"Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living."
(Murder in the Cathedral,
by T.S. Eliot)
Here is the oath of a clan of highway robbers
of Islamic tradition in the Caucuses: "At midnight the robber steals
into the mosque and prays: 'I swear, in the name of the holy place
in which I am now and which I respect, that from this day forward I
will be an outcast. I want to shed human blood and not have mercy on
anyone. I will hunt down people. I swear to plunder from them all
that is dear to their heart, their conscience and their honor. I
will impale an infant on his mother's breast, I will set ablaze the
last hiding place of the beggar, and wherever happiness prevailed
until now I will bring trouble and anxiety. If I do not fulfill this
vow, if love or mercy turn my heart, may I never see my father's
grave again, may water no longer slake my thirst and food never
satisfy my hunger. May my body be thrown by the side of the road and
a dirty dog relieve himself on it."
(From Kurban Said's
masterpiece "Ali and Nino - a Love Story," originally published in
1937. Said was a Jewish writer from Azerbaijan who converted to
Islam.)
In recent years Prof. Emmanuel Sivan, an historian
and expert on the Middle East from the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, has been consulted by politicians in Israel who examined
possible steps to take against Palestinian suicide bombers. One of
the questions that crops up from time to time in the discussions is
whether, if the potential bomber knows that he will be buried in
pigskin, will this cause him to abandon his attack because he will
not enter heaven as a shahid (martyr).
"This is arrant
nonsense," Sivan replies when asked this question. The British
government, he says, tried a ploy of this kind during the revolt
fomented by the Mahdi movement in Sudan against British colonial
rule in the 1870s. It was during this war that Muslim suicide
bombers first appeared. The pigskin burial tactic was successful
there because it encompassed fears and beliefs that no longer exist
today. Suicide attackers reappeared in the Muslim revolt against the
British in Malaya (now Malaysia) in the 1950s. The British again
tried the pigskin ploy, but this time without success - suicide
attacks continued. The weapon of suicide was used again in the
bloody war between Iran and Iraq that raged through most of the
1980s. The ayatollahs in Iran recruited children to the
Revolutionary Guards and sent them into the Iraqi minefields to
dismantle them. Chains were placed around the necks of the children
on which hung a key to the gates of paradise. Thousands of children
were killed brutally in this way and were known as the "children of
the keys."
"It was a mass phenomenon of brainwashing, a poor
man's kamikaze," Prof. Sivan says. "But it produced an impressive
result. The fact is, this act of sacrifice frightened the Iraqis."
Shahids appeared also in 1990s Algeria where it was used in the
revolt against the ruling secular authorities blocking the Islamic
movement from coming to power. About 100,000 people were killed in
the civil strife that lasted for nine years.
There are, of
course, other examples of the use of suicide attackers by Muslims in
the course of recent decades. The most famous and devastating of
them was the suicide attack by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida
organization against New York and Washington last September 11.
Stacked deck
There are two striking cases in
which suicide attackers have been used in battle or for terrorist
attacks by non-Islamic cultures. The best-known case was the
Japanese kamikaze (divine wind) bombers toward the end of World War
II. Japanese pilots on suicide missions steered their
explosives-packed planes into American warships to explode on their
decks. Some 2,000 kamikaze attacks destroyed about 35 ships.
Using kamikaze pilots was an act of desperation, says Prof.
Jacob Raz, from the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv
University. The Japanese resorted to this weapon when they had
effectively lost control of the Pacific theater and defeat was only
a matter of time. The kamikaze phenomenon is a modern one, Raz says.
The term "divine wind" was the name of a typhoon that destroyed the
fleet of the Mongolians when they tried to mount an invasion of
Japan in the thirteenth century.
Raz says: "It is not clear
whether there is a direct connection between the samurai, a
phenomenon that ended in the nineteenth century, and the kamikaze.
The kamikaze took root in a period when total madness reigned in
Japan. However, there was no religious aspect to it - it was the
result of mere political brainwashing." In any event, and whether by
chance or not, the kamikaze phenomenon took place in a culture that
embraced hara-kiri, suicide by cutting the stomach. Suicide of this
kind was characteristic of the samurai tradition, enabling the
samurai warrior to end his life honorably after a major failure or
falling into disgrace.
