Longtime SM readers know that I enjoy making occasional forays into the past, so as to connect to the present. History is the most spiritual of subjects, more so than even religion in my eyes. Those who believe in reincarnation and karma will find as much wisdom in the recurring motifs of a history book as in any sacred text.
Yesterday we awoke to what may have been yet another attempted suicide bombing. The first words I heard this morning on NPR as my eyes opened were that police had shot “a South Asian man” in the Tube. About two months ago University of Chicago Professor Ropert Pape (who heads the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism) released his book Dying to Win on the history of suicide bombings. Here is an excerpt from his New York Times op-ed re-published on Truthout.org:
Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.
The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks.
What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause
Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.But I don’t get it then. These “kids” in England are not seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination. They have it already. Also, they did not carry out their attacks as part of a political or military campaign. All that’s left of Al Qadea is an insane philosophy devoid of any tangible political objectives outside of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. Why don’t these kids fit within Pape’s well thought out logic? To make personal sense of it I went back to the 12th Century. Before all these modern studies and modern motivations, there were other factors. Time Magazine focuses on a legend:
The promise of paradise has long been to drive men into battle. But what has brought me to Alamut is the legend, chronicled by Muslim and Crusader historians, that Hasan-i Sabbah, leader of the 12th century Middle Eastern terror cult known as the Assassins, had built a simulacrum here of the sensual delights of Paradise to quicken his men’s taste for martyrdom. The Assassins a kind of al Qaeda of its time operated by stealth, and armed only with daggers, they killed hundreds of princes, viziers, generals, and rival clergymen. According to legend, before being dispatched on a mission, an operative would be drugged into a deep sleep. He would wake in a lush garden filled with fountains, music and beautiful maidens. After cavorting briefly, he would be drugged back to sleep, and upon waking again would be told that he had tasted the paradise that awaited on the successful completion of his suicide mission.
Iranian officials are a bit ashamed of this fanatic lurking in their history, and tried to discourage me from going to Alamut, near Qazvin in northwestern Iran, about 80 miles northeast of Tehran. But Mehrdad and I pressed on anyway. We climb the steep rock outcrop atop which Alamut’s castle glowers over a valley of cherry orchards in full bloom. Inside the castle, however, we find no trace of the legendary pleasure garden no crumbling stones of a fountain or wild thorns descended from the garden’s roses, only wind, gray rock and grasses. On the ramparts, we encounter a lone guard bearing a long staff.
Was Sabbah the Osama bin Laden of his day? I ask the guard before realizing that he was probably an Ismaili, one of the Assassins’ descendants who are today spread across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and follow the Aga Khan, a determinedly peaceful lot.
Of course not, he replies angrily. Sabbah never killed innocents. And his men only used a dagger, never poisons or easy ways of killing. They studied their victims, spent years getting close to them before they struck.
Now this begins to make more sense to me. The promise of virgins in a garden of Heavenly delights would be very motivating to a poor, brain-washed madrassa student from parts of the Middle East and Pakistan. It might be enough enticement to give up one’s life even in the absence of one of Pape’s factors. Failed suicide bombers that have been captured have previously described such motivations in fact. They just don’t know any better and are easily seduced by fanatics who themselves were seduced. Again though, these British kids knew better. One of the deceased bombers was described as quite the ladies man with easy access to virgins. The question one must ask is whether every individual’s garden of pleasure would contain the same enticements. I do not believe so. Fame and Ego are the virgins of those raised in free western societies. Relegated to the growing ethnic ghettos of Europe, these kids may have been seduced by the desire to become someone. Their masters in the camps of Pakistan seduced them in much the same way that Hassan-i-Sabah did in his time. They put the false fear of imminent conquest in their minds.
Hasan was extremely strict and disciplined. The abrogation of Islamic law (sharia) occurred under a later Grand Master, Hasan II, in 1174. If hashish was used by the community (and this is uncertain) it probably also occurred later.
Not much is known about Hasan, but legends abound as to the tactics used to induct members into his quasi-religious political organization. A future assassin was subjected to rites very similar to those of other mystery cults in which the subject was made to believe that he was in imminent danger of death. But the twist of the assassins was that they drugged the person to simulate a “dying” to later have them awaken in a garden flowing with wine and served a sumptuous feast by virgins. The supplicant was then convinced he was in Heaven and that Sabbah was a minion of the divinity and that all of his orders should be followed, even to death. This legend derives from Marco Polo, who visited Alamut just after it fell to the Mongols in the thirteenth century.
America doesn’t have many ethnic ghettos. Rightly or wrongly our immigration policies for many decades now have been biased in favor admitting the best and the brightest, who economically assimilate much better. This demographic is hopefully (for now) less likely to succumb to terrorist ideology because they have so much more to lose. The out-of-control U.S. prison population however is another concern. This segment of our society has many things in common with the stagnant pools that breed terrorists in Europe. Politicians are starting to notice as well. In the past week I’ve twice heard that in America we should be more worried about those who converted to Islam in prison.
I am sure that this post will generate much discussion on a variety of topics I have touched on but my main point was to reference history. If only we were all forced to learn about the past :)
