Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.
So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.
However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil warsbut not suicide bombings.
The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.
#1
It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings.
Nice try and not without some merit. However, I'd give more creedence to Phyllis Chesler's theory as it relates to rampant child sexual abuse in Muslim cultures.
According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount. In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, the Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author, counter-terrorism expert Yoram Schweitzer, describe barbarous family and clan dynamics in which children, both boys and girls, are routinely orally and anally raped by male relatives; infant males are sometimes sadistically over-stimulated by being masturbated; boys between the ages of 7-12 are publicly and traumatically circumcised; many girls are clitoridectomized; and women are seen as the source of all shame and dishonor and treated accordingly: very, very badly.
According to Dr. Kobrin, "The little girl lives her life under a communal death threat--the honor killing." Both male and female infants and children are brought up by mothers (who are debased and traumatized women). As such, all children are forever psychologically "contaminated" by the humiliated yet all-powerful mother. Arab and Muslim boys must disassociate themselves from her in spectacularly savage ways. But, on a deep unconscious level, they may also wish to remain merged with the source of contamination--a conflict that suicide bombers both act out and resolve when they manfully kill but also merge their blood eternally with that of their presumably most hated enemies, the Israeli Jews. In Kobrin's view, the Israeli Jews may actually function as substitutes or scapegoats for an even more primal, hated/loved enemy: Woman.
#3
Un-informed article. The largest known group of suicide bombers remains the Jap Kamikaze. At 220 plus, Sri Lanka Tamil Elan bombers topped Arab and Persian numbers until 2003.
I would worry most about Hindus. The belief in re-incarnation lightens death worries for non-Brahmans.
Polygamy produces human-bombs? Damn, and I was going to visit Utah.
#5
1/ There have been women suicide bombers.
2/ Some of the suicide bombers are married.
My own analysis leads me to believe that koran followers have
1/ The death cult.
2/ Smashed superiority complex.
This leads them to try and remove the evidence of the fact that following the koran leads to a shithole, not paradise and the death cult element leads them to remove themselves from reality at the same time.
#6
If this is true, we should look for increasing suicide bombers among Chinese and Indian youths as there has been a lot of female infanticide. Not that I'm holding my breath.
#8
This article is nonsense. They are doing it because they actually believe what it in the Koran.
Posted by: Ol Dirty American ||
07/08/2007 9:37 Comments ||
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#9
It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.
Horniness causes boom booms. I don't buy that. Too Freudian and too much of a psychobabble expalnation.
Islamic religion fuels the suicide bombers. We have snake-handlers in the South. They seize upon a particular passage in the Bible and that becomes a very important part of their beliefs.
#10
Remember also that what they believe is mostly from the commentaries on the Koran, not on the Koran proper. That is where most older religions get their really impressive distortions.
#12
There are large numbers of men in every society who don't get laid, and it doesn't cause them to explode. In fact most of them have successful careers as car salesmen and estate agents, not jihadists.
#14
If this article were true then I'd think there would be lots of China-men blowing themselves up.
Second, not to defend any tripe in the koran, but I think a lot of the clitoral circumsicions/pre-adolescent sexual abuse are the result of F8cked up tribal mores that predate 632 a.d. and were infused or joined to the muslim faith. One of the officers I worked w/who was born a muslim (also a female & no longer a muslim) made this claim to me about the only requirement being that women cover their breasts and dress modestly; was the result of subsequent religious headmen delivering fatwas that they actually do not have the authority to deliver. Her family left islam upon immigration to the states for the obvious reasons.
IMHO, islam is one bad variable, but couple that w/the tribal nature of the bedouin arab or supersticious african societies and you get a veritable molotov cocktail. I wonder if those that convert to islam in the west take on any sort of these beliefs or mores wrt clitoral circumsicion, etc. I.E. - I never hear of black converts doing this to their daughters - maybe something to look into.
#15
Im being followed by a Boom shadow,
Boom shadow, Boom shadow...
Posted by: Jusuf Islam ||
07/08/2007 12:44 Comments ||
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#16
the Quran's (4.3)words on multiple marriageare:
"And if you fear that you cannot act equitably towards orphans, then marry such women as seem good to you, two and three and four; but if you fear that you will not do justice (between them), then (marry) only one or what your right hands possess; this is more proper, that you may not deviate from the right course. "
Moslem apologists typically pull a dowd and say "marry only one" when speaking to ignorant infidels.
