Martyrs or Terrorists: Suicide bombing in Islamic Hermeneutics

Abstract

Most sociologists, anthropologists and scholars with backgrounds different from the Islamic tradition had written off martyrdom as parallel to suicide. However, the concept of martyrdom in Islam is associated with an all-inclusive effort to make the word of Allah supreme on the surface of the earth. The adoption of suicide terrorism by some Muslim groups as a strategic objective of modern warfare is the thrust of this paper. The work explicates suicide terrorism as war tactic in contemporary time. It examines the evidence and claims that have been advanced for the permissibility of self-sacrifices operation (al-amaliyyat al-Istishhadiyyah) or martyrdom, and suicide bombing, which many of the contemporary groups consider as legitimate tactic of war and hence subsequently qualifying the one that is involved a martyr. To achieve this, the authors use the Qur’an, Hadith, different school of thoughts and contemporary scholar’s view to examine the position and claims that have been advanced. However, the various sources from classical times to our present day provide evidence that martyrdom or self-sacrifice operation is not alien to Islam but, the upsurge of suicide terrorism and suicide bombing among some militant Muslim groups today is not an influence of Islamic fundamentalism or conservatism as mostly explained in intellectual discourse rather it is adopted as a war tactic which exists in other traditions outside Islam and that its permissibility depends on the context of its deployment.

Keywords: Jihad, Martyrs. Terrorists, Suicide, bombing