In as many generations as my Somali grandmother taught me to count back in our lineage, Islamic conceptions of the afterlife have remained remarkably fixed. Death in holy war and martyrdom continue to be the most hallowed pathway to paradise. The Enlightenment, evolution, Einstein: none has modified the overarching Islamic vision of paradise or hell, nor its centrality in Islamic theology.
Sacrifice in the Non-Muslim World
Of course, other religions have the concept of an afterlife. Christianity, too, has a tradition of venerating martyrs. John Foxe’s 1563 Book of Martyrs was one of the most popular publications of the English Reformation. Yet there are important differences in the way the other monotheistic faiths now understand both concepts.
Of the three great religions, Judaism has the least comprehensive concept of the afterlife. Indeed, early biblical writings say very little about what happens after death. When an individual transgresses in the Torah, God punishes the wrongdoer or his descendants in this life. Unlike either Christianity or Islam, Judaism did not see violent death as something that would bring a person closer to God. Over time, some strands of Judaism developed a clearer conception of an afterlife, but in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jews have returned to the religion’s original conceptions, seeing life on earth as the primary focal point.
Christianity, by contrast, has the idea of heaven at its very heart. That there is life after death is at the very core of Jesus’s teaching. He himself demonstrated that with his own Resurrection after his death on the cross. For believers, entrance to the kingdom of God was not based on status—indeed, according to Jesus, the most lowly would be first in line: the poor, the ignorant, the young. Admission was based on being pure of heart, on loving one’s neighbor as oneself. People who hoped to enter the kingdom—the “godly”—had to behave on earth toward one another as if they were already there. Persecution of the early Christians encouraged an enduring cult of martyrdom, to be sure. But unlike Muslim martyrs, Christian martyrs were nearly always the unarmed victims of cruel executions, a select few of them attaining sainthood precisely because of their sublime sufferings.
Unlike Islam, Christianity has never been a static religion. A three-tiered universe features in much medieval iconography, with heaven on top, earth in the middle, and hell below. That was later modified to include Purgatory, a kind of waiting room for those who had not fully atoned for their sins on earth and must endure additional purgation before being admitted to heaven. As we have seen, the Reformation was initially a revolt against the Catholic Church’s practice of selling shortcuts out of Purgatory. But it was not a revolt against the notion of an afterlife. On the contrary: the wars of religion that raged in Europe from the 1520s to the 1640s saw a revival of the early Church’s cult of martyrdom. As Catholics and Protestants burned each other alive, the list of Christian martyrs grew steadily longer. And the more wars Christians fought—whether against one another or against “heathens” abroad—the more the ideal of the warrior martyr took hold. Christianity and Islam never resembled each other more closely than in their periodic military collisions, from the Crusades onward.
Today, in our age of space travel and deep drilling beneath the earth’s surface, it has become difficult to maintain a literal conception of an actual heaven above and a hell below. Scientific and medical advances have radically modified the Christian conception of the afterlife, rendering it metaphorical for many believers. To be sure, there are still many Christians who regard the Bible as a factual account of the history of the world from the Creation to the Resurrection. But there are at least as many for whom it is a largely allegorical work, the spiritual meaning of which transcends the acts, miraculous and otherwise, that it purports to record.8 There are sincere and reputable people on both sides. They disagree, but their disagreement has not undone Christianity. And neither side is blowing anyone else up over it. Week in and week out, rabbis, ministers, and priests do not stand before their congregations, preaching about the world to come and exhorting them to seek martyrdom as a fast track to heaven. Bereaved Christians still seek solace in the thought that they will be reunited with lost loved ones in the hereafter, but no priest today would urge his flock actively to seek death for themselves and others in order to receive a posthumous reward. Murder and suicide are proscribed, not encouraged.
Indeed, most Jews and Christians today recoil from the notion of human sacrifice. For example, most modern believers are deeply uncomfortable with the story of Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Isaac to appease God. What has persisted in the Judeo-Christian world is the concept of self-sacrifice as a noble act when it aims to preserve the lives of others. In the United States, we expect the men and women of our armed forces to be willing to die to protect their fellow citizens. The president and Congress award the Medal of Honor to military personnel who have taken heroic actions to save others.
If you want to understand the completely irreconcilable difference I am talking about, you need only compare two groups of people: the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, flying their hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, and the New York City firefighters running up the stairs of the burning Twin Towers, determined to save whoever they could, regardless of the risk to their own lives. The West has a tradition of risking death in the hope of saving life. Islam teaches that there is nothing so glorious as taking an infidel’s life—and so much the better if the act of murder costs you your own life.
Martyrdom and Murder
As we have seen, Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.
The first modern “martyrdom operation” was in fact inflicted on the perpetrator’s fellow Muslims.9 It was carried out in November 1980 by a thirteen-year-old Iranian boy who strapped explosives to his chest and blew himself up underneath an Iraqi tank during the early part of the Iran-Iraq War. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini immediately declared the boy a national hero, as well as an inspiration for other volunteers to sacrifice themselves. And in the intervening years, such martyrs have stepped up by the thousands. Suicide bombing remains one of the most common ways in which Shia and Sunni Muslims kill each other.
