• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2288 0

equivalent of Christianity’s cosmocrator crucifix. This possibility also raises the further serious and very strong pre-Christian tradition that Isaac stands with Abel within the martyr tradition. Too often in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Period, Jews needed encouragement in their hour of trial, often when Christians were the persecutors. It was no wonder that they frequently welcomed the Arabs as liberators from the Christian Empire. But, as Isaac was not actually slaughtered, it is also possible that the symbol of Isaac stood for the Jewish notion that martyrdom should be avoided wherever possible, as well as encouraging martyrs in their unavoidable hour of trial. Isaac also stood for the synagogue’s faith that, though Jews were constantly imperiled in the Christian empire, God would save them alive, not as martyrs, as he had saved Isaac and Daniel alive.

In a further development of the rescue motif, which began in the stories about Daniel and Isaac, the Jewish mystical tradition contains the folkloric story of Lupinus Caesar (otherwise unknown) and the martyrdom of Hananyah ben Teradion.34 In the story, the emperor martyrs Hananyah, one of the mystic masters, but God substitutes one for the other and Lupinus, in fact, dies two deaths. The story shows that mystic knowledge helps the adept avoid martyrdom. Mystical traditions contain many rites and experiences of spiritual martyrdom-namely an ecstatic experience of martyrdom without any necessary, physical martyrdom. Not that it is a pretense. The mystic stands before God, handing his soul over to him (mesirat nefesh). Lawrence Fine has called this “spiritual martyrdom” or “contemplative death.”35 Rather than use martyrdom to help propagate the faith, Rabbinic Judaism attempts to minimize the losses from martyrdom whenever it is avoidable.

15

Islam and the Afterlife Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Fundamentalism

Resurrection on the Day of Judgment as the Primary Reward

IN VIEW OF THE martyrdom beliefs of the suicide attackers who brought down the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the development of the afterlife doctrine in Islam has become especially important to Americans; but few have bothered to survey the Muslim tradition to get a broader perspective on it. Though the attackers voiced visions of paradise in their suicide notes, and thought of themselves as martyrs, not even their intense faith can persuade Americans, or most Muslims, that their faith is the norm for afterlife beliefs in Islam. Rather, they are eccentric and dangerous views, though they have something important to teach about afterlife beliefs and the production of martyrdom through fundamentalist extremism in every religion.

Ordinary Islamic views of the afterlife are just as rich and manifold as in Judaism or Christianity, but later in time than this book can study in detail and different in some important ways from the religious ideas analyzed until now.1 We cannot study the whole tradition. But we can learn enough to know how to avoid the prejudices of seeing Islam from the perspective of its extremists. And we can also ask how the classic view of Islam has been so liable to manipulation by contemporary Islamists (fundamentalist extremists).2

Coming after Judaism and Christianity and being cognizant of the previous revelations, Islam was built on the doctrines of both Judaism and Christianity but tailored them for its own needs and out of its own understanding of the meaning of Muḥammad’s revelations. Unlike Christianity, Islam did not canonize the texts of its forebear religions; to the contrary, it posited that the traditions of the Old and New Testaments have been garbled where they disagree with the Quran. The watchword of Islam’s faith is: “There is no god but God and Muḥammad is His apostle.” With it, Islam claims its rank as the last and foremost of the Western monotheisms. It worships the same God as Judaism and Christianity. Its revelation is in the same tradition as Moses and Jesus, both of whom it acknowledges as true prophets.

Implicitly, in the next clause,