Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim ‘Human Bombers (original) (raw)

To understand Muslim ‘human bombers’, we obviously must see them within the discourse of jihad, but also within that of ‘sacrifices’ and ‘gifts’. .rom this perspective, ‘human bombers’ act because of their social relationships – whether these are with other human beings or with divine persons, conditions, or states of affairs. ‘Human bombings’ are not, therefore, simply matters of utilitarian military tactics, but are also religious and social as gifts, martyrdoms and sacrifices. As ‘sacrifices’, contemporary ‘human bombers’ deviate from the Muslim norm of the sacrificial restraint exemplified by Abraham, and conform instead to a new extremist view of sacrifice as total annihilation. The way we ‘talk the talk’ sometimes conforms to the way we ‘walk the walk’; the way we think about things sometimes determines how we will act. The heavy artillery of political and religious rhetoric is routinely wheeled into place alongside the machinery of military combat. Thus, whether it is the world of the latest intifada or that of post-9/11, the struggle to control the discourse about these conflicts is just as fiercely contested on the battlefield of language and concept as are the material struggles related to them. In the pages of this publication, Raphael Israeli has argued correctly that careful use of terminology is therefore ‘not a matter of mere semantics, but of great importance in order to discern notions and mindsets and their significance’; 1 I agree. In thinking about al-Qaeda, for example, it is vital that we think about them in ways that illuminate what they do and are. Should they be thought of as hijackers and murderers, suicides and fanatics, or as martyrs, saints, sacrifices, and ‘gifts’? 2 And, what of the Palestinian bombers? Are they also martyrs or suicides, sacrifice, homicide, ‘gifts’ and/or what Raphael Israeli calls them in the quest for a neutral designation – ‘human bombers’? 3 This article attempts to assess conceptual issues thrown up by naming the particular phenomena that Israeli calls ‘human bombs’. It proposes that we need to pay greater attention to the ‘sacrificial’ designations of these ‘human bombings’ as made by Muslims and which are rooted in Islamic discourse. This is done not in the interests of celebrating the acts of the ‘human bombers’, but for the sake of understanding them better. When we