What’s old is new…a sentiment aptly alluded to by Finbarr Barry Flood in his article Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum. In this article, while Flood does detail some historical instances of Islamic iconoclasm, or iconoclastic “moments”, he also takes great effort to highlight how many of the “rhetorical claims of image destruction have often been taken at face value, even when not borne out by archeological or art historical evidence”. Flood further highlights how it is not within Qur’anic scripture but within the Hadith that one may find the basis of Islamic opposition to figuration–primarily in “not usurping divine creative powers” or falling into the trap of idolatry. As such, figural imagery has found mixed acceptance within Islamic circles, who’ve tended to favour epigraphic or vegetal ornamentation, often referred to as aniconic, given the absence of representation of either sentient beings or gods. An Abrahamic faith, the God of Islam (Allah) cannot be represented or contained within figurative imagery or graven idol. Old arguments allege that an any idol or icon may be confused for something more than its materials and, subsequently, worshiped. The inspiring awestruck moment when one encounters deep art indeed has a transformative quality not unlike one’s encounter with sacred space or ritual. The only means of rendering such figural images as impotent, Flood argues, is to either recontextualize them or to decapitate them, “so that they become inanimate, that is, devoid of a soul“. Likewise, mutilation or defacing of an image appears to be an adequate substitute for decapitation. Flood also makes it clear that even those elements symbolic of the divine, such as the Christian cross or the Muslim minbar, might be seen viable targets for desecration or destruction. The crux here, no pun intended, seems to be the prohibition against confusing any object or representation with the divine–that is, prohibition against idolatry. Destruction did not always mean obliteration, often serving as code within Medieval texts for the “transformation” of a site’s previous architecture, monuments, or statuary–with eyes scratched out or heads removed. It was, therefore, “essential to render the image powerless, to remove from them their consecrated contexts”. This point, from Andre Wink, highlights the danger associated with images that might serve as vessel for either “quasimagical powers” or “evil or malevolent spirits”. The Bamiyan Buddhas and their contemporaries no doubt suffered from iconoclastic “moments” well before the modern era. It should be noted that iconoclastic impulses are not the strict providence of Islam and that many works formerly imbued with deep religious significance has been recontextualized and reconfigured as art–objects for sale, divorced from their ritual past. This view, common when encountering ancient traditions no longer extant–such as the mystery cults of ancient Greece, Rome, or the Near Middle East–sees such figural or cultic images as deanimated not by way of defacement or decapitation but by way of the divide encountered when time and shifting belief have rendered such icons impotent of their former ritual significance. The question begs itself: “When does an object lose its religious significance?” A further question might be: “In the face of action clearly in violation of customary law, international law, and the laws of armed conflict–whereby cultural icons are willfully destroyed as spectacle–how do we best protect our shared cultural history?” One need only look to the bombing of Monte Cassino, the former home of the Benedictine Order, during World War II to see how dramatically current events in the modern world are risking the irretrievable loss of religious heritage. Moving forward one might look at the bombing of Bagdad in 2003, and the looting of the Bagdad Museum. Wholesale destruction of icons and historical treasures need not be acts of iconoclasm or be motivated by harmful religious intent–they are often the result of careless expedience and a willful disregard of accepted law.