In fact, if it actually meant "only one" a huge number of hadiths would demonstrate anti quranic behavior and many mid level officials of the later caliphate and many minor tribal sheik of the current era would be guilty of violating the law
also note the phrase, "what your right hand possesses" - that means woman captured after their husbands and fathers were slaughtered.
#18
I never hear of black converts doing this to their daughters - maybe something to look into.
While you're probably referring to American blacks, FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) is still practiced in a conspicuously large proportion of Islamic African cultures.
#19
Actually, polygamy is not as important as the requirement that you be established in your career and community before you can marry.
This means having your own house and business. Real standards of living have been going down in the Muslim world for several decades, which means you have to wait longer and longer to get married.
If you combine that with no contact with unrelated women, you get an epidemic of Blue Balls. Death begins to look less terrible every day.
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
07/08/2007 14:17 Comments ||
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#20
#16, Thanks for reminding me MHW. A friend in Riyadh told me about the four wives and I have read Sura 4.2 before. Temporary amnesia let me get sucked into the marry only one bs.
I was really just researching the difference between polygyny and polygamy.
I take pride, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a June 2005 interview, in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda or participated in the activities of [the] Taliban.
Just two years after he made that assertion, the certitudes which underpinned it have been blown apart. News that three Karnataka residents possibly spearheaded an Al-Qaeda plot to bomb Glasgow and London suggests that the global jihad might have deeper roots in India than most people ever imagined.
All the Glasgow suspects are the kind of upper-middle class Indian Muslims who policy-makers imagined had been made immune to Islamist seduction for reasons of privilege and prosperity. Effort must now be made to explore the ideological landscape which led them to join al-Qaedas war-without-fronts, analysts point out.
Journeys into the jihad
Days before he is believed to have rammed a burning Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow terminal, Kafeel Ahmed phoned home to say he was about to face a difficult examination. His first presentation had been unsuccessful, the postgraduate engineering student said a possible reference to the fact that the cellphone-triggered fuel-canister bombs he had placed in two Mercedes-Benz cars parked in central London had failed to work. Pray for me, he asked his mother Zakia Ahmed.
The belief system that led Kafeel Ahmed to the hospital burns unit where he is now battling for his life is unknown, bar one fact: at some point he began to journey into the strange and subterranean world of the jihadist movement.
By some accounts, Ahmed was drawn around 1999-2000 to the Salafi movement, a sect inspired by the 18th century preacher, Saudi Arab Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Salafis, who take the Prophet Muhammeds companions and the two generations of Muslims after them to be exemplary models of the practice of Islam, became active in South Asia in the 19th century. Known in South Asia as the Ahl-e-Hadith, or followers of the Prophets traditions, the Salafi sect grow spectacularly because of Saudi Arabian support.
While some Salafi groups urge their followers to support or endure the regimes they live under, others call for armed struggle against non-Islamic regimes and Muslim states opposed to the Sharia. Perhaps the most active of these pro-jihad Salafi factions is the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the attack on the Indian Institute of Science right in Bangalore. In the Lashkars variant of mainstream Salafi ideology, the Koran is a manifesto for a perpetual jihad against unbelievers, in the pursuit of the construction of an ideal Islamic state.
Some, though, say Ahmed was in fact drawn to the Tablighi Jamaat a pietist organisation that has often been involved in acrimonious ideological exchanges with the Salafis. Perhaps the fastest-growing Islamist organisation worldwide, the Tablighi Jamaat urges Muslims to discard what it perceives as corrupt influences that have permeated South Asian Islam. Its founder, Mohammad Illyas, privileged the jihad bin-nafs, or the war for the conscience, over the jihad bin-Saif, or holy war by the sword. Most South Asian Muslims reject the neoconservative theology and politics of organisations like the Tablighi Jamaat: their faith includes syncretic Barelvi-school practices like the veneration of saints and the worship of relics.
While the Tablighi Jamaat once used to be criticised for its apolitical stand, the links between some Tablighi Jamaat followers and Islamist terror groups has become increasingly clear. In February 1995, Pakistani investigative journalist Kamran Khan quoted a Harkat ul-Mujahideen spokesperson as admitting that most of our workers do come from the TJ. He said: Ours is a truly international network of genuine jihadi Muslims.
Like Hindu and Sikh neoconservative movements, the Tablighi Jamaat attracted elite groups in search of legitimacy. Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, who was Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence in Pakistan during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifs first stint in office, was a Tablighi Jamaat activist. So was Mohammad Rafiq Tarar, President of Pakistan during Mr. Sharifs second tenure. In 1995, the Pakistan Army arrested a group of 36 officers led by Major-General Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi on charges of conspiring to overthrow Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and declare an Islamic state. The conspirators, the Pakistani media reported, were mainly Tablighi Jamaat and Harkat ul-Mujahideen members.
