The Destruction of Modern Muslim Shrines
by Fundamentalist Movements
Esmael Mayar and David Damrel
Introduction
What is Islam, and how should Muslims practice their faith?
Although answers to these questions might at first seem direct and
obvious, over the last 25 years sectarian conflict between various Muslim
groups worldwide has shown how complex and contested this question
really is. For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, different Muslim
communities have been engaged in intensifying controversies centered on
exactly who has the authority to define the “true” nature of Islam and
proper Muslim life (El Fadl 2007). In the late 1980s certain Islamic
“fundamentalist” groups (more properly called Islamist) began more and
more to forcibly condemn and act against what they consider un-Islamic
behavior within Muslim communities. These mostly Sunni –oriented
groups particularly targeted Muslim customs and traditions connected with
the shrines, tombs, and graves of holy men and women (Damrel 2012).
Many of these tombs and practices are related to Sufism (Islamic
mysticism) and Shi’ism, a minority religious tradition representing up to
15% of the global Muslim population. As a result, over the last three
decades many Sufi and Shi’i sacred spaces have faced growing criticism
and even physical attack from certain Islamist groups.
When the USSR left Afghanistan in 1989, different Islamist groups
across the Muslim world such as the Taliban in Afghanistan along with alQaida and similar groups in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Mali,
Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Somalia and Indonesia, became more active (Rashid
2001). Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been a correlation
between this increased Islamist activity and a general rise in violent attacks
on Shi’i and Sufi shrines across the Muslim world, presumably related to
an Islamist anti-shrine agenda.
This study gathered accounts of these incidents and created a
database that categorized the shrines (their name, type and location), the
date/s of the attack, the groups involved when known, and other significant
information. The database also recorded the source of the gathered
information. It is hoped that this data will contribute to a larger project to
help survey and investigate the impact of Islamist thought and activity
around the Muslim world.
Conclusion
University of South Carolina Upstate
Results
Through our research we were able to identify and categorize a total of 92 attacks on Sufi and
Shi’ite shrines post-1989 (Fig. 2, Table 1). The actual number of attacks on shrines is most likely
much higher; however, as many of many of these attacks were under-reported or not reported at all,
we were not able to include them in our database. It is worth noting that these attacks were not limited
to small, local shrines where there would be little resistance or global backlash. Many shrines of saints
with large national and international followings, in fairly populous regions, were targeted. For
instance, there were attacks (in some cases taking the lives of many worshippers) against the shrines
of Rahman Baba in Peshawar, Pakistan; Shaykh Shah Jalal in Sylhet, Bangladesh; El-Mursi Abul
Abbas in Alexandria, Egypt; Khwaja Mu’in al-din Chishti in Ajmer, India; Imam Ali al-Hadi and
Imam Hasan al-Askari in Samarra, Iraq; and Abdus-Salam al-Asmar in Zlitan, Libya. In addition to
this, we found no correlation between geographical location and the number of shrine attacks in a
country (Fig. 3).
Table 1. Frequency
of attacks per year
Year
Number of Events
1995
1
2004
2
2005
1
2006
4
2007
3
2008
2
2009
7
2010
4
2011
16
2012
40
2013
12
Total
92
The Shrine of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib in Mazar-i Sharif, AFGHANISTAN.
Source: Flickr
Scope of Study
Our study focused on shrine destruction events after 1989. We assumed
that the rise of certain Sunni Islamist groups energized by the defeat of the
Soviet Union and the beginning of civil war in Afghanistan in that year
would lead to new attacks on Sufi and Shi’i shrines. Our study was careful
to only document the efforts to destroy shrines specifically associated with
a ‘holy’ person. This meant that numerous attacks on mosques and other
sacred spaces were not included in this study unless the sites were
specifically connected to a Muslim Wali (‘Friend’ of Allah or ‘Saint’). In
terms of territory, our research examined the entire Muslim World (Fig. 1).
Figure 3. Relative number of shrine attacks in each country. Note the widespread dispersion of the attacks: there was no relationship between geographical
proximity of the countries and the number of shrine attacks that occurred within
them.
Spellings of Locations and Names
A multitude of spellings for locations, names, and groups involved in the
attacks appeared in English-language articles. To facilitate searching the
data, the database includes all the spellings encountered in journalistic
sources. We made no attempt to standardize the diverse spellings as there
is no universally accepted scheme for transliterating names into English
from words and names in Arabic, Farsi, Berber, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, and
other languages of the regions. As just one example, the name of the great
Muslim saint buried in Baghdad, Iraq is regularly rendered into English as
Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir Gilani and Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani and
Shaykh Abd al-Kadir Jeelani, depending on the source.
Identification of Groups Responsible
There is rarely solid evidence to indicate the involvement of a particular
group in an attack unless the group claims responsibility. Therefore the
GROUP RESPONSIBLE category of the database includes many “unknowns”
and incomplete identifications, such as “a group of radical Islamists
claimed to be Salafis.” Many of these attributions must be considered
tentative.
Social Context of the Attacks
Our database includes four social and political factors (weak economies,
poor infrastructure/security, active regional armed conflict, and the
strategic aims of extremist groups) that may indicate fruitful future
research areas connected to modern shrine attacks.
Mosque and tomb of el-Mursi Abul Abbas in
Alexandria, EGYPT. Source: Wikipedia
Popular poster depicting a
Muslim shrine in INDIA.
