I’m curious as to whether suicide bombing is something specifically Muslim. I realize this can be a pretty sensitive question, but I think about it a lot. Does Islam have a long history of suicide attacks?
Now, I know there’s obvious examples of Kamakazi (sp?) bombers in Japan who saw themselves as the divine wind that would bring victory to the Japanese, but that was a sort of twisting of the idea of the kamakazi, wasn’t it?
Suicide is considered a sin by most Christians, so it doesn’t seem possible that there would be much of a history of suicide attacks (of the type that one would place in the same category as suicide bombing, which is to say deliberately killing oneself to kill others, not participating in an attack that one has little chance in surviving).
I know there are also examples of protests where people light themselves on fire, but that’s not a physical attack on anyone but the person who’s doing it.
Finally, in the same sense that I mentioned (perhaps incorrectly) that Kamakazi bombing was a twisted version of the idea of the divine wind, is suicide bombing a twisted idea of becoming a martyr? I mean, Christianity calls, in a sense, for followers to be martyrs, doesn’t it?
This is not a question of whether or not Muslims/Japanese/Christians are good or bad people. It’s stricktly based on what the religion/history says and what happens now.
It seems to me that suicide is a sin too for muslims. I wouldn’t swear it, though, but some imams certainly use this point to condemn suicide bombings.
The Tamils are often mentionned as a recent example of non-islam related suicide bombers.
I did three tours in VN, between ‘66-’'71. We had “sappers” who would infiltrate
allied bases, almost always in the night, and plant or throw explosive charges at
strategic targets, but I believe that they planned to escape if possible.
There were also charges planted in crowded bars and hotels frequented by allied
personnel. On occasion these would, apparently, explode prematurely, taking the
“bomber” out also, but again, I think their plan was to escape before the detonation. I
don’t recall any intentional “suicide bombers” such as we are dealing w/ in the M.E.
That’s not to say it never happened, or that the “sappers” chances of escape were
very likely, but if it did, it wasn’t a frequent occurrence.
Further suicide is not an Islam-only thing. When Texans do it at the Alamo, it is Courage. When Mexicans do it at Churubusco it is crazed Crazed Fanaticism. You mention Japanese kamikazes, others brought up Vietnamese sappers. What about American at Bastogne? Jews at Masada?
So anyway, no attacks (or defense) against an overpowering enemy is not an Islam-only thing.
Um, I’m not sure how. It’s not like kamikaze had some meaning beyond the 1281 typhoon that destroyed the Mongol invasion force. The kamikaze was just a nickname given to special suicide attack squads that had more to do with the Japanese willingness to fight to the death and kill as many enemies as possible before dying than any twisted notion of the divine wind.
Suicide is also a sin in Islam. The reason that there isn’t a history of suicide bombings in Christian history is that there isn’t a history of suicide bombings as a common tactic in ANY culture until WWII with the Japanese and then the 1980s in Lebanon.
Yes, to the latter. Although the martyr thing is really just a way for the superiors to convince the soldiers to do it. The reason for suicide bombings is that it is an excellent assymetrical warfare tactic. Going head to head with the enemy in a fair fight would be suicidal for most of the practitioners of suicide bombings, so they seek a tactic that maximizes the enemy’s losses while minimizing their own. In return for the loss of one bomber, the enemy hopefully inflicts 5 or 6 or 30 deaths on the enemy, which is a better ratio than they could get otherwise.
I want to echo** Neurotik **here. The suicide bomber is the poor man’s smart bomb. It’s a way to overcome, in a limited way, the enemy’s huge technological edge over you. It just happens that some of the more notable “asymmetric” conflicts where suicide bombing has been used – Israel and Iraq – are taking place in the Islamic world.
Toadspittle, thank you for that very informative post. Those statistics are…sobering, to say the least. Too bad nobody in Washington is paying the slighest bit of attention to them.
Americans at Bastogne and Jews at Masade were fighting armed forces. Suicide bombers in Iraq, Gaza, and Israel are, for the most part, killing civilians — often their own countrymen (and -women and -children).
“When the Belgian War of Independence broke out van Speyk gained an appointment as commander of a gunboat. Van Speyk despised the Belgian independence movement. He announced once he would rather die “than become an infamous Brabander”. On February 5 1831, a gale caused his boat to drift into the quay at the port of Antwerp. Belgians stormed the boat and demanded Van Speyk take the Dutch flag down. Rather than doing so, he fired a pistol (some versions say he threw a lit cigar — few firsthand witness accounts survive) into a barrel of gunpowder while saying “Dan liever de lucht in” (which translates very freely as, “I’d sooner blow myself up”). The total number of casualties he caused remains unknown: possibly tens of people.”
*Grenville’s most famous adventure came in 1591, when he sailed back to the Azores with Lord Thomas Howard and a squadron of the queen’s ships, to try and capture home-bound Spanish treasure ships. Philip II of Spain sent a huge squadron of war ships to challenge them, and the English, outnumbered and with many men lying sick on shore, were forced to retreat. Either through ill-luck or defiance, Grenville’s ship, the Revenge, was late leaving harbour and was surrounded. He held out for 15 hours, damaging 15 Spanish ships, before ordering his crew to blow up the Revenge. They surrendered instead. *
It wouldn’t be surprising if at least a few of the radical Islamic terrorism groups felt some sort of connection to the Cult of Assassins of about 1000 years ago. For starters, they both have about the same tenuous connection to Islam.
The Assassins used the name fedayeen for themselves, which apparently means ‘one willing to give his life for the cause’. This word was also used by Palestinian suicide bombers who began attacks shortly after the establishment of Israel. More recently, Saddam Fedayeen was name given to the ‘death squads’ run alternately by Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay.
Suicide bombing, however, was not a tactic of the Assassins. Much as with the current meaning of the word, they selected particular and usually politically important targets. They also took did not make any attempt to harm anyone else involved, in sharp contrast to modern terrorists.
They did make their attacks in such a way as to heighten fears of them. A typical attack might involve a sudden rush to the person and stabbing in a public place (think Jack Ruby). They fully expected to be killed, even immediately, but did not commit suicide as such. This terror aspect is about the only thing in common with those who might claim spiritual kinship with them.
Angua isn’t likely to appreciate the implication that Isma’lis, their modern descendents, are only tenuously Islamic.
The Wikipedia article seems rather tendentious on this point - or at least very sloppily worded. What’s objectively true is that their Muslim non-Nizari contemporaries repeatedly condemned them as heretics, while the Nizaris themselves maintained that they were not. Modern scholarship usually accepts their self-identification as Muslim; to take the obvious example, the subtitle of Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam is rather deliberate.
One has to be careful about the terminology here. Fida’i was not a name for Nizaris in general, it being restricted to those who were actually carrying out the assassinations.
The Staff Report on the subject does a better job than Wikipedia.