the legacy of samson

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 Francisco

About 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.

Most of the rest of the Old Testament suicides  fall into two cousin-categories:  war, martyrdom, or both.  Martyrdom has a particular Hebrew name: Kiddush ha-shem – a willingness to lose one’s life for their faith, and thus set an example for Jews to follow.  (Though you don’t absolutely have to die to achieve it: Shadrach and his brothers, who miraculously survive having been thrown in a furnace rather than renounce their faith, are given the same credit.). The Q’uran says approvingly  “And some people sell themselves for the sake of Allah’s favor. Allah is kind to His servants.”

Both religions fill their early histories with similar heroic tales of suffering, and wars in which bringing down as much of the enemy as possible is just as glorious.

The Maccabees  in particular, Jason of Cyrene’s ballads of a persecuted people, offer us Eleazar and his eight brothers, tortured and killed for their unwillingness to eat pork, one of whom “threw himself into the braziers and so gave up his life” and all of whom can’t seem to resist making speeches about it, while Eleazar’s mother “threw herself into the fire so that no one would touch her body" The mother would likely find sisters in St. Agnes d’Agone and the other Christian martyrs, and perhaps with the jauhar girls (see Suicide Guidebook: India), as would the young suicides reported here by the Babylonian Talmud, threw themselves into the sea instead:

On one occasion four hundred boys and girls were carried off for immoral purposes. They divined what they were wanted for and said to themselves. If we drown in the sea shall we attain the life of the future world? The eldest among them expounded the verse (Ps. 68:23), The Lord said: I will bring again from the Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea. . . . I will bring again from the depth of the sea, those who drowned in the sea. When the girls heard this they all leapt into the sea. The boys then drew the moral for themselves, saying [by a fortiori reasoning], If these for whom this is natural act so, shall not we for whom it is unnatural? They also leapt into the sea. Of them the text says, Yea for thy sake we are killed all day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. 

(Suicide to avoid forced prostitution: a prototype Judith would ignore at her peril, when she went to Thailand.)

All of the above are described as having Kiddush ha-shem. (Shadrach and his brother, who miraculously survived  having been thrown in a furnace rather than renounce their faith, are given the same credit.) So are numerous persecuted rabbis and prophets in that same Talmud who were willing to strike a bargain with their executioners and “take them] along to the next world.” And numerous wartime suicides, starting with Saul and Abimelech, are still counted as Kiddush ha-shem. The Qur’an offers a succinct version of the rationale:

Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth in return for Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah, kill and are killed. That is a true promise from Him in the Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an and who fulfills His promise better than Allah? Rejoice then at the bargain you have made with Him; for that is the great triumph.

Both groups tell tales of heroic military victory against overwhelming odds – sometimes the same ones. Recounting the David/Goliath story, the Qur’an makes sure to cry out: “How many a small band has defeated a larger one by Allah’s leave. Allah is with the steadfast.”

That belief seems to inform all, it seems, when the war  is for Jerusalem.

When Roman troops enter the First Temple in 63 B.C., many of its priests “threw themselves over the precipices. Some, maddened by their hopeless position, fired the buildings round the wall and perished in the flames.”

These words from Jewish general and historian Josephus -- the perhaps-somewhat-unreliable Truman Capote of “the Jewish war,” whose narratives often provide gory encomiums to suicidal warrior-martyrs. Though when his own men proposed mass suicide in an early battle with the Romans, he speechified instead: "It is from Him we have received our being, and it is to Him we must leave the right to take it away." (Thanks to Darrell Amundsen, Amundsen, a professor of classics at Western Washington University, for the info in the previous two paragraphs -- cml).

This tension, between strict adherence to scripture and the desire for a martyr’s glory or release from agony, informs Jewish thought over centuries, changing as times do. In contemporary rabbinical discussion, you find the idea that since it is possible for the suicide to have repented in the very last moments of life, it is best to give her the benefit of the doubt and grant a sacred burial.

Recited all at once, these suicides seem plentiful even when compared with such festivals of self-deliverance as the Bhagavad-Gita; but in both Jewish and Muslim history since the first millennium, suicide stories are relatively scarce. Those proscriptions in Torah and Talmud had some power after all.

