Women Suicide Bombers

V. G. Julie Rajan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136760204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

This book offers an evaluation of female suicide bombers through postcolonial, Third World, feminist, and human-rights framework, drawing on case studies from conflicts in Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya, among others.

Women Suicide Bombers explores why cultural, media and political reports from various geographies present different information about and portraits of the same women suicide bombers. The majority of Western media and sovereign states engaged in wars against groups deploying bombings tend to focus on women bombers' abnormal mental conditions; their physicality-for example, their painted fingernails or their beautiful eyes; their sexualities; and the various ways in which they have been victimized by their backward Third World cultures, especially by "Islam." In contrast, propaganda produced by rebel groups deploying women bombers, cultures supporting those campaigns, and governments of those nations at war with sovereign states and Western nations tend to project women bombers as mythical heroes, in ways that supersedes the martyrdom operations of male bombers.

Many of the books published on this phenomenon have revealed interesting ways to read women bombers' subjectivities, but do not explore the phenomenon of women bombers both inside and outside of their militant activities, or against the patriarchal, Orientalist, and Western feminist cultural and theoretical frameworks that label female bombers primarily as victims of backward cultures. In contrast, this book offers a corrective lens to the existing discourse, and encourages a more balanced evaluation of women bombers in contemporary conflict.

This book will be of interest to students of terrorism, gender studies and security studies in general.

1 Mad, suicidal, and mentally
challenged

On June 29, 1996, PKK¹ woman bomber Zeynap Kinaci imploded herself while reciting the Turkish National Anthem, killing 10. In several letters written to the women's wing of the PKK and to the Patriotic People of Kurdistan and Revolutionary Public Opinion, she stated:

I shout to the whole world. Hear me, open your eyes. We are the children of a people that has had their country taken away and has been scattered to the four corners of the world. We want to live in freedom in our own land like human beings. Blood, tears, and tyranny must no longer be the destiny of our people. We long for peace, fraternity, love, humanity, nature and life more than anyone. We do not want to cause war, to die or to kill. But there is no other way of gaining our freedom. It is the imperialist powers and their lackey, the Turkish state, which are responsible for the war.²

In March 2003, a woman introducing herself as “Um Osama” (mother of Osama) noted she was the “leader of the women mujahideen of Al Qaeda,” the women's suicide bomber wing for Al Qaeda. In an email interview with the Saudi-based Asharq Al-Awsat, she stated:

We are preparing for the new strike announced by our leaders and I declare that it will make America forget […] the Sept 11 attacks in 2001. […] Our female fighters are training to use weapons such as the Kalashnikov, grenades and assault rifles. Besides martyr operations, our mission is to provide logistical support to the mujahideen and intelligence on the hypocrites wanted by the mujahideen. We intend to set up training camps in areas where there are large numbers of female mujahideen such as the Arabian peninsula […]. Our nation will not rest without revenge. We will avenge our brothers.³

Women bombers and militants have made comparable statements in other war situations. Those statements reveal that the women were able to understand the political context and the current events of the political struggle for which they imploded themselves; could distinguish between notions of peace and violence, as well as between the pain of their people and the pain of those they violated through their missions; and had a clear understanding and ability to articulate components of the military weapons and tactics used in war, as well as an ability to negotiate present technologies of communication. The women's statements present a mental ability to articulate and to negotiate their missions not as random actions, but as systematic, logical, and, most critically, justifiable in the name of freedom.

Yet dominant media, cultural, and academic narratives (see the Introduction) – particularly those rooted in the West and affiliated with sovereign nations engaged in conflicts with women suicide bombers (heretofore referenced as “Western nations” and “sovereign states,” or re-arrangements of those same terms) – have represented women bombers in ways that question their mental condition and political consciousness. Although male suicide bombers have been depicted as mentally unstable by scholars such as the Israeli Ariel Merari, women, in comparison, have been projected as particularly emotionally and mentally unstable, as excessive forms of social deviance. Those perspectives may be attributed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial theories about the deviant nature of women in general, and of non-European, native women in particular. They underscore present Western perceptions about women in Third World spaces, from which most women bombers surface and sovereign state ascriptions to those perspectives. This chapter draws upon colonial and feminist theories and cultural studies to present a theoretical framework that may be significant to understanding present Western and sovereign state (mis)conceptions about women suicide bombers, and what drives the consistency of those misconceptions.

