Hatina2005.pdf

Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2005),

10(3), 241–267

Theology and power in the Middle

East: Palestinian martyrdom in

a comparative perspective

MEIR HATINA

Department of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A BSTRACT Jihad (holy war) and self-sacriﬁce constituted a formative ethos

for Palestinian Islam in its struggle against Israel from the early 1990s

onward. They became important components of politics of identity, aimed at

infusing metaphysical values into Palestinian life, while also positing a

political alternative to the PLO. This paper focuses on a formative manifesto

titled ‘Readings in the Laws of Martyrdom’ (Qira’a ﬁ Fiqh al-Shahada).

Disseminated by the Islamic Jihad in 1988, the manifesto laid down the

ideological foundations of martyrdom in Palestine. With the passage of time,

Palestinian ‘suicide attacks’ became unprecedented in scale, distinctive

thereby from similar phenomena in other conﬂicted areas such as Lebanon,

Kashmir, Chechnya, Turkey and Sri Lanka. The discussion evaluates the role

of the Palestinian manifesto in the radical Islamic orbit. For this purpose, two

other formative texts are also examined. The ﬁrst is ‘The Absent Duty’, issued

in 1981 by the Egyptian Jihad movement, which was responsible for President

Sadat’s assassination. The second is ‘Manual for a Raid’, issued by the al-

Qa‘ida organization, containing instructions for the perpetrators of the attacks

in the United States on September 11, 2001. A comparative analysis of the

three texts reveals common themes as well as variations that reﬂect the

particular context in which each Islamic group was active.

A nation familiar with the art of death, and that knows how to die an honorable death, will be

bestowed by Allah a gloriﬁed life on earth and eternal pleasures in the hereafter. 1

Correspondence Address: Meir Hatina, Department of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies, Institute of Asian and

African Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. Email: mhatina@mscc.huji.ac.il

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/05/030241–27 q 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13569310500244289

meir hatina

Introduction

Jihad (holy war) and self-sacriﬁce constituted a formative ethos for Palestinian

Islam in its struggle against Israel from the early 1990s onward. They became

important components of politics of identity by interpreting the past through the

prism of the pressing claims of the present. 2 The very act of martyrdom in the

name of a superior moral authority delivered the dramatic message that the conﬂict

in Palestine was as much cultural as territorial. Islamic violence against Israel

aimed to infuse metaphysical values into Palestinian life, while also serving as an

effective mode of resistance in a period of a search for peace, thereby positing a

political alternative to the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA). The

intertwining of religion and politics as impelling Islamic violence was aptly

articulated by the leader of Islamic Jihad, Fathi al-Shiqaqi, in November 1994,

shortly after the establishment of the PA: ‘Without the martyrs we have no life or

history, no past, glory or value. It is they who pave the way for us for the future,

and not the cowards who keep silent, defeatists who trade off the homeland and

sell off Jerusalem’. 3

Backed by two scriptural commands—death for the sake of Allah, and the duty

to forbid wrongdoing (nahy ‘an al-munkar)—self-sacriﬁce became a moral code

justifying ‘suicide attacks’ 4 against Israel. These acts were deﬁned by Islamists

and other local observers as ‘martyrdom’ (istishhad), but were perceived by

Westerners, who had long since ceased to regard religion as a central priority,

simply as fanaticism or, alternatively, as nihilism and self-destruction. The

sharpest critics deﬁned the Muslim who sacriﬁces himself as motivated by a greed

for honor, a desire to retaliate, or a thirst for blood, while harboring a fantasy of

going to heaven. 5 Other Western observers held that Islamic violence was not the

result of blind outrage but was a political act that seeks to reshape the world as

more just and equal. 6 Whatever the perceptions in the Western intellectual

spectrum, clearly the phenomenon of ‘human bombs’ captured the attention of the

Western world no less than the Arab Muslim world.

This paper focuses on a formative manifesto title ‘Readings in the Laws of

Martyrdom’ (Qira’a ﬁ Fiqh al-Shahada). Disseminated by the Islamic Jihad in

1988, the manifesto laid down the ideological foundations of martyrdom in

Palestine. Islamic Jihad was in fact the ﬁrst movement in the Palestinian arena to

turn Islam into a theology of liberation against Israel in the late 1970s, as well as

the ﬁrst to legitimize the ethos of self-sacriﬁce. 7 With the passage of time,

Palestinian ‘suicide attacks’ became unprecedented in scale, distinguished thereby

from similar phenomena in other conﬂicted areas such as Lebanon, Kashmir,

Chechnya, Turkey and Sri Lanka. 8

The discussion below evaluates the role of the Palestinian manifesto in the

radical Islamic orbit. For this purpose, two other formative texts are also

instructive. The ﬁrst is ‘The Absent Duty’, issued in 1981 by the Egyptian Jihad

movement, which advocated armed jihad against deviant Arab regimes, laying the

foundation for the assassination of President Sadat. The second is ‘Manual for a

Raid’, issued in 2001 by the al-Qa‘ida organization, containing instructions for the

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theology and power in the middle east

perpetrators of the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

A comparative analysis of the three texts reveals a commonality alongside

variations that reﬂect the particular context in which each Islamic group was active.

