Martyrdom in Modern Islam

From Hizbullah’s ‘suicide’ vehicle bombings in the 1980s to Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 hijackings and the thousands of ‘martyrdom operations’ that have taken place in Iraq since 2003, the narratives and conceptions of selfsacrifice created and endorsed by some Islamist movements and particularly militant organisations continue to dominate the world’s news headlines. The image of militants, many of them young men and women, knowingly ending their own lives in order to carry out ‘successful’ attacks on civilian and military targets alike is jarring to many. The emotional responses to violence and the frequent shock at the relatively young age of many of the perpetrators obscures the fact that the concept of justified or even sanctified self-sacrifice for a ‘greater cause’ appears in almost every human culture around the world. It is not, although it is often portrayed as such, unique to Islamic societies and cultures. Indeed, the tactic of ‘suicide’ attacks has and continues to be used by a host of non-Muslim groups such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and non-Islamist militant organisations operating in Muslim-majority countries, such as the Marxist Kurdish PKK and its even more violent offshoots and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.....