I do note the story of Umm al-Nasr, the legendary (and quite real) princess of a sultanate in what is now central Sudan. In 1856, on behalf of her brother, a blind sultan, Nasr took over defense of their land, battling  invaders on horseback  as all had done for centuries -- until his death in 1856, when she refused all food and water (a fairly quick death in the desert). Her story reminds me of the Vietnamese girl warriors Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, in whose names Judith and Ki swore their troth – and gives a painful twist to how the same horseback warfare she loved became the signature in the 21st century for the genocide of her country-turned province, Darfur. In the wake of slaughter of hundreds of thousands by the janjaweed militias that disgraced Nasr’s legacy and the rape and mutilation of hundreds more, hundreds of refugees “internally displaced” by the violence confessed to international observers that they had violated Qur’an by considering or attempting suicide, or that someone in their family had gone ahead and the consummation devoutly to be wisht.

Here, too, the Jews (ahem) got there first. (Just our luck, as Judith’s ex-husband Mark would say.) After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) in 1938 — when 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted, dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were looted — many Jewish adults sought final exit, the subject of sacred burial no doubt rendered moot.
Almost impossible to find are solid facts about suicide in the concentration camps, to derive somehow how many chose their own exit rather than incineration. What is, of course, much remarked on is the miraculous thousands who did not, in the face of the systematic brutal destruction of their people. Who faced the horror and survived.

The same horror drives, feeds the Israeli Jew's sense of entitlement to the ancient lands "reclaimed" by the Jewish people.

This reclamation, this nation-state, born of a postwar push fueled by a Western Europe hugely embarrassed at having ignored the Holocaust for far too long (e.g. the desperate refugees of the St. Louis, turned away at numerous ports in 1939, more than half of whose passengers ultimately died in the camps). Settled by a tiny minority at the 20th century's birth, Israel was midwifed by a world anxious to get the "Jewish problem," as Hitler called it, "solved" in a way that diminished no one's power — except the power of those tending the olive groves and fishing the Mediterranean. The darkness of the Holocaust is in the choked voice of even the most moderate Jew, when the subject of discussion is Jerusalem.

The white stone city hosted the climax of the Six-Day War on June 7, 1967 as Israeli soldiers stormed down the Via Dolorosa, ignoring the weeping faces at each doorway. They raised the Israeli flag over Temple Mount, starting riots, then withdrew the flag either too late or too soon, depending on who you ask.

"Never again!" Reina at the dinner table one Passover, the seder in its traditional intermission, a young guest having dared to suggest a shared Jerusalem. Mark's mother, who weighed in at 300 pounds of what seemed sheer muscle and whose family had fled Poland in the nick of time, was an avenging Minerva; to her the loss of Jerusalem equated rather directly with the risk of another genocide. Her logic only a little better than my Nonna's equating Pope-banned films with teenage pregnancy, her faith just as unassailable.

Lost in such faith then the farmers, the fishermen, the university students of Palestine; fueled by such faith a brutal occupation, only slowly eroded by occasional peace treaties and truces, most themselves burned in turn by a generation that that twists the Q’uran to make their own fiery deaths. Not that any of them, or the radical preachers who celebrate them, themselves call it suicide.

Only in the late 20th century, and only in this contested land, did angry Muslims commence what are now known as “martyrdom operations,” an epidemic that now crosses continents, including mass transit systems in the West. But that’s not suicide, and I’m not the only one saying it.
Listen to a sheikh who was also the Saudi ambassador to the UK: “You died to glorify the Word of my God . . . Did you commit suicide? No! We are those who committed suicide, In a life where the dead are still living…”

Or to an anonymous cleric, writing to Muslims in Chechnya: “How great is the difference between one who commits suicide—because of his unhappiness, lack of patience and weakness, or absence of iman [faith] and has been threatened with Hell-Fire—and between the self-sacrificer who embarks on the operation out of strength of faith, and to bring victory to Islam, by sacrificing his life for the upliftment of Allah’s Word!” Excuse me, Judith murmurs as she reads.

Each explosion fuels Jewish rage, each response combusts Palestinian, until the man with the bomb strapped to his body conflagrates the grandchildren of camp survivors.
Until Israeli bombs rain on villages and half-demolished homes. Until an aging Palestinian leader declares war "until the Palestinian flag flies over Jerusalem."

