In recent years, iconoclastic incidents have taken place in various parts of the Islamic world and the discourse that has influenced these acts is also current in various Islamic communities in the West. In this chapter, we look at some of these events within both their local context and wider settings, focusing first at ISIS, and, in order to ensure comparative depth, we also take a look at iconoclastic incidents in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, North, West and East Africa, and parts of Asia.

Before we do so, it is only right and proper that we should emphasise that not all iconoclastic stances over the last century have been influenced by Wahhabism–Salafism. This was, for instance, certainly the case in the Soviet Union, where Sufi orders were considered to be primary enemies of the Communist state. The Soviet authorities quite rightly identified the Sufi orders as keepers of traditional religious order and as obstacles in the way of the full integration of their regions into the Soviet realm. A similar pattern was to be observed in the newly established republic of Turkey, where all Sufi orders were dissolved and visits to shrines – among other practices – were prohibited. Many of the shrines (ziyaret) of the numerous saints (evliya) were destroyed in the zealous secular republicanism of the 1930s and 1940s. Extreme antiSufism to some extent declined after the ending of the Republican People's Party rule in 1945. Several years later, tombs were reopened for pilgrimage purposes. Even then, however, Turkish Islam continued to devalue the role of the saints and to become increasingly mosque-centred. Due to modernist ideas, many Muslims started to scorn shrine visits and view faith in the power of saints as being inappropriate.