Muslims play games with words to justify suicide attacks.
BY AMIR TAHERI


As President Bush and Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, met in Washington yesterday, the latest mass murder rocked Tel Aviv. A blast in a pool hall killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 57 others. So, will the Palestinian who here turned himself into a walking agent of destruction be regarded by his people as a "suicide bomber," a "terrorist" or a "martyr"?

Many in the West assume that the Muslim world has already answered by honoring the human bombs as "martyrs." And the chorus of voices from the Muslim world does support that assumption. Foreign ministers from 57 Muslim countries met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this month with the stated intention of defining terrorism and distancing Islam from terror. Instead, they ended up endorsing the suicide bombers.

Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, says he would accept the suicide of even 10% of Muslims in a nuclear war to wipe Israel off the map. Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has described the bombers as "innocent blossoms of martyrdom." Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia's ambassador in London and also a poet, has praised the human bombs as a model for Muslim youth in an ode. Ismail Abushanab, the Hamas leader in Gaza, says that 10,000 Palestinians should die while killing 100,000 Israelis as part of a strategy to "put the Jews on the run." And Saddam Hussein says the suicide bombers are "reviving Islam."

Many Arab television channels have enlisted their resources in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, presenting self-styled sheikhs who use sophistry to bestow religious authority on a cynical political strategy. But even these apologists of terror find it difficult to justify the bombers in terms of Islamic ethics.

The first difficulty they face is that Islam expressly forbids suicide. Islamic ethics underlines five "unpardonable sins": cannibalism, murder, incest, rape and suicide. The rationale is that these are evil deeds that cannot be undone. To avoid such awkwardness, the apologists of terror recently abandoned the term entehari ("suicidal") which was coined for human bombs when they first appeared in Lebanon in 1983.

The apologists also know that they cannot use the term shahid for the men who self-detonate in civilian areas. This is a complex term. Although it also means "martyr," it must not be confused with the Christian concept of martyrdom. In Islam, Allah himself is the first shahid, meaning "witness," to the unity of creation. The word indicates that individuals cannot decide to become martyrs--that choice belongs only to God.

But this is a lofty honor. There are no more than a dozen or so "shahids" in the history of Islam--people who fell in loyal battle in defense of the faith, not in pursuit of political goals. By becoming shahid they bore testimony to the truth of God's message. The Palestinian teenager who says in video-recorded testament that he or she has decided to become a martyr is, in fact, challenging one of Allah's prerogatives.

To get around the semantics, terror's apologists now use the word etsesh'had, which literally means "affidavit." As a neologism, it means conducting "martyr-like" operations. Thus "martyr-like," the ersatz in place of the real, is used to circumvent the impossibility of regarding suicide bombers as martyrs in Islam.

Muslims who implicitly condone terror know they cannot smuggle a new concept into Islamic ethics, where human activities are divided into six categories along a spectrum of good and evil. Most activities fall into a gray area, half of which is described as mobah (acceptable though not praiseworthy), the other half as makruh (acceptable though best avoided).

Suicide bombing falls within the category that is forbidden (haram). To change its status as a concept, its supporters must give a definition (ta'rif), spell out its rules (ahkam), fix its limits (hodoud), find its place in jurisprudence (shar'e) and common law (urf). Such an undertaking would require a large measure of consensus (ijma'a) among the believers, something the prophets of terror will never secure. And not a single reputable theologian anywhere has endorsed the new trick word estesh'had, though some have spoken with forked tongues. The reason is not hard to see.


Islam forbids human sacrifice. The greatest Islamic festival is the Eid al-Adha which marks the day God refused Abraham's offer to sacrifice his firstborn and, instead, substituted a lamb. A god who refuses human sacrifice for his cause can hardly sanction the same to promote the strategies of Mr. Abushanab, or Yasser Arafat. Islam also rejects the crucifixion of Christ because it cannot accept that God would claim human sacrifice in atonement of men's sins.

Some, like Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, present suicide bombings as acts of individual desperation. This is disingenuous. One of the girls who blew herself up, murdering almost a dozen Israelis, had been recruited at 14 and brainwashed for two years. Mounting a suicide operation needs planning, logistics, surveillance, equipment, money and postoperation publicity--in short, an organization.

But then, the recruiters never use their own children. No one related by blood to the leaders of Hamas or Islamic Jihad has died in suicide bombings.

Arafat's wife, Suha, says she would offer her son for suicide attacks. Mrs. Arafat, however, has no son, only a daughter, living with her in Paris. It is always someone else's child who must die.

Mr. Taheri is author of "The Cauldron: Middle East Behind the Headlines" (Hutchinson, 1988).

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