The Believer 116 December 2017 January 2018

Download or read book Dying as a Shahid written by Raphael Israeli and published by Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dying as a Shahid: Martyrs in Islam examines the motives, religious and psychological, which make the so-called “suicide bomber” tick. What is usually so-called, must rather be termed “Islamikaze” a combination of Islam and kamikaze, due to the phenomenological resemblance between the Japanese kamikaze who fought in the Pacific during World War II, and the present-day Muslim terrorists. In addition to the religious, social, and psychological underpinnings of the phenomenon of Shahid (martyr), there is a rich array of historical precedents that have fixated this sort of terrorism with self-immolation, dubbed “self-sacrifice,” as a prominent feature of Islamic life.