Dead for Good

Martyrdom and the Rise of the Suicide Bomber

Hugh D. Barlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"An easily accessible account of the development of martyrdom...Barlow presents a masterful account of how religion, death and sacrifice developed into the cult of martyrdom of today." Mia Bloom, University of Georgia and author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror "Thoroughly researched, yet full of novel-like gripping narratives, this book succeeds in giving the reader a glimpse of what might happen in the mind of candidates to "martyrdom" while never loosing sight of the overall context that brings this phenomenon into being, and fuels it." Gilbert Achcar, author of The Clash of Barbarisms "Hugh Barlow is a gifted writer. In this book he uses his skills as a renowned sociologist to bring the reader a refreshing and engaging analysis...This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in understanding martyrdom operations from a broad historical and cultural perspective." Ami Pedahzur, University of Texas at Austin Dead for Good vividly describes how history gave rise to the suicide bombers of today. The passionate submission of ancient Jewish and Christian martyrs was largely supplanted by militant self-sacrifice as Islam spread and holy war erupted in the Crusades. In the Indian Punjab, the Khalsa Sikhs made warrior-martyrdom an instinct and policy in their defense of community and of justice. In a last-ditch effort to defeat the Allies in World War II, the Japanese transformed warrior-martyrs into martyr-warriors trained to sacrifice themselves in attacks on enemy carriers. The current suicide bomber is the latest phase: Whether motivated by nationalism, religious ideology, or a combination of both, the new "predatory" martyr dies for the cause while killing indiscriminately. Exploring martyrdom across cultures and throughout history, this book gives us new insights into today's suicide bombers and answers the common question "Why do they do it?"

Part I
The Martyrs of Antiquity

The condemned man waved the women and children from the room. He asked the servant to fetch the jailer, who soon came in bearing a cup of hemlock. The man took the cup from the jailer’s hand. The gathered friends protested and begged the old man to delay, but he would not. He cheerfully downed the poison and called on the gods to hasten his passage to the next world. Heeding the jailer’s advice, the old man walked around to speed the poison’s work. When his legs grew heavy he lay down, pulling the bedsheet about him. As death grew near, he pulled the sheet over his face.

So died Socrates, dignified and in charge. The place was Athens, Greece, in the year 399 BCE. Here was a man accused of corrupting young minds and showing irreverence to the gods, a crime punishable by death. A respectful and contrite demeanor might have saved him, but a defiant Socrates purposely chided and embarrassed the jury. He reminded them of their own ignorance and their misguided pursuit of wealth rather than truth. The jury pronounced Socrates guilty and sentenced him to death. Although Athenian law allowed the condemned to request exile, Socrates rejected that alternative. There was no dignity in it, and, besides, he had lived his life in Athens so Athens was where he would die. Even when his friend and disciple Crito offered to arrange his escape, Socrates refused to save himself. It was his time to die, or the gods would have given him a sign.

To many in the power elite of Athens, Socrates had long been an intellectual pest and a political liability, a thorn in the side of those favored by the status quo. The poet Meletus was among them, and it was Meletus who eventually authored the charges against Socrates. In the words of historian Lacey Baldwin Smith, all the props necessary for his arrest and conviction were there: personal animosity, civic paranoia, and political revenge.¹ A recent plague, costly wars, political intrigue, and growing social unrest had been sapping the strength of the great city and threatening its security. Its leaders found a convenient scapegoat in the annoying and blasphemous old philosopher.

Yet as Socrates himself admitted, he had made no attempt to appease his enemies; quite the contrary, in fact. As he had for forty years, he continued to challenge prevailing doctrine and scoffed at the intellectual abilities of its defenders. He likened himself to a pesky horsefly appointed by the gods to arouse, persuade, and reprove the citizens of Athens. During his defense he advised jurors to spare him, not for his sake but for their own: “If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place.”² Even though Socrates called the trial an “accident,” he knew that sooner or later the law would be used against him. He did not expect the jury to heed his advice, and he told them so. As his final hours approached, Socrates was cool, a seventy-year-old sage ready for death and “the joys of the blessed” in the next world.

