Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [410]
On the other hand, these ideas of martyrdom can be manipulated by unscrupulous political and religious leaders. It would be wrong to underestimate the force of these religious justifications for motivating soldiers of Christendom and Islam in the Middle Ages or even in our own day, whether the war be national or religious in nature. It is characteristic of our day that national and political conflicts are being reexpressed in religious terms.
Modern Islamic Views of the Afterlife
IF THE CLASSIC and medieval Islamic views of the afterlife are more complex than we can characterize in a few paragraphs, modern views are nearly impossible even to categorize in this chapter. It is, however, tentatively possible to divide modern Muslim views into ways similar to those of modern America. There is the traditional camp that views Quranic descriptions of bodily resurrection as still relevant today. This camp will include a number of ordinary pious Muslims for whom the language of the day of judgment and the barzakh remains especially meaningful, as well as the growing number of fundamentalists and the small but very dangerous group of fundamentalist extremists. These latter Muslims are very much more conscious of the value of conversion and mission in Muslim life and tend to favor the foundation of states based on Islamic law, the shariya’. Not only do heaven and hell retain a hold on their religious life, they are often quite elaborately described.
However, unacknowledged innovation abounds in these modern interpretations of tradition. The horrendous descriptions of the pain of dying for the sinful, and the pleasures which a shahid can bring for himself, his family, and friends are new ideas in Islam; many Muslims, with some justification, would judge these innovations as heretical. The people who promulgate them are in very many respects like modern Christian fundamentalists or Christian fundamentalist extremists, who innovate even while claiming they are returning to the ancient tradition.
On the other side, one sees another group of theologians who interpret Islam’s traditional teachings much more broadly and attempt to see in Islam a justification for cultural pluralism and interreligious tolerance. Though these writers are as yet only a small minority of Muslim writers, their existence is very significant. They tend to speak out of culturally plural situations, like India, or the Muslim Diaspora in Europe and the United States, and they try to demonstrate that Islam can coexist with other like-minded, tolerant religions.55 But they do not come only from these places. And, indeed, some fundamentalist extremism was formed in Diaspora, European and American culture as well.
Osama bin Laden and Fundamentalism
FUNDAMENTALIST extremism is a phenomenon that exists in all religions, not just Islam. At the moment, Islam is numerically the largest sponsor of violent extremism. Since the events of September 11, 2001, Muslim extremist religious beliefs have been tragically emphasized for Americans, but Muslims have been very much aware of them for decades, while we have occasionally focused on our own brand of fundamentalist extremism.56 It is crucial for Americans to realize that these movements are not normative for Islam, much less American Islam, but are sectarian movements of extraordinary intensity present in every religion. Islamic fundamentalist extremist sects have as much in common with sectarian, fundamentalist extremism throughout the religious world as they do with Islam in particular. We need to study them and their relationship to martyrdom