“In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, in Jerusalem.”
— Zechariah 12:6

“For centuries, believers have streamed into Jerusalem . . . to marvel at the site that all three religions believe will be the place of the Last Judgment. On that day, both Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews expect their Messiah to stride down from the Mount of Olives and burst through the Golden Gate. Many Muslims believe that the Ka’aba — the holiest place in Mecca — will be transported to Jerusalem, and that all the dead will meet again in the streets of the city. As long as such mythologies are taken literally, the struggle for Jerusalem and the Temple Mount will never end.”
— Lawrence Wright, “Letter from Jerusalem,” The New Yorker

Armageddon perhaps the ultimate mass suicide, perhaps, like Rama at Ayodyha, believers with free passes to heaven, as centuries of pitched battles power a religious fundamentalism fueled by poverty and fear. The circles tighten: Jewish archaeologists look for the First Temple, joined by American Christians who yearn to destroy Temple Mount, feeding more bombings that raise the temperature on the soldier-shadowed Via Dolorosa. Meantime all three faiths meet to worship and plot at the Wall, the extremists on all sides serene in their knowledge that the End is coming and with it their triumph.
No doubt, most inhabitants on all sides are civilians, with no interest in armageddon, but the fanatics s make sure the razors stay bloody.

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Then we're back into plot, even in the guidebook -- one of a series of "Suicide Guidebooks" that appear as my protagonist, Judith Rossi (a mid-20s girl with MS, go figure) travels the world looking for the perfect suicide.  (I've already posted the India guidebook, as part of a post on Afghan girls setting themselves on fire.) Adding links, for this blog, has been an interesting project - so you can go and check how authoritative my sources for this piece actually are.

There was a point in the late 90's, when I first started this, that I thought the Middle East would no longer belong in a novel about suicide (individual and collective). But that was before "suicide bombing" became a trope in all our nightmares.

Now you understand better why the Ostriker poem I posted this morning felt like such a calm space in the midst of such chaos.

Comments

[sajjad]

trying to get a dialogue going....

How Muslims should address the war on terror.

We, as Muslims, know that the motivation for any so-called Jihadist activities is not a "hatred for freedom," but rather a reaction to foreign policies and the encroachment of the West on Islamic world. Is the violence justified? No. Is the violence the best reaction to the policies? No. Does the West want the violent reactions? Yes. Why? So the West can continue its encroachment on the lives of Muslims everywhere. What should Muslims do about it? Muslims in the world should drop the resistance and anger against the West. The greatest fear of policymakers in the West is not the violence; the violence can be quelled, but rather the explosive growth potential in the population of the Muslim World. Muslim nations have the youngest average age of all nations in the world, and therefore the greatest potential for population growth. This is what drives fear in the West and why it reacts with such hatred; the world through demographic change will become more Islamic by default. With the West bringing the war to the Islamic world and killing thousands of Muslims today, the West is actually killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Muslims a few generations from now. This is at the heart of the West's war on terror agenda. The West must slow the growth of the world Islamic population. If there really is a war between the West and Islam right now, it will not be won or lost with guns, but rather birth rates. Demography is destiny. Muslims will only survive by living peacefully as the Quran teaches, and focusing on the growth and stability of the family as they have done for many generations.

[Chris]

Sajjad --

Your analysis is cogent, if a little scary: I like to think the evil deeds of Western government and financial institutions are based on more crass and tangible purposes, like pouring millions into their pockets and protecting what they have, then worrying about future Islamic hegemony. Besides, unless you're proselytizing like mad in Chins, I'm not sure you're right.

Is it possible for the Islamic future you envision to happen with tolerance for those of us who remain unconverted? That worry sits unexpressed, I think, under the tongues of even liberals who hear the word "caliphste."

Meanwhile, how can those of us in the West that aren't policymakers make a difference here? Or is it all about stopping those destructive policies?

[Michelle]

You know? I'd never stopped to consider how suicide is regarded in Judaism, but it's so obvious that now I'm sort of scratching my head wondering how I missed that. Definitely adds an interesting shade to an issue that is both complex and simple. Think I'll be chewing on it for awhile.

That sounds like a kick-ass novel. :)