The second major use of suicide
attackers occurred as part of the struggle launched by the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam against the central government of
Sri Lanka. In the past 15 years the Tamil Tigers have used terrorist
attacks and suicide missions against senior figures in the
government. The conflict in Sri Lanka has religious, national and
linguistic aspects. The Tamils are Hindus, like the overwhelming
majority of the population in nearby India. They are a minority in
Sri Lanka - most of the people of the island state formerly known as
Ceylon are Sinhalese and follow Buddhist teachings. In their
struggle the Tamils did not balk at attacking targets of the Indian
government, which supports the Sinhalese regime. It was a Tamil
woman suicide bomber who in 1991 killed Indian prime minister Rajiv
Ghandi.
Engraved on the monument to Dov Gruner - a member of
the pre-state Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), who
was executed by the British Mandate government in 1947 - are the
words of the founder of the Irgun, David Raziel: "Those who are
about to die establish the homeland."
Is it possible to find
a common denominator of any sort between the shahids and the members
of other religions who displayed readiness and even a desire to
sacrifice their life for one cause or another?
According to
Prof. Sivan, they do have something in common: "In almost all cases,
these are `walking dead' people." Sivan developed this analysis in
the spirit of the concept of psychologists in Algeria who coined the
term "conditionally dead" to describe the suicide bombers in their
country.
"They live with a sense of despair and act out of
existential despair," Sivan continues. "Dov Gruner was a classic
example of a walking dead man. In his perception, the world of
civilization did not exist. He was a Holocaust survivor who had been
granted an extension of life. Gruner belonged to a group of Irgun
and Lehi [Israel Freedom Fighters, another pre-state group that
fought the British] activists whom the British intended to execute
(though in the end most of them were spared) and who at the moment
of truth refused to ask for amnesty.
Were they depressives?
No, but a significant number of them were like Gruner, young people
who had just survived the Holocaust and who were burning with a
tremendous urge to take revenge. But at the same time they felt they
were alive by chance so their readiness to risk their lives for a
cause that they considered sublime was extremely high.
"In
general, these are people who, even if not suicidally inclined on a
personal basis, are seized by a sense of perdition. In the
overwhelming majority of cases, we can see these are persecuted
people from the margins of society. They live on borrowed time, on
the assumption that their lives will be short in any case.
Therefore, they are willing to take risks and even make suicidal
decisions. The same principle is valid, of course, for those who are
ready to sacrifice their lives in all religions and all periods,
without exception."
Shahid master
What would
the prophet Mohammed say about the fact that today's shahids are
young Muslims whose suicide entails the murder of innocent women,
children and men? Would he be shocked to the depths of his soul and
order an immediate halt to this form of killing, or would he
perhaps, like the current Muslim spiritual leadership, encourage the
continuation of the bloodbath? Scholars and researchers who
specialize in ancient cultures and religions have looked for a
historical precedent for the acts of murder committed by the current
wave of Palestinian suicide bombers. They have found nothing similar
in ancient Islam. "I find no precedent for these actions in the
history of Islam," says Prof. Etan Kohlberg from the Department of
Arabic Language and Literature in the Institute of Asian and African
Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"At the same
time, I am loath to guess what the prophet Mohammed would have said
about the phenomenon. It is impossible to rule out a possibility
that he would approve acts of cruelty - Muslims carried out many
acts of cruelty against Jews. In 627, with the authorization of
Mohammed, Muslims massacred all the members of the Quraysh Jewish
tribe in the city of Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. Justifying the
action, Mohammed maintained that everyone in the tribe had forged an
alliance with his enemies. Therefore, the whole tribe was
blameworthy. However, it is clear that there is a difference between
that event and the events we are seeing today."
Prof.
Kohlberg is considered one of the leading experts in the study of
the martyr phenomenon in the Muslim religion. He is the author of
the entry "Shahid" in the new and revised edition of the
Encyclopedia of Islam.
In the years 623-625 Mohammed had a
series of revelations, in part against the backdrop of the Battle of
Uhud (625), in which opponents of the prophet did battle with his
forces. According to one of the traditions, the souls of the
warriors who were killed in the fighting ascended to heaven, where
they discovered the delights that awaited them. They asked leave to
tell the earthly warriors what they had found so that those going
into battle would not be afraid. According to another tradition, 72
virgins await the shahid in paradise.
