Until a few weeks ago, Al Farouk, the patron djinn of Timbuktu, protected the ancient city in northern Mali. For centuries, from astride a winged horse in center of the city, the stone genie kept watch over the houses so that children didn’t sneak out at night. Legend had it that if Al Farouk caught you getting up to anything naughty, he’d warn you the first two times. If he nabbed you a third time, you’d disappear forever.

Now Al Farouk has disappeared. On June 30, days after UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, placed the city of Timbuktu on its list of endangered historical sites, Al Farouk’s statue was beheaded by a man called Abu Zaar. “People thought Al Farouk was the saint protector of the city,” he told French television. Abu Zaar belongs to Ansar al Dine, Defenders of the Faith, a militant group that recently seized control of Northern Mali and has aligned itself with Al Qaeda’s main franchise in Africa, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Abu Zaar said, “There’s only one protector. That’s us.”

Over the past two weeks, men in open jeeps with fluttering black flags have rolled up on many of Timbuktu’s 333 holy sites and taken pick axes to the ancient mud-hewn shrines. Since the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, Timbuktu’s holy sites are the first UNESCO World Heritage Sites to be systematically destroyed. This parallel is no accident. Like their Afghan precursors who aimed at erasing Buddhism’s long history in Afghanistan, the members of Ansar al Dine claim that decimating many the holy sites of Timbuktu is a matter of religious “cleansing.” Knocking down mud walls is their way to wipe Sufi religious history off of the African continent.

Destroying rival gods is nothing new. The ancient Romans called the practice damnatio memoriae. A new emperor would lop off the heads of his divine predecessor’s statues or re-carve the nose or chin on a face to reflect his own. This was, at its roots, a turf battle over power, and that’s what’s happening in Mali right now, where Ansar al Dine is one of several rival groups that has seized control of the north. Ansar al Dine considers Sufi Islam illegitimate because it involves the veneration of saints, as well as singing and dancing. Most Sufis, who make up the majority of Africa’s nearly 500 million Muslims, see it differently. They view their ecstatic prayers as authentic in contrast to what many call “Arabized Islam,” the newly imported and militant form of the faith that has gained ground in Africa, as elsewhere, over the past several decades.

This struggle reflects the complicated bid within Islam today over who is a legitimate believer and who isn’t—a clash within that is increasingly influential in determining the religious future of the world’s nearly two billion Muslims. Yet for Ansar Dine, which currently controls a region just shy of the size of Texas in northern Mali, Sufis are really just the means to create a public relations coup. Destroying tombs, flogging inadequately veiled women, imposing an arbitrary hudud, the Islamic criminal code—all of these actions are tools in their bid to grab the world’s attention, to identify with the putative glories of other international Islamist movements (including Al Qaeda), and in so doing, prove the reach of their own global power.