The chapter opens with an overview of how present Western ideologies about terrorism resonate heavily with colonial views about the non-Western, native, and, particularly, Muslim populaces it colonized as deviant. This first section explores how colonial assumptions were reinforced by philosophical and so-called scientific investigations carried out in Europe and the Americas during the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries – a period known as the Era of Scientific Racism. That analysis concludes by considering how Western perceptions of suicide have informed Western representations about terrorism, namely about suicide bombers. Those broad investigations provide a solid foundation for the second section of this chapter, which explores how Western and other sovereign state perceptions of women-initiated suicide bombings as particularly deviant turn on patriarchal ideologies about the subversive nature of women. Those biases are examined in the following narrative patterns: women bombers as mad and monstrous entities, as suicidal and depressed, and as mentally inept, naïve, and even unconscious of what they are doing.

The “native” Other: race, religion, and terrorism

This section examines how colonial notions of race and religion have impacted Western interpretations of the motivations behind, and the effects of, male suicide bombings in contemporary global politics. I open by assessing how Western Orientalist views of and tensions with, particularly, the Islamic Other affect prevailing Western assumptions about links between Islam and terrorism. Subsequent sections interrogate Christian attitudes toward suicide and sacrifice, as well as the Western tendency to decontextualize, or even to dismiss as inconsequential, the political contexts that surface suicide bombings. The final portion of this section evaluates historic Western perceptions of suicide bombers as the ultimate symbol of deviance, immorality, and evil, to the point of monstrosity and madness.

Orientalism and “The White Man's Burden”

In considering the mental “condition” of suicide bombers in general, a number of texts offer perspectives that resonate with Western Orientalist colonial ideologies about the native Other. By the eighteenth century, white European colonizers sought a means by which to control their native subjects to sustain colonialism. At the same time, European philosophers became increasingly interested in locating the rightful place of human beings among the life forms they were routinely discovering through colonial ventures. Much of European society practiced Christianity, and, as such, the colonial ideologies were heavily guided by Western appropriations of Christian doctrine. Europeans focused on the ideology of the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy that sorted all living creatures according European perceptions about their mental capacities, spiritual caliber, and, hence, inherent morality. In the Chain, humans were placed above all other beings, and therefore were considered to be the closest to God, the most mentally stable, and the most moral of all creatures. Yet Europeans found it perplexing to differentiate among human beings. Among the different creatures that could be recognized as human (specifically with reference to race, gender, and sexuality), who should be placed above whom? And, moreover, how could the superiority of one human above another be proven?

From the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, European scientists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts tackled those questions in what became known as the Era of Scientific Racism. The name of that era is fitting, as European findings of that time were heavily guided by a desire to maintain the colonial enterprise, and therefore affected beliefs concerning the racial superiority of Europeans over natives. The colonial enterprise depended on the subjugation of native peoples. As such, white Europeans increasingly ascribed to an Orientalist image of non-Western peoples, which was premised on Western colonial culture's ability to imagine, reproduce, and therefore reduce the non-Western peoples and spaces it colonized to fit its limited views about Western vis-à-vis native peoples, cultures, and geographies.⁴ Those beliefs stressed native peoples not only as different from but also as hierarchically below European peoples in terms of human development.

Orientalism surfaced theories such as “The White Man's Burden,” which underscored the moral duty of Europeans to civilize non-whites. The core tenets of “The White Man's Burden” resonated with the Christian doctrine of needing to save people, here from their savage selves, by bringing them into the moral, civilized order of the Christian religion and the cultures which practiced it. Consequently, civilizing the natives included converting them to Christianity, and also physically and psychologically controlling them to regulate their unwieldy native instincts, even using excessive violence.⁵ Orientalism also supported the Era of Scientific Racism, where Europeans initiated “scientific” investigations to classify human value on a global scale. That value was gauged by evaluating the significance of differences in the physicality and mental aptitudes between Europeans and the non-Europeans they colonized. That significance was measured by investigating the physical body of the native Other, which symbolized the counter, the deviant, the pathologic body, in comparison to the “normal” human being signified by the European. Focusing on the look of and material nature of the body inextricably linked deviance to the native, presenting evidence of their improper, incorrect humanity.

