I linked earlier, without commentary, to “Are you ready? Tomorrow you will be in Paradise . . .“, a profile of suicide bombers and their training by Pakistani Muslim Nasra Hassan.

Hassan was given extensive access to Palestinian trainers of suicide bombers and their bombers in training. The whole piece is well worth your time, bit for the nonce I want to focus on this part, her conversation with a volunteer she identifies only as “S.” S had been shot in the head by Israeli security after pressing his detonator. His bomb failed to explode. After a two-month coma, the Israelis concluded he was brain dead and sent him home to die. But he recovered. Here are excerpts:

In Gaza, S is celebrated as a young man who “gave his life to Allah” and whom Allah “brought back to life”.

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

Ms. Hassan also interviewed “an imam affiliated with Hamas, a youthful, bearded graduate of the prestigious al Azhar University in Cairo.”

He explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

In Islam, unlike Christianity, there is no doctrine of divine, unmerited grace by which human beings are saved to eternal life. Haverford College’s Prof. Mark Gould explained in, “Understanding Jihad,”

the requirement to act in accordance with God’s decrees, possible but nonetheless difficult to fulfill, thus attaining salvation, may be short-circuited when fulfilling the religious obligation of jihad. There, either one accomplishes good works (as decreed by God) or dies a martyr; if the former, one enhances one’s chances of being sent to heaven at the Last Judgment; if the latter, one goes directly to heaven. …

God has requested nothing that believers cannot do. … man’s nature enables him to act in ways that merit God’s grace. While not easy to follow, the rules do not demand anything that people are incapable of accomplishing through their own capacities; the rules guide men to paradise.

What I find intensely interesting, from a religious standpoint, are two things:

1. that jihadism embraces the concept of eternal salvation through the voluntary giving of one’s life, and that

2. the one who sacrificed himself can, by virtue of his self-sacrifical act, grant entry into paradise for 70 others who lack merit on their own to enter. That is, their sins are remitted not by what they do, but by what the self-sacrificed one did.

Remission of sins through the shedding of blood is deeply rooted in the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Before any of those faiths were born, child sacrifice was done to appease and placate the local gods of city states or local areas. Abrahamic Hebraism denounced the practice and substituted the sacrifice of goats or bulls. Long before Jesus’ day a complex Temple system had evolved in Judaism that was designed to gain annual remission of the sins of the whole population through the ritual sacrifice of, in turn, a bull and a goat by the high priest for remission of his own sins and then the banishment of another, flawless goat into the wilderness. On its head had been ritually applied the sins of the Jewish people. The goat, literally the “scapegoat,” carried the sins away. According to Shalom Ministries of New York, in very ancient times the goat was to be led into the wilderness and left there. In time, the Jewish people became concerned that the goat could find its way back into the camp and thus bring back the sins of the nation. So in order to ensure that the sins of the nation would be carried away by the scapegoat, never to return, the scapegoat came to be led up a steep cliff and thrown down.

The Christian book of Hebrews uses the Temple sacrificial system as the model for explaining how the death of Christ saves all who believe in him as son of God and risen savior. The salvific work of the Jewish High Priest had to be repeated each year at Yom Kippur. But, explains Hebrews, Jesus has no need to offer sacrifices over and over again because of his divine identity. His sacrificial acts were perfect, complete and eternal. By his own death he carried away all the sins of all whom follow him and accept him as risen Lord. All our atonement to God is already done by Jesus Christ for all time; we cannot accomplish any part of it.

From their inception, Judaism and its child Christianity affirmed vicarious salvation - that the saving of the many had to be accomplished by the efficacious acts of the one. In Temple Judaism, the one was the High Priest. The people relied completely on the work of the High Priest to remit their sins at Yom Kippur. No one else could perform his function. In Christianity, Christ, being of the very nature God and in fact a person of the Godhead, “holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever” and so,

Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself (Heb. 7:24-27).

What jihadism has done within an Islamic framework is effectively to assign to suicide shahidi, martyrs, the role of high priest. Islam, never having fallen under the sway of Roman law and culture like Christianity did, has more affinity to Judaism than Christianity; both religions developed from a Semitic ethnicity, anyway. A suicide shahid performs in micro functions very similar to the Temple’s High Priest: he earns his own salvation and intercedes, priestlike, to guarantee salvation for others - 70 others, according to the Egyptian imam. The difference between a suicide shahid and the Temple’s High Priest the two are enormous, of course. The Temple High Priest committed no murder and shed no human blood. Yet that is what the shahidi do.

Priesthood in both Judaism and Christianity has always been seen as a holy office, occupied by men and women divinely selected. One thing that makes a priest a priest is the intercessory function, the recognized ability to act as intermediary between the people and the deity. Protestantism typically has pastors, not priests formally called, but still usually recognizes the exclusivity of this function in the administration of ordinances or sacraments, almost always reserved only to pastors. Moreover, most Protestants affirm a doctrine of the “priesthood of believers” for one another in the community of faith. (Frequently this concept is misquoted and misunderstood as “the priesthood of the believer,” erroneously implying that a Christian can be a priest on his own behalf. Not so.)