Source: David Damrel
We were able to identify a correlation between major events that occurred in a region and the
frequency of shrine attacks. This allowed us to group most destruction events into two broad time
periods: (1) the time of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and (2) during the “Arab Spring.” The
Afghanistan and Iraq war time period included events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, India, and
Bangladesh. The Arab Spring began in 2011 and included shrine attacks in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia,
Mali, Yemen, and Syria (Fig. 4). Attacks in Somalia, Iran, and Indian Kashmir did not easily fit into
either of these categories.
35
1,2
3,4,5
6
Table 2. Key events with dates
30
Number of Shrine Attacks
Sources Documenting Shrine Destruction
Major scholarly and journalistic sources were used to find data about the
various attacks. These sources were identified using major resources such
as Index Islamicus as well as online search engines and foreign language
sources in Farsi and Arabic. The uneven nature of online material required
us to create special rules governing these materials. A news account was
deemed reliable only if it came from a recognized news organization and
provided information on the name of the shrine, date of destruction,
location (city and country) and a short description of the attack against the
shrine. Even then, sources were viewed and reviewed critically to avoid
potential biases and misattributions. In some cases, data from several
sources was compiled to produce a composite account of an incident.
Shrine Images
Figure 2. Sites of shrine destruction. Due to overlapping, not all shrine
destruction events are shown. This figure demonstrates that numerous attacks
occurred in populous metropolitan areas such as Tripoli, Libya; Alexandria,
Egypt; Mazar-i Sharif, Afghanistan; Peshawar, Pakistan; Ajmer, India; and
Sylhet, Bangladesh.
Methods
Figure 1. World Muslim Population Distribution
Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2009)
The “crisis of authority” within modern Islam has intensified in the
last century and as a result Islamist groups with anti-shrine agendas have
become more active globally (El Fadl 2007). However, only recently have
these groups undertaken physical attacks against these historical and
sacred shrines on a large scale. Moreover, our research has shown that the
pace of Muslim shrine destruction has increased greatly within the past
decade.
Our findings suggest that even though Islamist groups began
organizing and taking shape in the 1990’s (Rashid 2001), it was not until
post-9/11 that shrines and worshippers began to be attacked physically.
This suggests that Islamist groups initiated a “civil war” that targeted other
Muslims based on their religious practices. While we were able to identify
92 shrine attacks, journalistic reports place the actual number of incidences
near 200. Muslim shrine attacks have increased dramatically in the past
decade, with no immediate end in sight. Future research might focus on the
social and political contexts of the attacks as well as on the ideological
convictions of the attackers.
Syria
Yemen
Mali
Tunisia
Libya
Egypt
Iraq
Bangladesh
India
Pakistan
Afghanistan
25
20
15
10
5
0
1
Event
Date
Wars in AFGHANISTAN
and IRAQ begin
Oct 2001 and
Mar 2003
2 U.S. Drone campaigns in
PAKISTAN near AFGHAN
border begin
Jun 2004
3 Ben Ali overthrown in
TUNISIA
Jan 2011
4 Hosni Mubarak rule ends
in EGYPT
Feb 2011
5 Muammar Gaddafi rule
ends in LIBYA
Aug-Oct
2011
6 Islamist rebels seize cities Jun 2012
in northern MALI
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Year
References
Figure 4. Frequency of shrine attacks by year for various countries that
were either in the Afghanistan and Iraq war or the Arab Spring category.
The numbers in the figure signify when key events occurred, listed in
Table 2. Though the shrine attacks occur, in some cases, right after the
key events, these events should not be taken as the sole causes of the
shrine attacks.
Abou El Fadl, Khaled. The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the
Extremists. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
The majority of the attacks on Sufi and Shi’ite shrines were carried out by Islamist groups,
(Fig. 5) and these incidents were included in the database. These identified Islamist groups ranged
from armed militias to unaffiliated “rogue” youth gangs that displayed limited Islamist connections
or orientations (Fig. 6). Although these attributions are included in the database, it is important to be
aware of the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the data due to conflicting narratives in many of the
primary sources.
Pakistani Taliban
2
7
2
25
Al Shabaab
7
14
"Salafis"
Islamists
Various Government Forces
62
3
11
4
3
13
1
Figure 5. Parties responsible for shrine destruction.
Damrel, David W. “Baraka Besieged: Islamism, Neofundamentalism and
Shared Sacred Space in South Asia,” in Muslims and Others in Sacred
Space. Ed. Margaret Cormack in the Religion, Culture and History Series
of the American Academy of Religion. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012.
Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in
Central Asia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.
The project database is available online at:
http://www.uscupstate.edu/religion
Unidentified Islamist militia
Unknown
Right-wing Hindu Groups
The photo above left depicts the grave of Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq in
his shrine in Misrata, LIBYA. The image above right shows the Wali’s
tomb after its destruction by an Islamist group in 2012.
Source: Omid Safi.
Ansar Dine
Movement for Oneness and
Jihad in West Africa
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula
Libyan militia
Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Figure 6. Breakdown of different Islamist groups
responsible for shrine attacks.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the University of South Carolina for providing
funding for this study through the Magellan Scholar Grant. We would
also like to thank Omid Safi for providing pictures of the destruction of
the Ahmad Zarruq shrine.