The news this morning of the bombing at Sharm-el-Shaikh was bracing, if unsurprising in some ways. Still, that resort did feel a refuge during my too-brief time in that part of the world ( I'll post photos if I can later). Fot good solid analysis and a roundup of the commentary, the best come as usual from Billmon.
And today, Monday, Dan of the Christian Science Monitor writes of a "jihadi subculture":
The culture of Islamist suicide bombers is becoming more commonplace, as is the defining of civilians as "enemies."
Even in the wave of Islamist terror attacks that destabilized Egypt for much of the 1990s, suicide bombers weren't used. Now the country has seen two major attacks of this kind in eight months, with the latest death toll now at least 88.
What concerns counterterrorism experts is that tactics that once prompted fierce ideological debates within radical circles -- suicide and attacks on civilians are both classically defined in Islam as sins -- are now more likely to be embraced by young men. A decade or two ago, Muslim males might have been willing to take up a rifle and risk death fighting against the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, but many would have balked at making the ultimate sacrifice or at blowing up civilians in a Moscow train station.
Still, I think it's still not useless to post this excerpt of my crazy novel. If you ever needed to convince someone that that Islam has been hijacked as firmly as Christianity by its fundamentalists, this might give you a little ammunition.
I still never conceived that a project I've been nurturing for so long would be so fscking timely.
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"While we are bidden to place all our faith and trust in God, the rabbis nevertheless deduce from the language of the Torah itself that we should be active in improving and preserving the health of the body . . .Just as we are prohibited from taking the life of another, we are also prohibited by the Torah from taking our own life, which is God-given, and anyone who commits suicide is deemed a murderer and is not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery."
— Rabbi Eliahu Shalom Ezran, spiritual leader of Magain David Sephardim Congregation, San FranciscoAbout suicide, the Holy Qur’an states clearly: ‘Do not kill yourselves, for surely Allah is Compassionate to you’ (Qur’an, 4:29), ‘Do not cast yourselves into destruction by your own hands’ (Qur’an, 2:195) and ‘No soul can die except by God’s permission’ (Qur’an 3:185). An Islamic objection to any form of suicide (rational or irrational) is that the motive which prompts individuals to take their own life is contrary to the divine prerogative over human life…. In theological and philosophical reasoning, suicide has been considered for centuries an unethical act. What is clear is that suicide has remained a religious taboo in the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
-- G. Hussein Rassool, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Jerusalem, of course, one of the few places frequently associated with suicide in the minds of even non-suicides: some will likely think first of headlines about the ill-named “suicide bombers.”
Like the FBI agents who zeroed in on a pair of Muslim teenage girls in New York City and deported them -- in part, for mentioning suicide in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. (They should have hired me as a consultant. Show me, I might have told them, a sixteen-year-old girl who’s not intrigued by suicide and I’ll give you five bucks.)
But I digress: neither of those girls was from anywhere near Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, the tourist brochures assure us, is sacred to three great religions. More like three branches of a family, drunken cousins in a multi-tiered bloodthirsty dynamic that’s rather Shakespearean, for the number of bodies left on the floor. Adherents of all three faiths have crossed swords both literally and figuratively for so many generations, some sculpting in white stone the tragedy of Temple Mount, that one can only find ironic that Judaism and Islam share with Christianity (see the Jesus option, above) similar canons 'gainst self-slaughter. They also share the same mirror-image flirtation with martyrdom – and a not-quite-death-defying obsession with Jerusalem.
The two were paired, Jerusalem and suicide, almost from the beginning, especially in early Jewish writing – the Old Testament, the early Talmud, and those sexy and violent books excluded from the canon as apocrypha – especially the 5 books of Maccabees, some of which I’ll save for the next guidebook (Special Edition: Masada.)
Of the five suicides in the Old Testament, the first to take place in Jerusalem is also among the most spectacular: Samson, who pulls down the walls of the First Temple, to die together with the same Philistines whose victory had led to the suicide of Saul. Judges 18:30 sings: the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. Get that? He died so that the Philistines would die too, even if his temple would be destroyed with him, centuries before Islam was born -- millennia before its good name would be smeared with an epidemic of suicide-homicides.