The essay, or manifesto, under discussion, ‘Readings in the Laws of

Martyrdom’, appeared as an appendix to a journal published in Nicosia identiﬁed

with the Islamic Jihad, al-Islam wa-Filastin in June 1988. 9 The essay is unsigned.

According to Abdulaziz Zamel, an Arabic scholar at Tampa University, Florida,

who was associated with Palestinian Jihad circles, the author was Misbah al-Suri

and the content was based on lectures he delivered to fellow detainees in an Israeli

prison. 10 Al-Suri, a former leftist, became a strict Muslim and thereafter was a key

activist in the military arm of the Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. He was killed in a

clash with Israeli forces in October 1987. Another possibility, no less plausible,

regarding the source of the essay, is that it was written by one of the two leaders of

the movement, Fathi al-Shiqaqi, or Shaykh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ‘Awda.

The essay was distributed in the early stages of the 1987 Intifada (uprising),

with the aim of heightening the momentum of the Palestinian revolt against Israeli

occupation from civil protest to a military operation. Although the extent of the

manifesto’s circulation is not clear, the timing of its publication overlapped with

the forging of a close link between Islamic Jihad and Iran and its prot´g´,

Hizballah, as a result of Israel’s expulsion of the top Islamic Jihad leadership to

Lebanon at that time. The revolutionary Shi‘a, beyond serving as a source of

ideological inspiration, evolved at that point into a logistic arm for Islamic Jihad. 11

This close afﬁnity also engendered new emphases in the rhetoric of the struggle in

Palestine, focusing especially on self-sacriﬁce. These emphases feature

prominently in the essay under review.

Martyrdom: Personal and collective salvation

Alternating between deﬁance and apologetics, the essay aims at molding a new

believer imbued with determination and a sense of mission, going beyond ritual to

an embrace of revolutionary activism. The essay also seeks to formulate a new

agenda for Islamic politics in Palestine and beyond, based on a carefully

constructed ethos of death which relies both on judicial arguments and on the

critical nature of the conﬂict in Palestine. The text opens, pointedly, with a

discussion of the differences between self-immolation (intihar), which lacks any

religious purpose and is motivated solely by a desire for relief from personal

distress, and martyrdom, which occurs in the battleﬁeld and represents the

pinnacle of faith. Self-immolation condemns the perpetrator to endless torment in

hell, while martyrdom grants him the pleasures of heaven. 12 Notably, the

prohibition of self-immolation is ingrained in the Islamic ethic, which, like

Judaism and Christianity, preaches the duty to bear suffering and pain, since life is

a gift bestowed by God, with continuity in the hereafter. Since Allah is the sole

authority over human affairs, self-immolation by His creatures constitutes a

blatant violation of that authority, punishable by excommunication from the

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Muslim community. 13 In contrast, martyrdom is deeply entrenched historically in

the Islamic judicial and communal consensus.

The need to sharpen the divide between these two types of death, which is

reiterated in the text several times, relies heavily on verses from the Qur’an and the

hadith (the Prophet’s sayings). The focus on this issue reﬂected the awareness by

Islamic Jihad of the sensitivity of suicide in Islam and the fear that such acts would

be interpreted as acts of desperation purely as a result of the ongoing occupation.

Such an interpretation would detract from the attractiveness of Islam as a theology

of liberation and as the sole vehicle for the ﬁnal victory. To neutralize such a

danger, and to keep ‘suicide attacks’ within the conﬁnes of sanctity, the manifesto

highlighted two basic elements: the duty of jihad, and the acute nature of the

struggle in Palestine.

