Suicide bombers: the `just war' debate, Islamic style

Christian Century, August 14, 2002 by John Kelsay

TUCKED AWAY in an account of the Jewish resistance to Antiochus Epiphanes is the story of a hero's sacrifice. The Book of 1 Maccabees describes the prebattle scene. Jewish forces are encamped at Bethzechariah with the enemy directly opposite them, fully armed and ready to fight. As the Jewish soldiers watch, their counterparts prepare elephants--the heavy artillery of ancient warfare. Wooden towers are fastened onto elephants, with each tower bearing four armed men who will fight from this raised position. The army is a fearsome spectacle: "The sun shone on the shields of gold and brass, the hills were ablaze with them and gleamed like flaming torches.... All who heard the noise made by their multitude, by the marching of the multitude and the clanking of their arms, trembled, for the army was very large and strong."

Fighting ensues, and then a member of the Jewish resistance makes a move:

   Eleazar, called Avaran, saw that one of the animals was equipped with royal
   armor. It was taller than all the others, and he supposed that the king was
   on it. So he gave his life to save his people and to win for himself an
   everlasting name. He courageously ran into the midst of the phalanx to
   reach it; he killed men right and left, and they parted before him on both
   sides. He got under the elephant, stabbed it from beneath, and killed it;
   ... it fell to the ground upon him and he died. (1 Macc. 6:43-46)

Eleazar's action offers one of the enduring images of war. In giving his life for a cause, he also provides a context for discussing the suicide bombings that are now a feature of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. If we are to understand why Palestinians engage in such acts, we must begin with their categories. For many Palestinians, the bombers are not "suicides" but like Eleazar, "martyrs." And their actions are "martyrdom operations."

In this context, the important issues have less to do with the social-psychological dynamics of suicide and more to do with the concerns of military ethics. Martyrdom operations are tactics by which Palestinians attempt to engage an enemy militarily. As such, they must be evaluated in terms of the criteria of the just war tradition, or in Muslim terms, of the Shari`a provisions governing armed conflict.

On March 27, 2001, a Palestinian detonated explosives next to a bus in the French Hill sector of Jerusalem, killing himself and injuring 30 Israelis. The next day, another Palestinian did the same in Neve Yamin, killing himself and two Israeli teenagers. These incidents occurred in connection with the al-Aqsa intifada, which began in the fall of 2000. But they fit a pattern that began after the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords and has become ever more familiar. In these, as in most such attacks, responsibility was claimed by Hamas, which calls itself the specifically Islamic party within the larger Palestinian movement.

A month later, the highest-ranking official of the Saudi religious establishment questioned the legitimacy of such attacks. Fighting must be governed by the Shari`a, said Shaykh Abd al-Aziz bin Abdallah al-Shaykh, and he warned that the deaths of those who kill themselves "in the heart of the enemy's ranks" are "merely" suicides, and thus contravene God's command.

By appealing to the Shari`a, the Saudi scholar invoked well-established practices by which Muslims debate the rights and wrongs of particular acts. The term stands for the ideal way of living. Scholars like the shaykh are responsible for interpreting the Qur'an, the example of the Prophet, and precedents from prior generations in order to establish analogies between these sources and the questions of contemporary Muslims. The shaykh considered the practice of suicide bombings without precedent in Islam, and thus illegitimate.

Responding to this argument, Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, emphasized the importance of intention and argued that the "mentality of those who carry out [martyrdom operations] has nothing to do with the mentality of one who commits suicide." Suicide involves taking one's life for selfish reasons; those who die in the course of suicide attacks aimed at Israeli targets are anything but selfish, he argued. They sacrifice their lives for the sake of others. As Shaykh Qaradhawi put it, to speak of these acts as "suicide attacks" is misleading because they are really "heroic acts of martyrdom [that] have nothing to do with suicide." Instead of sinful contraventions, they are "the supreme form of struggle in the path of God."

Up to this point, Qaradhawi spoke for the majority of Muslim scholars. But the Shaykh al-Azhar responded by noting that "the suicide operations are classified as self-defense and are a kind of martyrdom, so long as the intention behind them is to kill the enemy's soldiers, and not women or children." The intention of a martyr, in other words, is understood in relation to the target that he (or more recently, she) attacks. Here, the highest authority in Egyptian Islam had in mind the saying of Muhammad: