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and the afterlife, from everything we have come to understand about the two conceptions elsewhere in Western traditions. Islam adds an important new twist to the tradition: The martyrs await the day of judgment in a specially prepared pleasure-garden (aljamia), which is elliptically described in several places in the Quran (see, e.g., Q 56:1-26). As in Rabbinic Judaism, this garden is the garden of Eden, where the original couple enacted their drama of disobedience. In Muslim tradition, Satan himself is present as Iblis (perhaps from Greek diabolos); he plays the role of the snake. He also sins against God by refusing a direct order to worship the newly created Adam (Q 2:29-30).

Not only is there a special heaven reserved for martyrs while they await the day of judgment, the same accommodations are available to the holy warriors (sing. mujahid; pl. mujahidin), who die in battle. These martyrs are those people who take on Jihad (from the root meaning “striving”) as soldiers. The use of the term goes back to Muḥammad, who spoke both of the striving to be moral in each person, the greater Jihad, and the lesser Jihad, a term usually translated “holy war.” Most of the discussion of Jihad in the Quran, and for a considerable time afterwards, deals with “holy war” and not with personal striving. The term mujahid, striver, normally refers to the soldier-warriors of the “holy war.”31

As a sacred duty, holy war is regulated by religious law. Over the centuries, many things about holy war are prescribed and proscribed in Muslim law. What we today call “terrorism”-that is, randomly killing civilians-is forbidden. So is suicide. Yet, in a “holy war,” the mujahidin can attain the status of the shahid, the martyr. Not only that, the early Hadith literature encourages martyrdom. The person seeking martyrdom, the talab al-shahada, is to be exalted and emulated. This kind of martyrdom is earnestly prayed for and devoutly wished for. A merciful God would never deny the desire of a seeker of martyrdom: “One who prays for martyrdom sincerely: God will place him among the ranks of the martyrs, even if he dies in his bed.”32 The practice became associated with the Kharijite rebels and condemned.33 Nevertheless, holy war and martyrdom are two tandem engines powering the early Islamic conquest of the Middle East, as well as large chunks of Europe and Asia.

According to Muslim tradition, Muḥammad himself ruled that the soldier of Islam who died in attacking the infidel would go immediately to paradise. The tradition goes back to the battle of Badr, on March 15, 624, when Muḥammad’s greatly outnumbered band of Muslims faced the organized forces of his own tribe, the Quraysh. After spending hours in prayer, Muḥammad told Abu Bakr that the angel Gibril himself, armed for war, and his entire angelic host would be fighting with them (Q 8:9). Muḥammad announced to his troops that the soul of anyone killed that day while advancing against the enemy would be transported immediately to paradise. When a youth named Umayr heard the promise, he exclaimed: “Wonder of wonders! Is there nothing between me and my entry into paradise but that these men kill me?” Miraculously, the day was an enormous victory for Muḥammad and the Muslim forces. Only fourteen Muslims died at the battle of Badr but among them was the fifteen-year-old Umayr.34

The rewards awaiting the mujahidin are similar to those of the faithful and righteous after the day of judgment but they are specially rewarded during the barzakh in Islamic imagination, with all the luxuries of the current life, including access to seventy-two wide-eyed beauties, the bur (“the pure,” often called “Houris” in English), whose presence is inferred from the Quran itself:

For them [i.e. God’s sincere servants] is a known sustenance, Fruits, and they shall be highly honored. In gardens of pleasure, on thrones facing each other. A bowl shall be made to go around them from water running out of springs, white, delicious to those who drink. There shall be no trouble in it, nor shall they be exhausted therewith. And