In Plato’s writings about Socrates’ life and death we see elements that will become defining features of martyrdom in antiquity. One theme is found in the seemingly contradictory idea that a martyr’s death is both active and passive. Socrates had a direct hand in the events leading to his death, a result that he anticipated and accepted. He even shaped how death itself played out, manipulating the actions of adversaries and friends alike. At the end he chose a dignified, even contented, submission to the inevitable: no resistance, no flight. Socrates also suggested that the gods would have intervened if his death were not meant to be. They would not have let their servant die unless the time was right. So perhaps there was a divine hand and purpose in his death.

Active submission and notions of divine will and purpose were not the only themes elaborated by martyrdom in antiquity. Unlike the elderly Socrates, most martyrs of antiquity faced a terrifying death, usually preceded by torture. The martyrs were often young, as well, making their submission all the more extraordinary. To cap it off, the martyrs of antiquity were almost always given a last chance at life: They could renounce their allegiance or faith and live. They never did, of course, which underscores the voluntary nature of their deaths.

All this made martyrs newsworthy. Common people were awed by martyr stories because they were so extraordinary, so incomprehensible. They could not imagine doing it themselves, yet by passing on the stories they seemingly shared in the martyrdom itself. Perhaps the martyr was the hero they wanted to be, giving life selflessly to the cause. But heroes do not necessarily want to die, whereas martyrs seemingly choose death happily. If this was the aspect of martyrdom that most people found incomprehensible, the stories addressed it with this simple idea: There is a reward awaiting the martyr that is more valuable than anything found among the living. Socrates imagined an eternity discussing philosophy with history’s greatest minds. The Jewish and Christian martyrs of antiquity, whose stories take up the next two chapters, imagined resurrection in the eternal glory of God.

Chapter 1
The Passionate Witness

Around the time Socrates was calling on fellow Greeks to forsake material wealth and join his divine quest for truth, the Jews of Palestine were slowly recovering from a string of tragedies. These had begun two centuries earlier with their exile to Babylon, in modern-day Iraq, following the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s great temple in 586 BCE. The covenant between God and His Chosen People set the Jews apart. The Jews believed in the One God, Yahweh. The faithful were required to obey His law as revealed to Moses and to follow strict rituals, including male circumcision and various dietary laws. Perhaps because the Babylonians had many gods—65,000 according to one count—the exiled Jews were allowed to practice their religion (what’s one more god?), and many historical books of the Hebrew Bible, Christianity’s Old Testament, were written during this time.

It is in a biblical story of the Jewish exile in Babylon that ideas about martyrdom as religious witness first took shape. The book of Daniel¹ recounts the adventures of the captive Jew Daniel and his three young friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had been given court appointments after Daniel cleverly deciphered the king’s dreams. The story tells of the time the king built a golden idol ninety feet high and demanded his subjects worship it or be killed. True to their own God, the three young Jews refused to worship the idol, an affront that soon came to the king’s attention. An angry Nebuchadnezzar ordered them to worship the idol or be thrown into a blazing furnace. He taunted them: “Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?”

The king had unwittingly put himself in a no-win situation, as the friends’ response made clear. “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Daniel 3:17–18). Astounded by this impertinence and determined to save face, the furious king ordered his soldiers to heat the furnace seven times hotter than usual. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were then bound together and thrown in.

A few minutes later a stunned Nebuchadnezzar saw the three Jews emerge from the flames unharmed. Even their clothes were untouched. He was so impressed that he decreed death for anyone who spoke ill of the Hebrew God. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were rewarded with promotions in the king’s court. In one of the few clear biblical statements on martyrdom as religious witness, the author of Daniel then gives the point of the story: “They trusted in him [God] and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God” (Daniel 3:28; italics added).

The would-be martyrs had shown their mettle and their devotion to God. But in this story God was not ready for them to die; divine intervention saved Daniel’s friends just as it had stayed the hand of Abraham centuries before. Despite their willingness to die for their beliefs, the sacrifice was not consummated.