Thus Muslims first
became familiar with the phenomenon of the shahada - the death of
holy men. In the Koran, the word shahid (plural: shuhadaa) appears
with the meaning of "witness": "That Allah may know / Those that
believe, / And that He may take / To Himself from your ranks /
Martyr-witnesses (to Truth)" - that is, those who died a holy death
(Surah 3: Al Imran, in Abdullah Yusuf Ali, "The Meaning of the Holy
Qur'an," revised edition, 1989).
Kohlberg, in an article on
the subject, notes that Muslim scholars construed the word "shahid"
to mean that God and the angels were witnesses to the fact that the
person in question was deserving of a place in paradise. Or, in
another interpretation, it meant God would be witness to the fact
that his intentions were good and pure.
The master of the
shahids is Hamza, the prophet's uncle. According to one tradition,
Hamza was killed in battle. Mohammed considered the option of
leaving his uncle's body on the field of battle, without burial, and
thus ensuring that on Judgment Day he would be restored to life from
the innards of the birds and beasts of prey. Finally, Mohammed did
not leave the body unburied, in order not to offend the feelings of
Hamza's relatives, and because he was concerned about creating a
precedent.
The phenomenon of the shahid is related to the
holy war, or "jihad," which has to do with the order of the world as
it is perceived by the Muslim religion. From its inception, Islam
divided the world into two - "Dar al Islam," which includes all the
Muslim believers, and "Dar al-Harab," namely all other human beings,
who must be destroyed. In time a change developed in the
interpretation. Muslims understood that if they were to slay all the
unbelievers in the world, there would be no one to pay them poll
tax. So they adopted an approach according to which those of the
heretics who would submit to them would be allowed to uphold their
religion and pay the tax.
"The political imperative is to
expand the world of Islam at the expense of the other world," says
Nehemia Levtzion, professor of Islamic and African History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "That is the role of the jihad. It
is a permanent situation. As long as the imperative of Dar al Harab
exists, jihad is a commandment. It is imposed on the community,
although it is not a personal obligation like prayer or fasting.
To encourage jihad, the believers must be given wages,
rewards, hence the concept of the shahid. Those who undertake the
jihad and fall in battle will be considered martyrs and become
saints. Those who fight in battle are buried in their uniform and
their bodies will be treated differently. Usually a body must be
washed before burial; but a shahid is considered pure by virtue of
having been killed in battle and he ascends straight to paradise."
The Islamic sages rely in this matter on what Mohammed
stated at the Battle of Uhud, namely that the shahids should not be
washed, for on the day of the resurrection of the dead each of their
wounds will give forth a scent of musk.
Mohammed named three
types of shahids. The first is the warrior who goes into battle
neither to kill nor be killed. The second enters battle with the aim
of killing the enemy without himself being killed. The third type
seeks to kill the enemy and be killed himself. All will be rewarded,
but the greatest reward will go to the martyr of the third type.
This behavior is known as "seeking a martyr's death." On Judgment
Day this type of martyr will appear with his drawn sword lying on
his shoulder and he will be treated with greater honor than prophets
and will dwell in whatever part of paradise he wishes.
Conquering religion
The phenomenon of
readiness for self-sacrifice in religious contexts exists in the
three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The
question of what type of death the believer chooses derives in large
measure from the status that each of the religions had in the world
during its period of formation, emergence and development.
In the period of glory of the Roman Empire, Judaism and
Christianity were persecuted religions. Islam, by contrast, emerged
in the seventh century after the split in the Roman Empire and in a
period of a global political vacuum, enabling it to gather strength
and momentum in relatively short order.
"The first
Christians were passive. They accepted death with love. They turned
the other cheek," explains Dr. Aviad Kleinberg, an expert in early
Christianity, from the Department of General History at Tel Aviv
University. "There are no testimonies about persecuted Christians
who tried to defend themselves," he notes. "From the period of the
Emperor Nero in the first century CE until the fourth century, they
are led like sheep to the slaughter. The principle that guided them
was that an authority exists that is beyond human authority and for
the sake of which it is worth dying. If you act in the name of that
authority, you are beyond good and evil." The model of the desirable
death emulated by the early Christians was that of Jesus. He is the
lamb taken to be sacrificed, whose death atones for all sins.