The major part of ordination procedures in both Catholicism and Protestantism focuses on discerning and affirming the divine call; the validation by the Church that one is divinely called to the priesthood or pastorate is the most important matter in conferring ordination.

But the idea that a shahid can assume priestly authority simply by volunteering omits the idea of divine appointment. As Ms. Hassan points out, the most important matter in selection and training of a suicide shahid is implanting the determination of the shahid selectee that s/he will actually complete the deed.

Because Islam is a religion in which salvation results solely from human achievement (”works,” in the usual Christian parlance), not a gift of divine grace, there is a strong implication of despair about Islam itself in the theology of suicide martyrdom. Christianity holds that human beings are born in the grip of sin and that no merely human effort can overcome either that “original sin” nor sins of volition committed in life. Likewise, there is no human sin that Christ’s salvific work cannot remit. Hence, this life is always one of hope that the future can be better, both in this life and life to come. “The gates of Hell,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “are locked only on the inside.”

There is no concept of original sin in Islam. There are only the sins of volition. These are overcome or remitted by obeying the precepts and commandments of Allah. Not all sins have equal weight and not all virtuous acts have equal merit. Since Mohammed’s day martyrdom has been held so meritorious that by itself it remits a lifetime of sin.

But the theology that a shahid can bring 70 people into paradise who otherwise have not earned it themselves is a new thing in Islamic thought, as far as I can determine. Heretofore, the shahid’s self sacrifice earned his own salvation; now it earns the salvation of dozens, at least in jihadist Islam. The belief betrays, I think, a growing realization among the Islamic ummah that Allah’s demands are indeed more than humans can reliably achieve and shows a lack of faith at a fundamental level. It is the addition of vicarious sacrifice to Islam and the invention of a proto-doctrine of unmerited divine favor (that is, salvation by grace) in a religion whose formal structure and theology make no room for it.

It is no tragedy that so many Muslims are embracing this theological precept. The enormous tragedy is that they are doing so violently, taking the lives of thousands of innocents. Yet I have to wonder whether this theological shift in contemporary Islam makes its adherents more amenable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whose voluntary offering of life makes him able to intercede not for a mere 70 souls, but for all souls of all time.

——-

Endnote: I should also point out that the conceptualization of salvation has varied from ancient Jews, Christians and Muslims. The salvation sought through the Temple sacrificial system in ancient Judaism was little focused on life hereafter; even a belief in a general resurrection in the age to come was slow to develop. The salvation sought by the ancient Jews was primarily understood in terms of national health - the fruitfulness of the fields and flocks of the nation, its security among its neighbors and the increase of trade and prosperity - and most of all, peace. Yet even in the darkest times of their history, the Jews always affirmed that God’s faithfulness to his people: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jer 29:11). They saw God as deity, yes, but also as a partner in life who abided with them and was literally present with them in their lives and history.

In Christianity a greater focus came that emphasized the survival of individuals after death in the presence of God. “Eternal life” moved toward the center of Christian understanding of salvation, but with only a some cultic exceptions it never became the overwhelming concern. From the days of Jesus’ ministry his followers have understood that while the Kingdom of God has not yet come in power, it is discernibly present in the here and now among the Christian faithful. Indeed, Christ was known from the first as Immanuel, “God With Us.” Hence, there has always been a major line of Christian understanding that salvation included a “life abundant” in the here and now. We are saved not just in the hereafter but also in the here-now; salvation is begun in this life and completed in the eschaton. Salvation is lived out now in worship, service, charity and love. We can experience heaven now, if only “as in a mirror, dimly,” as Paul put it in 1 Cor. 13:12. Also, Christians say we are “seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror [and] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…” (2 Cor. 3:18).

But in jihadism salvation, though earned in the here and now, is not realized at all until after death. The object of suicide martyrdom is not to improve life for the faithful in this life but to guarantee admission to paradise after death. While this concept is not identical with historic Islam, it is not very distant, either. As Prof. Gould pointed out,

… there is an authentic Islamic tradition that partially explains the predisposition to the use of force, in jihad, that is diffused widely among contemporary Muslims.

This is a theology of eschatology that basically denies any value to the created order and the present life and confers all value onto the hereafter and paradise. Islam has always held that Allah is not on earth, he is solely in his heaven. Without a divine presence within and among the created order and its creatures, infusing them with divine value, there is nothing here of ultimate worth. Jihadism, then, is a form of nihilism and like all nihilism is a religion of despair.

——-

Previous installments of “The Forever Jihad”

Part One: Re-evaluating al Qaeda’s Strategy

Part Two: Islamism v. Jihadism