The story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego reasserted the long-standing biblical theme that God has a hand and purpose in the life and death of His servants. Although referring to pagan gods, Plato suggested the same idea in his story of Socrates’ death. What better way to demonstrate the authority of any god than over life and death? Abraham submitted, as did Moses, Samson, Saul, and Jonah. Elijah was taken away by God. Some prominent biblical figures, Moses, Elijah, and Job among them, pleaded unsuccessfully with God to take them before it was their time, before He was ready. Daniel helped make divine will or compulsion a core theme of the martyr’s story.

Four hundred years later, around the time the book of Daniel was actually written, another group of Jews showed their mettle and devotion to God. They, too, refused to obey the orders of a king. But the story of these Jews had a different ending—they died for their beliefs. These martyrs came to be known as the Holy Maccabees. Their story begins with the return of the Jews from exile.

Solomon, son of King David, had built his temple to God on Mount Moriah, a peak among a ridge of hills where God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22:1–2). Known as the Temple Mount, no place was (or is) more sacred to Jews. Rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem was thus their first priority when the Hebrews, led by Zerubbabel, returned to Palestine in 538 BCE following the conquest of Babylon by Persian king Cyrus the Great. Over the next two hundred years, the Jews fortified the city of Jerusalem, as well as their commitment to Yahweh and His law. No matter how dreadful the trials and punishments visited on them, faithful Jews believed that they would enjoy the final triumph of God’s Chosen People—destruction of their enemies and their own collective resurrection.

But the Jews were not to be free of trials and tribulations anytime soon. The next great test began with the appearance of Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, son of Philip II and Olympias. Upon his father’s assassination by a jilted homosexual lover, Alexander inherited a full-time modernized army, the finest fighting machine the world had seen. The young warrior took a mere four years to wrest the Persian empire from King Darius III, which he finally accomplished in 331 BCE at the battle of Gaugamela, near the modern-day Kurdish capital of Irbil, Iraq. Eventually, Alexander’s own empire would stretch from Macedonia and Greece south to Egypt, and east through Mesopotamia and Persia all the way to India. He built the great city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile and was declared pharaoh by the Egyptians. The region of Judah and its jewel, Jerusalem, now lay at the crossroads of Greek, Persian, and Egyptian influence.

Less than ten years later and still planning great exploits, the thirty-two-year-old king was enjoying himself at a drinking party when he became ill. Within days Alexander the Great was dead, probably poisoned, though nobody knows for sure. His vast empire was divided among his generals. Seleucus took control of Syria and the Asian territories taken from Persia; Ptolemy took Egypt, bringing Alexander’s body back with him for burial in Alexandria. Antipater became king of Macedonia and conquered Greece, ending democracy there and the so-called Classical Greek era. After continuous warfare among Alexander’s successors and their heirs over five generations, Judah eventually came under the rule of Antiochus III, a descendant of Seleucus.

This history is important because the Greek, or Hellenistic, influence on Egypt and the region we now call the Middle East was profound. As time passed, many Jews succumbed to its attractions, especially the emphasis on cultural integration and religious tolerance. Intermarriages increased among Jews, Persians, and Greeks. Some Jews even rejected circumcision and began eating forbidden foods. The Greeks, Thomas Cahill suggests, would have been pleased at this: “To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters—which were not all that important, anyway—was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious.”²

But compromise requires tolerance. In the unending battle for control of ideas and values, tolerance is often interpreted as a sign of weakness. Leaders worry that they will be taken advantage of, so they become less tolerant of differences and they take more active measures to ensure compliance with the doctrine they support. Antiochus IV Epiphanes (“the Illustrious”), who reigned from 175 to 163 BCE, is a case in point. Antiochus decided that the more or less voluntary embrace of Hellenism by many Jews was not enough. He sought absolute loyalty. To emphasize the point, Antiochus declared himself “God manifest” and abolished the Law of Moses, along with circumcision, observation of the Sabbath, and the prohibition against Jews eating pork. To prove their loyalty, citizens were ordered to sacrifice pigs to the god Zeus and then to eat the meat of the slaughtered pigs. Jews who refused to obey the new decrees faced torture and execution. In his monumental history of the Jewish people, Antiquities of the Jews, the Roman-Jewish author Flavius Josephus described how men were crucified alive, their wives put to the sword and children strangled. Circumcised boys were hanged from the necks of their crucified fathers, infants from the necks of their mothers. The rebuilt Temple, so precious to Jews, was turned into a pagan shrine.