Gradually, however, Christianity shifted from pacifism to a
"Samson-like" conception of "let me die with the Philistine,"
Kleinberg continues. The radical conceptual shift, according to
which people who die in battle are holy, developed from the period
of the Crusades in the eleventh century. "At the same time, there is
no suicide phenomenon in Christianity. The Crusader who went into
battle may have undertaken suicidal missions, but there is no
sanctification of suicide. Christians reject suicide - according to
their belief, deliberate suicide is a sin and gains nothing."
Judaism also condemns suicide, yet it praises a series of acts of
suicide. Some of these acts were considered exemplary behavior or
were interpreted as acts of martyrdom and became cornerstones of the
historical myth. Two of the most striking cases were the death of
Samsom and the suicide of King Saul after the Israelites' defeat in
the battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa. However, the
terms Kiddush Hashem ("martyrdom") and shmad (religious persecution,
forced conversion) appeared in the wake of the anti-Jewish decrees
in the period of Greek and Roman rule. The Second Book of Maccabees
tells of the death of Hannah and her seven sons. Rabbi Akiva was
among those who died a martyr's death in the wake of the Bar Kochba
Revolt in 135 CE - he was put to death because he insisted on
reciting the Shema prayer.
The most spectacular of the
suicide events - although not the only one of its kind - was the
mass suicide at Masada in 73 CE, three years after the destruction
of the Second Temple. There were also acts of mass suicide at Yodfat
and Gamla. About a thousand years later, in the eleventh century, a
similar event occurred in the Rhine Valley in Germany. During the
First Crusade, the Christians gave the Jewish communities at Mayence
and Worms a choice between baptism and death. The Jews chose to die
as martyrs "for the sanctification of the Name."
Hundreds of
Jews killed their children and then took their own lives. Dr.
Yisrael Yoval, from the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew
University, studied the impact of this on Christian public opinion.
It emerges that the mass suicides were among the factors that shaped
the image of the Jews as possessing murderous traits. "But the Jews
who committed suicide did not kill others," Yuval says. "They said
that it was not worthwhile for them to live in a world where they
would not uphold the tenets of their faith. They preferred spiritual
existence to physical existence."
In contrast to the
defensive posture taken by early Christianity and by Judaism
throughout most of its history, Islam in its first 200 years was a
conquering, triumphant faith. The Muslims reached the peak of their
power and efflorescence in the ninth century. All the promises of
paradise that appear in the Koran and in the later traditions date
from the first hundred years of Islam. They were intended to develop
a warrior culture. Beginning in the eleventh century, Islam went on
the defensive. At this stage another phenomenon became dominant -
that of shahids who gave their lives in internecine Islamic strife
(such as the wars between the Shi'ites and the Sunnis).
The
virtues of martyrdom as contrasted with the sanctity of life were
discussed by the Islamic sages in clear association with the
discussion of jihad, Prof. Kohlberg says. One of the questions that
engaged them was whether a lone warrior is permitted to attack a
large enemy force. According to Mohammed al-Hassan al-Shibani, one
of the founders of the Hanifa school, who lived in the second half
of the eighth century, a lone fighter may attack even a thousand of
the enemy if a reasonable chance exists that he will survive the
assault or kill some of the enemy before himself being killed. If it
is more than likely that he will be killed without doing damage to
the enemy, his action is considered reprehensible, as he is exposing
himself to death without an expected gain to the Muslims. So it
stands to reason that the shahids in our time would meet with the
approval of the Hanifa school, though under one condition: that they
directed their operations against fighting forces and not against
civilians. As an operation "against the enemy," they definitely meet
the criteria laid down by Mohammed al-Shibani. How closely, if at
all, is the phenomenon of the terrorism unleashed by the suicide
bombers against Israel connected to the texts that appear in the
historical Islamic sources? According to Prof. Kohlberg, "there is
continuity here, but the situation is different from what it was in
the Middle Ages. There are things here that did not exist in the
past. There was never a situation in which a country such as the
Jewish state, which is perceived as a state of heretics, was
established in territory that is considered Waqf (Muslim religious
trust) land that belongs to Islam. The evolution in Palestinian
thought in this direction began in 1967, but it has gathered
momentum more recently. The radical Palestinian movements today rely
on medieval texts in explaining the shahid phenomenon."
Kohlberg has written that there are Muslim religious
interpreters today "who state explicitly that if modern explosives
had existed in the period of the prophet Mohammed, the Muslims would
have made exactly the same use of them as the shahid fighters do
today." |