Today marks the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. What does this anniversary tell us about attacks on images in the post-Bamiyan world, and the relationship of these attacks to both religious and political conflict? In this brief piece, I will attempt to put the relationship into context, comparing events ten years ago in Bamiyan to other subsequent acts of Islamist image-breaking, and will ask whether such acts can be categorized as a singular type of contemporary iconoclasm, interpretable through the often-used label of “Wahhabism.”

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