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BOOK
REVIEW
God's madmen
Suicide Bombers. Allah's New
Martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar
 Reviewed by
Sreeram Chaulia
The
specter of ghoulish suicide bombers shaking
normality in Iraq has re-ignited the question of
the motivations and intentions of martyrdom. Why
would any normal person want to blow him/herself
and others up in this macabre fashion? Iranian
intellectual Farhad Khosrokhavar's new book argues
that Muslim human bombs, far removed from
traditional atavism, are in fact products of
modernity and Westernization. They are extreme
forms of subjectivity that embrace violence and
death through a complex mental construction of the
modern world, not merely naive creatures
manipulated by a few masterminds.
Khosrokhavar starts with a basic
distinction between defensive and offensive
martyrdom. The former is non-violent defiance of
oppressors that ends in the agents of "evil"
putting the martyr to death. The latter is a
violent fight to annihilate the enemy, a
legitimate killing of the infidel in which course
the martyr could lose his life. The Muslim
shaheed differs from the Christian
martyros , who did not seek to inflict
death on Roman pagans. Physical violence against
enemies of Allah "has immense merit" and enough
justifications in Islam to "slay or be slain". (p
12)
Jihad has a theological foundation in
Islam, whereas "crusade" doesn't in Christianity.
Jihad can be waged to defend Islam against
repression (interpreted in its broadest sense) or
to ensure its expansion across the world. "On the
whole, Islamic thinkers reject the quietist and
mystical vision of jihad against the ego." (p 15)
Read independently, verse 29 of the Koran's
Repentance surah justifies all-out war on
non-Muslims. Da'wa, in the literal sense, forces
Islam on non-believers.
In Shi'ite
traditions, the militant martyrdom of Husain in
the battle of Karbala encourages the idea of a
fight to the death against injustice. Across Iraq,
Iran and Lebanon, young men who commit to
martyrdom humanize Husain and follow in his
footsteps. Hassan-i-Sabbah's Assassins (11th
century), who executed Islam's enemies before
forsaking their own lives, were followers of
Ismailism, a form of Shi'ism.
Morteza
Motahhari, an ideologue of the Iranian revolution
of 1979, lays down that "Islam's roots lie in the
joy of achieving martyrdom". Ali Shariati
declares, "Martyrdom is the heart of history. If
it is possible, kill the enemy. If that is not
possible, be prepared to die." (p 44) Besides
semantic continuity with the past, today's Shi'ite
martyrs have a suicidal dimension born from
despair at modern life's meaninglessness.
Influenced by media reports, they rely on
statistics of deaths caused on both sides of a war
to vindicate their actions.
In the Sunni
world, Pakistan's Maulana Maududi merges
deen (religion) and daula (power) by
stipulating holy war as the "dominant fundamental
principle of Islam" to be launched against those
who usurp Allah's rule (p 28). Destruction of
Satanic powers will herald Islam for the whole of
humanity. Syed Qutb of Egypt exhorts the true
Muslim to be heroic and inflexible in war and
sacrifice. For Muslims to fight Western
materialism and "bestial secularism", they must
overcome fear of their own weakness. To emerge
victorious and accept martyrdom, Muslims have to
develop honor and warrior virtues. Sheikh Omar
Abdul Rahman considers it a duty of Muslims to
fight idolatry and ignorance.
Candidates
for martyrdom in the Middle East, South Asia and
Maghreb are in search of dignity that will let
them escape insignificance and hurtful
inferiority. Radical Islam "guarantees a happy end
whereas life on earth is profoundly unhappy". (p
45) Be it Palestine, Chechnya or Kashmir, Muslims
suffer an "impossibility of being" that demands
blood. Martyrs of al-Qaeda are crisis-laden
individuals who live the obloquy of their
imaginary brethren vicariously, and globalize
death. Their sole ambition is to die and destroy
as many enemies as possible, watering the tree of
Islam that cries for blood.
The
ambivalence of Islamist ideologies - empowering
the mujahid and yet subordinating the individual -
destabilizes the martyrs' minds. They believe that
predecessors are waiting for them "on the other
side". Fascinated with the hateful enemy, homo
occidentalis, they demonstrate their own
superiority and purity in marrying death. Islam is
defined as the antithesis to Western hedonism and
perversion. Moderate Muslims are considered
Western lackeys or evildoers. Algeria's Armed
Islamic Group stresses the necessity of
eliminating traitors who shirk Islamic duties. To
overcome fear, martyrs subscribe to a vision that
Allah predetermined everyone's moment of death.
Murders and massacres are viewed as religious
rituals, "as extensions of the sacred act of
cutting a sheep's throat". (p 69) Modern martyrdom
debuted in an Iran traumatized by the anticlimax
of the revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq
in the 1980s. The Bassidji model of martyrdom made
sense to susceptible young men. Fearless and
utterly devoted to the revolution's leader,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the regime, they
competed with one another for martyrdom in the
mass guilt of having under-served Islam. Their
exaggerated puritanism and anti-social sense of
identity intimidated society. Holy death conveyed
ecstasy and effervescence to the necrophile
martyrs. Those who clung to life were blacklisted
as cowards. Khomeini's death in 1989 disintegrated
the Bassidji.