It is not immediately clear if his Salafi or Tablighi Jamaat leanings led Ahmed as well as his arrested brother, the Liverpool-based doctor Sabeel Ahmed, and cousin, Mohammad Haneef into the embrace of Al-Qaeda. But this much is clear: others from the Tablighi Jamaat have traversed much the same road as Ahmed.
Preachers role
Earlier this month, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) secured the conviction of several members of an Islamist cell led by Maulana Sufiyan Patangia a Tablighi Jamaat preacher who used to run in the Waliullah seminary in old-city Ahmedabads Kalupur area. Patangia is thought to have recruited cadre for the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad after the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat. According to the CBI, the preacher played a key role in organising the assassination of one-time Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya.
Salafi clerics, like their Tablighi counterparts, steer clear of endorsing terrorism. But their stances have proved attractive to many angry young people. Investigations into the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai showed that top Lashkar-e-Taiba organisers Rahil Ahmed Sheikh and Zabiuddin Ansari often met at the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) in Mumbais Dongri area. IRF librarian Feroz Deshmukh, their contact there, turned out to be a key member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba cell which executed the bombings.
Zakir Naik, a popular Salafi television evangelist who heads the IRF, had no role in the Mumbai serial bombings. But his teachings, which include calls for Muslims not to participate in Hindu and Christian festivities, have considerable symmetries with those of organisations advocating violence. Interestingly, the IRF is listed as an approved religious information resource on the official website of the Lashkars parent organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
While figures like Zakir Naik are emphatic in their rejection of terrorism, others are less so. Tablighi Jamaat preachers in Gujarat, for example, have been deeply inspired by the South African cleric Ahmed Deedad. While Deedads target was syncretism, his work contained the seeds of violence praxis. Deedads Durban-based Islamic Propagation Centre International received large financial contributions from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden. In 2001, South Africas Sunday Times reported that Deedads son and successor, Yusuf Deedad, had distributed anti-Jewish literature emblazoned with pictures of Adolf Hitler at the World Conference Against Racism.
Ahmed and his relatives, then, might well have picked up the foundations of their ideology through Tablighi Jamaat teachings. It is also possible that experiences of communal hatred reinforced their beliefs. The son of an unemployed factory worker, Jalees Ansari graduated from Mumbais Sion Medical College in 1972. Despite his professional success, Ansari felt embittered by what he perceived as pervasive religious intolerance. Students and staff at his college, Ansari told investigators later, often insulted Muslims. Later, Ansari came to believe that his Hindu colleagues did not treat their Muslim patients with care. Although Ansari claimed to have been a secular-minded person, successive communal massacres and the demolition of the Babri Masjid led him to snap. He executed 50 bombings nationwide.
From east to west
In the weeks to come, investigators will seek to piece together just what led Kafeel Ahmed to snap. Most likely, he came into contact with the rest of Glasgow group through Bilal Abdullah, an Iraq-trained doctor who sat with him during the Glasgow airport attack. Abdullah is believed to have had active links in the Hizb ut-Tehrir, a U.K.-based Islamist group that has long supported Osama bin-Laden. When Abdullah was a student at Cambridge, Ahmed studied at the nearby Anglia Polytechnic. Abdullah possibly put Ahmed and his relatives in touch with the overall head of the car bombing plot, Saudi national Mohammed Jamil Asha.
Experts note that no similar collaboration between South Asian and Arab Islamists has ever been seen before but it is, in fact, no surprise. Groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Harkat ul-Jihad Islami are affiliates of bin-Ladens International Islamic Front. In April 2006, bin-Laden expressly linked Al-Qaedas campaign against the West to these organisations, by referring to a a Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against the Muslims. Since then, Arab-South Asian alliances have been increasingly evident.
For example, a French court recently convicted Pakistani national Ghulam Rana for funnelling funds to terror groups with the assistance of two French citizens of Arab origin.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/08/2007 10:56 ||
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#1
...in the pursuit of the construction of an ideal Islamic state.
So why don't they build just one - you know, sort of a prototype - and then others would see the advantages, and follow along peacefully. Like the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, as EPCOT was orignally intended to be, but with Sharia.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/08/2007 13:07 Comments ||
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#2
I think the Taliban proved that the "ideal Muslim" state could very favorably compete with "ideal Communist," ideal Aryan," "ideal Baathist" and "ideal Khmer" states with respect to corpses generated.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
07/08/2007 20:38 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