Another early martyrdom operation was the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, which left 241 American military personnel dead. The attack, conducted by members of a then-obscure group called Islamic Jihad, so shocked the American public that President Reagan ordered the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, handing the jihadists a prestigious victory and confirming the tactic’s effectiveness. Since then, Palestinian militants have used suicide bombings repeatedly against Israeli targets. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, suicide bombings became a recurrent feature of an insurgency that rapidly took on the character of a Sunni-Shia civil war. Suicide bombings are now commonplace events all over the Muslim world, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Nigeria.
The psychology of suicide bombing is complex. Muslim clerics take great pains to reject the term “suicide,” preferring “martyrdom.” Suicide, they explain, is for those without hope. Martyrs are living successful lives, but nobly choose to sacrifice their lives for the higher good. These purveyors of death are recognized and honored as well. Within the Palestinian territories, streets and squares are named for them. Mothers of suicide bombers talk as if their sons had gone off to get married. This is not a strange, inexplicable failure of parental love, as some Westerners might like to believe. It is part of an alternative ideology. In this ideology, death is—to quote the seventeen-year-old would-be martyr from Chicago—“an appointment” that must be kept.10
True, while the martyrs’ ultimate goal might be paradise, for years there were also significant monetary incentives for suicide bombers. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein openly paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers up to $25,000 for attack
s on Israelis. Officials from the Arab Liberation Front would personally deliver the checks, with the compliments of Baghdad.11 In addition, charities from Saudi Arabia and Qatar have sent money to the families of Palestinians killed in operations against Israel.
Yet it is impossible to explain the cult of murderous martyrdom purely in these material terms. The parents of the 9/11 attackers were not enriched by their sons’ bloody deed. In very few societies can it truly make economic sense for a young person—in whom a family must have invested at least a childhood’s worth of food, clothing, shelter, and education—to self-destruct.
In the aftermath of 9/11—to date, the most spectacular martyrdom operation ever undertaken—American commentators debated whether the terrorists who flew the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center were “cowards” for attacking a civilian target. Elsewhere, anti-Americans of every stripe hailed the terrorists as heroes. In fact they were neither cowards nor heroes—they were religious zealots acting under the deluded belief that they would not suffer at all as the planes collided with the towers, but would go directly to paradise. You cannot call someone a coward who does not fear death but rather longs for it as an express ticket to heaven. Indeed, you cannot define them at all using the usual Western terminology.
Modern Martyrdom
Today the call to martyrdom can be heard not just in mosques, but also in schools and in the electronic media, from television to YouTube. The argument is a subtle one that is not well understood in the West. During an interview on Al-Aqsa television in May 2014, Dr. Subhi Al-Yazji of the Islamic University in Gaza acknowledged, “the Islamic concept of sacrifice motivates many of our youth to carry out martyrdom operations.” But he added:
Contrary to how they are portrayed by the West and some biased media outlets, which claim that they are youths of eighteen to twenty years who have been brainwashed, most of the people who sacrificed their lives for the sake of Allah were engineers and had office jobs. They were all mature and rational. Some people claim that they did this for the money. [But] take, for example, someone like brother Sa’d, who was an engineer, had an office job, owned a home and a car, and was married—what made him embark on jihad? He believed that the Muslim faith requires us to make sacrifices.12
Ismail Radwan, an Islamic University professor and spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, explains what the reward will be for those who embrace death. “When the Shahid (Martyr for Allah) meets the Lord,” he writes, “all his sins are forgiven from the first gush of blood, and he is exempted from the torments of the grave. He sees his place in Paradise. He is shielded from the Great Shock and marries 72 Dark-Eyed [Virgins]. He is a heavenly advocate for 70 members of his family. On his head is placed a crown of honor, one stone of which is worth more than all there is in this world.”13
In part because the Palestinians have been the most frequent proponents and practitioners of suicide bombing, they have developed the most elaborate and detailed rationalizations of martyrdom. To many of them, the afterlife is not a theoretical, abstract concept; it is exceedingly real.14 As the Tel Aviv disco bomber explained in his will, written before his June 2001 attack, which left twenty-three Israeli teenagers dead, “I will turn my body into bombs that will hunt the sons of Zion, blast them and burn their remains. . . . Call out in joy, oh mother! Distribute sweets, oh father and brothers! A wedding with the black-eyed [virgins] awaits your son in Paradise.”15
As a mother of a three-year-old son, I can imagine nothing more unbearable than his death. So I have tried hard to understand the psychology of Mariam Farhat, the Palestinian “mother of martyrs” also known as Umm Nidal, who positively encouraged three of her sons to undertake attacks on Israel that cost them their lives. “It is true that there is nothing more precious than children,” she said before one of her sons died in a suicide attack she herself had planned, “but for the sake of Allah, what is precious becomes cheap.”16 Her son Muhammad Farhat attacked an Israeli settlement school with guns and hand grenades, killing five students and wounding twenty-three others before being killed himself. Why did she condone this? “Because I love my son,” she replied, “and I wanted to choose the best for him, and the best is not life in this world”:
For us there is an Afterlife, the eternal bliss. So if I love my son, I’ll choose eternal bliss for him. As much as my living children honor me, it will not be like the honor the Martyr showed me. He will be the intercessor on the Day of Resurrection. What more can I ask for? Allah willing, the Lord will promise us Paradise, that’s the best I can hope for. The greatest honor [my son] showed me was his Martyrdom.17
The Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh commented that Nidal’s words made him “recall the words of the hadith that ‘Paradise lies under the feet of the mothers.’ ”
As the organization Palestinian Media Watch explains, this message “comes from all parts of society, including religious leaders, TV news reports, schoolbooks, and even music videos. Newspapers routinely describe the death and funerals of terrorists as their ‘wedding’. . . . The longest running music video on PA TV, originally aired in 2000 and broadcast regularly in 2010, shows a male martyr being greeted in Islam’s Paradise by dark eyed women all dressed in white.”