In Palestine, martyrdom is a
reaction against the paralytic nation-building of
secular organizations. Caught between Israel's
domination and the Palestinian Authority's greedy
dissolution, "martyrdom became a way of totalizing
life" during the al-Aqsa intifada. (p 111)
Sacrificing life for Islam is a way of showing the
mighty Israelis that they, too, are vulnerable.
Explosive living conditions in Gaza and the West
Bank give rise to an extremism that knows no fear.
"Death is a glorious escape from spatial and
economic confinement." (p 137) Hamas and Islamic
Jihad dehumanize Jews based on Islamic tenets of
impurity of other religions, easing ambiguity or
doubt. The feeling that God is on their side
drives some fedayeen to divorce themselves
from the original goals and treat "killing and
being killed as an end in itself". (p 140)
Coveting the reward of being with Allah,
the supply of martyrs far exceeds the demand in
Palestine. Not all of them are poor or refugees.
Khosrokhavar emphasizes that fedayeen are
not sacrificial victims whose consent is
manufactured. The lure of houris (virgins
from Paradise) is not a major goading factor for
these neo-ascetics who cultivate beards.
Between 1975 and the late 1980s, martyrdom
flourished in a Lebanon torn by Israeli invasion
and civil war. Designating the enemy's religion as
absolute evil, Hezbollah's martyrs destroyed the
"other" as a form of self-assertion. Holy death
was the fulfillment of a burning desire to meet
Allah after fighting the ungodly enemy.
Al-Qaeda's martyrs dream of a world-scale
umma (brotherhood of Muslims), especially
in the West. They affirm that the West must turn
to Islam to halt its own decline. Western
arrogance and humiliation by proxy pervade their
existence. Terror operations "give a new sense of
pride and restore lost dignity". (p 152) Western
love for life is termed a weakness that should be
exploited. Innocents can be killed "in the higher
interests of Islam". Homosexuality and loss of
male authority and virility enrage transnational
martyrs who are well educated and convinced that
Islam is being mistreated everywhere. "The idea
that Islam is in danger and must be saved has deep
roots" in their psychology and is juxtaposed with
a mythical age when the Prophet's banner was
triumphant.
Competition for centrality is
intense among harbingers of the neo-umma.
The Pakistani groups Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami and
Jaish-i-Mohammed try to outdo each other in
producing shaheeds for a "free Kashmir".
Heterogeneous terrorist groups also work together,
sharing the common need to fight for Islam.
Transforming "inauthentic Muslims" into authentic
zealots is one of the projects of such actors. The
Muslim soul has to be de-contaminated from
"Westoxication". Khosrokhavar establishes
fascistic tendencies in the determination to turn
the world away from kufr (heresy) so that
"nothing exists outside Allah". Having no concrete
referent but the Koran and the hadiths,
Hizb ul-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun, organizations
run mostly by British Pakistanis, press jihad into
service for establishing a caliphate in the West.
They are anti-Semitic, anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh,
anti-feminist and homophobic.
A category
of martyrs in the West is that of Christian
converts who submit to Islam due to its
non-avoidance of legitimate violence. To them,
radical Islam is "a new kind of Nietzscheanism" (p
215) Being martyred in jihad is a restitution of
sacredness to a Western society that lacks "noble
causes". Converted martyrs marry Muslim women who
are "more docile", thus boosting their
masculinity. To prove their affiliations,
proselytized jihadis like Wadi-al-Haj, Richard
Reid and John Walker Lindh are more bigoted than
born Muslims. They long to provoke Apocalypse
instead of remaining passive witnesses to its
constant postponement.
Diasporic martyrs
find it easier to overcome fear of death due to
their disillusionment with the cold, impersonal
life in Western mega-cities. Feelings that human
relations are vacuous and reality is evanescent
dominate their psyches. The unending crises of
atomization and urbanization are likely to
multiply the ranks of such disoriented jihadis.
"The future may witness mimetic generalization of
this form of holy death". (p 229) New training
grounds in Pakistan and Iranian Balochistan (for
Sunni martyrs) will keep this problematic
pathology alive, even if Afghanistan ceases to be
the blessed finishing school.
Khosrokhavar's psychoanalytical exegesis,
drawn from numerous interviews of hardcore
Islamists, is compulsory reading for persuasively
rationalizing the irrational actions that dot the
terrorist map of the 21st century. It provides
madness a much-deserved reason and context.
Suicide Bombers. Allah's New
Martyrs by Farhad Khosrokhavar. Pluto Press,
London, 2005. ISBN: 0-7453-2283-2. Price:
US$27.50, 258 pages.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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