History does not record the identities of all those tortured and killed under Antiochus IV, or how many there were. But fear must have run deep among Jews, and it is easy to imagine that many chose life for themselves and their families. Even some devout Jews would have wavered, there being no future in mass suicide. Yet out of persecution, legends arise over time that help to revitalize the flagging spirits and faith of people living under oppression. And so it was that stories emerged about this period in Jewish history that showed the triumph of faith over evil. But these stories also contained something new: They spoke explicitly of heavenly rewards for martyrs, even though the sacred Torah—the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy)—makes no mention of an afterlife. So the motivation and justification for any suicidal violation of Antiochus’s decrees were difficult to reconcile with Jewish teachings. Unless, that is, ideas about martyrdom were modified to accommodate some notion of vindication through death. What greater vindication could there be than this: Death on God’s behalf leads to immortality; death is reversed through resurrection in heavenly glory. It was no longer adequate simply to suggest that divine compulsion is at work in the martyr’s act. Martyrdom now became a way to acquire life.

The legendary martyrdom of the Jewish Maccabees reflects this evolution in the idea of martyrdom. The stories were written over a period of nearly three hundred years as part of the books of Maccabees. These books were added to the Septuagint, the original Greek version of the Old Testament translated from Hebrew by Greek-speaking Jews living in Egypt. Many Jews, perhaps including Jesus, used the Septuagint side by side with the Hebrew version. It was later translated into Latin and used by the developing Christian church for nearly four hundred years. The martyrdom of the Holy Maccabees, as they came to be known, was as familiar to early Christians as it was to Jews. And the message was as powerful as it was simple: Salvation comes through suffering for God.

The story begins with Mattathias Maccabeus, a Jewish priest from the town of Modein, near Jerusalem. Mattathias refused to obey the laws of Antiochus IV. Outraged by the acquiescence and infidelity of many Israelites, Maccabeus killed a Jew who was taking part in a Greek sacrifice and also the royal officer responsible for enforcing the new decree. He then fled to the mountains outside Lydda with his five sons where he was joined by many other Hasidim—men who were strict adherents to Jewish law. The Hasidim waged a guerrilla war against the king. After his death, Mattathias’s son, Judas Maccabeus, lead the Hasidim to victory over a Syrian army sent to destroy him; he occupied Jerusalem as high priest and ruler of Judah, and he reconsecrated the Temple in 165 BCE. The exploits of Judas Maccabeus have been celebrated by Jews and Christians for thousands of years; his story is the subject of an oratorio by eighteenth-century composer George F. Handel, better known today for his Messiah, and the reconsecration of the Temple is celebrated by Jews during Hanukkah. The Talmud, the immense written interpretation of the Torah, says that Maccabeus could find only enough oil in the Temple to keep a light burning for one day, but the light burned for eight.

At some point during the early days of the uprising against Antiochus, an elderly Jewish scribe named Eleazar and a devout mother (named Hannah centuries later) and her seven sons were arrested, probably at different times. They were tortured and executed. There are no eyewitness accounts, so the various versions in the books of Maccabees consist of stories written long after the events took place. They were passed down orally from generation to generation, undoubtedly embellished along the way.

Like Socrates two hundred years before them, the devout Maccabees stood firm in the face of death, sure of their beliefs and way of life. There was no turning back, no denial of the one true God. Given the choice of life or death, in the spirit of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, they chose death rather than deny their faith. But unlike the quiet, almost gentle passing of Socrates, the Maccabees faced a brutal public execution. Eleazar was bent over a whipping drum, where he was beaten mercilessly, then burned and forced to swallow noxious liquid through the nose. The legend held that Eleazar repeated his love for Yahweh throughout the ordeal and died saying he was “glad to suffer”³ the punishment. The second book of Maccabees says that Eleazar “welcomed death with honor rather than life with pollution” (2 Macc. 6:19).

Antiochus offered a way out if Hannah and her seven sons would “share in the Greek way.” The offer was clear: renounce your faith and live. When the offer was contemptuously rejected, the killing ordeal began. The executioners first tore out the eldest son’s tongue, then scalped him, severed his han...