Author: Marianne Bray
Publication: CNN News
Date: August 17, 2003
URL: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/08/17/martyr.culture/index.htm
When Bali bomber Amrozi was sentenced
to death by firing squad this month, he turned around, smiled broadly and
turned his two thumbs up in the air.
"It's a martyr's death I am looking
for," Amrozi said during his trial in Denpasar, following the October Bali
nightclub blasts.
The 40-year-old mechanic from a
village in East Java was happy because he had a chance of joining a growing
horde of Muslims from Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan willing to die as heroes
in the name of Islam.
While there are many reasons young
Muslims sacrifice their lives -- including the honor and money bestowed
onto their families after their death -- it is the martyr's afterlife that
captures the imagination.
In the late 1990s, Pakistani journalist
Nasra Hassan interviewed nearly 250 prospective bombers, their families,
as well as their trainers, from within militant Palestinian camps.
In remarkable accounts, members
of the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas described how potential bombers
came to believe that paradise was on the "other side of the detonator."
Candidates for martyrdom were told
the first drop of blood shed by a martyr washes away their sins. They could
select 70 of their nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and they would
have at their disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of paradise, Hassan
recounted in the New Yorker.
Indeed many of the statements written
by suicide bombers before they died spoke of a painless death that offered
the shortest path to such a Heaven.
The struggle
But Islamic law prohibits suicide
and the killing of innocents, and many bodies, such as Saudi Arabia's Council
of Senior Clerics, have said terror acts have no "religious grounds." (Saudi
clerics condemn terrorists)
A sacred pillar of Islam is the
jihad, or struggle. The greater part of the jihad is the struggle within
the soul to fight the devil inside, experts say, while the lesser jihad
is the fight against those who try to subjugate Muslims.
In 1998 Saudi-born militant Osama
bin Laden took the lesser struggle and declared a jihad on America, claiming
Muslims were under attack.
U.S. troops were occupying sacred
Saudi soil, the Americans were supporting Israel and Islam needed to be
defended, he said.
Suicide attacks were seen as the
deadliest arsenal for this "Holy War", a weapon that could not only penetrate
"enemy territory" and kill, but also instill fear, horror and revulsion.
Fundamentalist Islamic leaders justified
such acts by saying those who were strapping bombs on their bellies, or
flying planes into buildings were not committing suicide, but were chosen
by Allah to commit "sacred explosions" and become shahids, or martyrs.
In a bid to meet a growing call
to arms, charismatic, but extremist, Islamic leaders began upping their
recruitment efforts, very often honing in on religious schools, such as
the madrassahs in Pakistan and pesantrens in Indonesia. (Terror group goes
to school)
In these jihad factories, poor and
impressionable children learnt the Koran and were kept largely ignorant
of the world and anything but one interpretation of Islam, Jeffrey Goldberg
reported in the New York Times, after spending some time at a madrassah
in Pakistan.
Students came to see the world divided
in two domains: the peaceful worldwide community of Muslims ("the abode
of peace") and everywhere else ("the abode of war"), Goldberg found.
The United States was viewed as
a spiritually corrupt nation hostile to Islam, particularly after Washington
declared a "War on Terrorism" following the September 11 attacks.
Persecution
While not all were recruited in
this manner -- indeed many potential martyrs in Southeast Asia were educated
with jobs -- a fringe of Muslims became united in their belief they were
being persecuted in a time of war, and the best way to change this was
to die.
Following the arrests of 31 members
of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network in Singapore, the government
released a paper detailing just how such groups cultivated these mindsets.
Leaders from JI, an al Qaeda-linked
group seeking to set up a pan-Islamic state spanning Southeast Asia, eyed
captivated students at mass gatherings. They then indoctrinated those deemed
suitable into the clandestine group over 18 months.
During that time they were taught
"JI-speak." Those who believed in the "truth" of JI doctrine became closer
to Allah. They learned the "true" JI knowledge of jihad -- that innocents,
both Muslim and non-Muslim, could be sacrificed.
They were promised martyrdom if
they died in the cause of jihad. And anyone who left the group was called
an infidel.
Not only did these teachings foster
a sense of superiority over outsiders and a strong group mentality that
made it difficult to quit, the Singapore report said, but the psychologists
interviewing the detainees said many JI members turned to the leaders to
find a "no-fuss" path to Heaven.
They wanted to be convinced that
they had found "true Islam" and free themselves from the endless searching.
Especially since they believed they could not go wrong, as the JI leaders
had quoted from holy texts. None of them was found to have suicidal tendencies.
Research showed the recruits became
so committed to the cause they become perfect jihad machines, looking for
an opportunity to sacrifice their lives and avenge the suffering of Muslims
in the ultimate devotion in a "defensive" holy war.