18 Yet this cult of murderous martyrdom is no longer confined to the Palestinians. It is not only in Gaza that kindergartners are dressed up as suicide bombers. All across the Muslim world, children are being inculcated with a death wish. On Egyptian television, the child preacher Abd al-Fattah Marwan extolls “the love of martyrdom for the sake of Allah.” On Al-Jazeera, a ten-year-old Yemeni boy chants a poem he has composed himself, promising, “I will become a martyr for my land and my honor.”19
In Somalia, fathers recruit their children, some as young as ten, to become suicide bombers and film their “martyrdom operations” with the same pride as an American father filming his son scoring a goal or hitting a home run. The leaders of Boko Haram likewise raise their children to be martyrs.20 Finally, and inevitably, the cult of death has reached European Muslims. In 2014 a British-born woman calling herself Umm Layth tweeted a breathless comment on her new life as the wife of a Syrian IS fighter: “Allahu Akbar, there’s no way to describe the feeling of sitting with the Akhawat [sisters] waiting on news of whose Husband has attained Shahada [in this case meaning martyrdom].”21 At the time she wrote those words, Umm Layth had more than two thousand Twitter followers.
Such ideas are already established in America. Consider the very popular Methodology of Dawah el-Allah in American Perspective, by Shamim Siddiqi, a leading commentator on Muslim issues, and published by the Forum for Islamic Work. The book sets out how Muslims can establish an Islamic state in the United States and more broadly in the West. It presents both the preferred ways of reaching potential adherents—through mosques, conferences, television and radio appearances—and the best strategies for doing so. But what is most striking is the book’s death-laden language, starting in its very first pages. It is dedicated to those “who are struggling and waiting to lay down their lives for establishing God’s Kingdom on earth” and quotes the Qur’an on its dedication page: “Of the believers are men who are true to that which they covenanted with ALLAH. Some of them have paid their vow by death (in battle), and some of them still are waiting; and they have not altered in the least” (33:23). Siddiqi focuses on how the ideal Muslim must sacrifice everything for the sake of the Islamic movement and “expect rewards from Allah only in the life hereafter.” The perfect Muslim “prefers to live and die for [the hereafter]. He gladly gives up his life for its sake. . . .”22 Unfortunately, this isn’t mere rhetoric.
Fatalism in This World
I can already hear the complaints: Oh, but you are merely citing the extremes; the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not sending their children off to die. And no, of course they are not. But this fixation on the afterlife has other—subtler but also pernicious—consequences.
The Islamic vie
w of the relative insignificance of everything we see with our own eyes is that this world is merely a way station. While martyrdom is the extreme reaction, it is not the only reaction to this view of the world. The question arises: Why bother, if our sights are trained not on this life but on the afterlife? I believe that Islam’s afterlife fixation tends to erode the intellectual and moral incentives that are essential for “making it” in the modern world.
As a translator for other Somalis who had arrived in Holland, I saw this phenomenon in various forms. One was simply the clash of cultures when immigrant Muslims and native-born Dutch lived in close proximity to one another. In apartment complexes, the Dutch were generally meticulous about keeping common spaces free of any litter. The immigrants, however, would throw down wrappers, empty Coca-Cola cans, and cigarette butts, or spit out the remnants of their chewed qat. The Dutch residents would grow incensed at this, just as they would grow incensed by the groups of children who would run about, wild and unsupervised, at all hours. It was easy for one family to have many children. (If a man can marry up to four wives and have multiple children with each of them, the numbers grow quickly.) The Dutch would shake their heads, and in reply the veiled mothers would simply shrug their shoulders and say that it was “God’s will.” Trash on the ground became “God’s will,” children racing around in the dark became “God’s will.” Allah has willed it to be this way; it is there because Allah has willed it. And if Allah has willed it, Allah will provide. It is an unbreakable ring of circular logic.
There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward? Those are not the behaviors that mark good Muslims; they have nothing to do with praying or proselytizing.
Heretic Page 11