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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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