO urges military forces to protect culturalsites in Mali during air raids and ground interventions’ (14 January 2013),http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/la_directrice_generale_de_lunesco_exhorte_les_forces_militaires_a_proteger_les_sites_culturels_au_mali_lors_des_raids_aeriens_et_interventions_terrestres/#.Uj2hxCTrYcg (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

42. http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13637&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (last accessed 11 November 2013).

43. ‘The Director-General of UNESCO urges military forces to protect culturalsites in Mali during air raids and ground interventions’ (14 January 2013),http://www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/la_directrice_generale_de_lunesco_exhorte_les_forces_militaires_a_proteger_les_sites_culturels_au_mali_lors_des_raids_aeriens_et_interventions_terrestres/#.Uj2hxCTrYcg (last accessed on 10 November 2013).

44. Works such as Foucault (2002) have demonstrated historical shifts in theways that people throughout history have conceptualized materiality, andhow power determines what forms are privileged as categories—or dis-courses—while others are left neglected.

45. ‘Murder of leading Dagestani cleric signals deepening crisis in Sufi hierar-chy’ (8 August 2013, M. Vatchagaev, Eurasia Daily Monitor 10 (147),http://www.ecoi.net/local_link/255216/366709_en.html (last accessed 11November 2013).

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