The duty of jihad

The manifesto’s reference to the doctrine of jihad is deliberate and insistent, based

on the central position of the notion of holy war in Islamic theology and law. Jihad is

linked to the ultimate goal of reafﬁrming the moral superiority of Islam over other

cultures and sharpening the divisions betweenMuslims and inﬁdels. Any neglect of

military jihad is tantamount to a grave sin and to nifaq, or hypocrisy, i.e. having

weak faith or even undermining the faith of others. 14 In the words of the hadith,

‘Whoever dies without ﬁghting or expressing readiness to ﬁght [for Allah] dies as a

hypocrite’. An extensive body of literature exalting the idea of jihad ( fada’il al-

jihad) developed over the centuries, transforming it into a symbolic code that could

be evoked at any given moment, and especially in times of crisis and distress, to

awaken fervor for self-sacriﬁce. 15 The Crusades in the mid-twelfth century

provided such an occasion. Another was the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth

century. This symbolic element gained vitality and dominance with the declining

position of the Muslims vis- ` -vis theWest in the modern era. Once a superior world

power, the Muslim community gradually found itself marginalized, lagging behind

the progressive Western nations and often subjected to their domination. Yet, the

gloriﬁed voices of the past, juxtaposed with the acute challenges of the present,

combined to produce a political revolution in the formof radical Islamicmovements

such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Typically, the 1988 essay positions jihad as an

inspirational model, thereby paving the way to the link with self-sacriﬁce.

The doctrine of jihad, the essay argues, also deﬁnes the essence of life on earth,

which is not limited to self-preservation and satisfying man’s physical needs but

includes dedication to spreading the word of Allah, which signiﬁes the victory of

truth and justice. The notion of the negligibility of life as compared to total

devotion to Allah is aptly expressed in the manifesto by quoting Khalid ibn

al-Walid (d. 642), the commander of the Muslim armies which brought an end to

Byzantine rule in Syria and Palestine. He observed that the passion to encounter

Allah’s enemies after a freezing night on the battlefront is much stronger than the

passion for the embrace of a young bride on a warm night. 16 Total commitment to

an exalted act beyond the mundane realm leads the Muslim martyr to cease caring

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theology and power in the middle east

about his personal fate and to focus on the meaning of life in relation to a welcome

death. In this sense, jihad for Allah does not contradict the value of preserving

life. 17 Moreover, killing others is proscribed by certain restrictions, the essay

emphasizes, quoting the Qur’an: ‘... you slay not the soul God has forbidden,

except by right’ (Sura 6: 151). Jihad against the inﬁdels, however, is an exception,

because it is killing for the purpose of promoting ‘a just cause’ (haqq, which is also

synonym for Allah). 18

The deﬁnitive test for pleasing Allah is the intention (niya) to become a martyr,

according to the essay. This elevates Islam to a higher moral plane than Western

philosophies, which justify death and bloodshed only for the purpose of gaining

material assets such as imperial expansion, or, alternatively, which sanctify the

value of life over the worship of God. The result is tyranny, exploitation and

selﬁshness, which are avoided in Islam precisely because of the balance it dictates

between preserving life and martyrdom. 19

Clearly, Islamic Jihad, as a quasi-military movement that raised the banner of

jihad in Palestine, was not interested in simply maintaining this balance but in

altering it to favor the martyrdom dimension. Martyrdom is exalted in the essay as

an act of worship, parallel to a vow or transaction that must be fulﬁlled as part of

belief in Allah. 20 It is placed in the same category as refusing to submit to pressure

to speak heresy, or taking a ﬁrm stand in the name of holy truth against tyrannical

rulers—situations in which the believer knows that such behavior will lead to his

death. As an act of worship, martyrdom exchanges transient life for eternal life. It

bestows the rewards of paradise, such as purifying the martyr’s soul from all sins;

bringing him into the company of the prophets, the just, martyrs, and the righteous;

and ensuring a place in heaven for 70 of his relatives. 21 Notably, the sexual

motivation of marrying 72 black-eyed virgins, which captured Western attention,

does not appear in the manifesto, but only in later documents, mainly wills left by

‘suicide’ bombers. Conceivably, this issue was avoided in the interest of

presenting arguments that were more sober and weightier.

Moreover, martyrdom for Allah and for the faith, according to the manifesto,

constitutes not only a personal guarantee of rewards in paradise but also collective

insurance for the emancipation of the political community. As such, the religious

idea was intertwined with pragmatic national considerations, with the martyr

becoming a cultural agent—a symbol of revolution and liberation. In this context,

the text posits a ‘cost-beneﬁt’ doctrine (maslaha) which holds that the welfare of

the public justiﬁes an altruistic personal sacriﬁce. Ironically, whereas Muslim

reformists enlisted the doctrine of maslaha to diffuse sectarian and cultural

tensions as a response to the challenges of modernity, radical Islamists such as

Palestinian Islamic Jihad used this doctrine to reinforce the divisions between

Islam and its cultural environment and to promote revolutionary activism. 22

The nature of the struggle in Palestine

Linking individual salvation to collective emancipation paved the way for the

Islamic Jihad to highlight the second element in justifying self-sacriﬁce, namely

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