Studies were enacted on the black race, for investigations into those with the “darkest” skin would provide an index whereby to shape comparable ideologies about all other humans of color. Most notable of investigations were those of nineteenth-century historian Johann Jakob Bachofen. Bachofen associated the black race with the image of the swamp. Through that metaphor, he projected the black race with ideas of the primitive, animal-like tendencies, and disease.⁶ Other “scientific” analyses rationalized that the black skin color of Africans was an anomaly that presented congenital leprosy and syphilis.⁷ Collectively, these and numerous other “rational” investigations firmly identified the black race as the locus of a range of “evils” imagined to haunt European society.

Accordingly, natives were identified by their irrationality and excessive forms of madness. Those views are exemplified by the colonial phrase “going native,” which speaks to colonial fears about the degeneration of white men contaminated by behaviors and desires of native populaces. The term speaks to European anxieties about intersexual relations between colonizers and colonized, which contaminate the “pure stock” of Europeans. The term also references colonial fears of participating in native ceremonies, or partaking in local food, clothing, etc.⁸ Because native desires and cultures signified all forms of human deviance, when white men “went native” they were, in fact, going insane, losing control over their minds, going mad, reflecting a condition that was deviant from the standard norm of human beings.⁹ That belief in the contagious nature of native deviance only reinforced the European classification all non-Western peoples as sub-human, as human aberrations tending toward the monstrous, in contrast to Europeans, who presented the epitome of human evolution.

Colonial anxieties about native deviance undergirded anxieties about the “insurgent” native male, or native tendencies to resist colonization and to present an agency that was unsanctioned to natives in the colonial social architecture. Those fears are evidenced in British responses to the Indian Mutiny in 1857, which took place in the then British-colonized space of India.¹⁰ During the Mutiny, Indian soldiers in northern India who served in the British colonial army revolted against the British in Northern India to protest against colonialism. Unlike previous uprisings against colonial powers, this incident involved some native attacks against British women in the form of sexual violence. Jenny Sharpe observes that the British interpreted that sexual violence as affecting the native emasculation of British men, and how, in the British imaginary, fears of emasculation soon characterized the nature of the entire Mutiny. The Mutiny exaggerated existing colonial fears about native tendencies toward insurgency and violence, which, if not dealt with violently and immediately, could destabilize what the British construed to be their natural, God-given right to rule over the natives – hence, the natural order of the Universe.¹¹

Most suicide attacks are executed in geographies that have experienced or continue to experience some form of colonialism, as noted in the Introduction. Interestingly, historic colonial biases concerning the mental aptitudes of non-Western peoples resonate with present Western and sovereign state speculations about suicide bombers in contemporary global politics. Those biases are intensified with regard to suicide bombers who are Muslim.

The Islamic Other

Historic tensions between Christianity and Islam impacted Western colonial beliefs about the Muslim populaces they colonized. Those perceptions continue to affect contemporary Western stereotypes about Islam, especially in relation to suicide terrorism, as explored.

Edward Said observed that present tensions between Christianity and Islam are rooted in the Crusades, where Christians and Muslims battled for control of the Holy Land between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.¹² Such ideologies qualified Christian–Muslim tensions by singling out Islam as a nemesis of Christianty, especially with regard to its shared religious myths and principles. Islam is an Abrahamic religion, and hence incorporates religious stories common to Judaism's Torah and Christianity's Biblical Old Testament, including those about Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Moses.¹³ Christianity regarded Islam as the only other monotheistic religion that was comparable, and therefore threatening, to Christianity in terms of its military, economic, and social presence globally. After the Prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam, died in 632 ad, Islam spread immensely. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Islam had impacted the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Sicily, Indonesia, China, and parts of France and India.¹⁴ Fearing the hegemony of Islam, Christian leaders tried to vehemently delegitimize Islam, especially among Christians residing in areas governed by Islamic rulers. In the seventh century, the administrator to the Muslim Caliph of Damascus and Christian theologian John of Damascus projected Islam as another type of heresy Christians had to battle – this even as Muslim rulers did not demand that their non-Muslim subjects convert to Islam.¹⁵ The threat that Islam posed to Christianity is ev...