The Seventh Heaven and the Seventy Virgins

A marathoner assisting one of the wounded

Having grown up in Boston, I may have been more affected by the Marathon Bombing than I otherwise would have been. I have thought about it often since April 15 and gave myself a crash course on the Abrahamic religions. I am certainly no expert, but what follows  is just a slice of what I learned, with my prejudices thrown in. I also posted a poem on my website, Poems Old and New (click here)

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are known as Abrahamic religions because all three accept Abraham as the first prophet of the one  god all three religions profess to believe in, the god Jews call Yahweh, Christians call the Father, and Muslims call Allah. The Abrahamic religions believe also in the Seventh Heaven, the highest heaven, where the Throne of God, the absolute center of god’s realm,  is located.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on the Abrahamic god, but they disagree on which of them are the Abrahamic god’s chosen people and disagree on which of them, therefore, are going to heaven. Jews believed in heaven but they also believed  that they were excluded from any part of it because they were unworthy. For Jews, Judaism was a cross to be borne. “It appears most unlikely,” J. Edward Wright observed in The Early History of Heaven (Oxford, 2000), “that in the biblical period anyone [any Jew] thought they could or would ascend to heaven.” For most of their history the long suffering Jews felt unworthy of anything better than Sheol, the grim abode of the dead where, according to Isaiah (14:9-10), “Worms are your bed, maggots your blanket.” It’s a good thing the Jews did not believe in proselytizing, because if they had nothing better to offer than Sheol they would have gotten nowhere.

Unlike the Jews, Christians believed they qualified for heaven. But  there was a fly in the Christian ointment—boredom.  Mark Twain complained the Christian heaven lacked those vices that made life worth living.  No drinking, no gambling, and, worst of all, no sex .In the epistolary Letters from the Earth, which Twain had not dared publish in his lifetime, the  devil wrote letters deriding the  inanity  of the average Christian.  “For instance,” Twain’s devil wrote, “he has imagined a heaven, and left entirely out of it the supremest  of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race—and ours—sexual intercourse!” In Heaven in the American Imagination, Gary Scott Smith pointed out that surveys revealed, to no one’s surprise, that the vast majority of Christians believed sex was unsuitable for heaven.

Islamic Paradise

Islamists did not make the same mistake. They did not leave sex out of their paradise. The Islamic paradise was a sultan’s dream,  a garden of delights and grand palaces containing harems. “Pious Muslims,” Wright wrote,  “learn that luxurious palaces, verdant gardens, magnificent feasts, and all manner of unending pleasure await them as rewards for their fidelity to the ways of Islam.” The pièce de résistance of  the Islamic paradise, at least for males, were  nubile virgins.  “These indescribably gorgeous, virginal female beings,” Wright explains, “exist in paradise to attend to the pious Muslim male’s every physical and sexual desire.” According to one holy Islamic source, a typical palace in the Islamic heaven is made from a pearl, and in accordance with the mystical sacredness of the number seventy, “within it are 70 courts of red ruby,  in every court 70 houses of green emerald, in every house 70 bedrooms and in every bedroom 70 sleeping mats from every color, and on every mat a woman . . .”  Physically, the virgins of paradise are far purer than earthly females, who naturally, like all humans,  produce unpleasant waste products.   But the heavenly virgins, or houris, the Sunni Islamic scholar Al-Bukjari wrote, “will not urinate, relieve nature, spit, or have any nasal secretions.” Even their sweat will smell like musk, and of course they do not menstruate. The palatial, voluptuous Islamic heaven is all the more irresistible to Muslim males because it is the antithesis of the puritanical, sexually repressive society that Islam, through Sharia law, imposes on living Muslims.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar

Among the motives that led Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to plant pressure cooker  bombs near the finish line of the   Boston Marathon was their belief  that as martyrs they would go directly to paradise. It was not the brothers’ only motivation, of course, but it was certainly an important one. As Dzhokhar would make clear after the bombings, the expectation of paradise was on their mind during their brief but bloody career as jihadists. The degree to which their expectation  was important to them  was revealed  on April 19, four days after the bombings, when  Dzhokhar, sure that his brother was dead and that he too would be soon,  scrawled what he apparently intended as dying words on the hull of the boat he was hiding in. The full text of what he wrote will not be released until his trial, where it is expected to be introduced as evidence, but those who read what he wrote quoted parts of it to reporters. Unnamed officials told CBS News that  the wounded Dzhokhar had written, among other things,  that his brother was already in paradise and that he expected to join him soon. Just as sex is used in consumer societies  to sell everything from cars to cologne, in repressive Islamic societies sex is used to sell jihadism.  Controlling and regulating the  drive of younger males  is a major  challenge for every society, but Islam not only controls and regulates, it also exploits that drive  by promising that the pleasures rigidly restricted  in this life will be allowed untrammeled expression, in idealized form,  in the next. The hierarchical Islamic heaven has seven levels and those martyrs who die fighting for the holy cause will experience eternal bliss in the seventh heaven.

The Devout Sniper

“The Confessions of a Sniper,” a feature story in  Time Magazine  (17 Dec. 2012) detailed the career of a jihadist identified only as” the Sniper.”  A Syrian rather than a Chechen, the Sniper had migrated in his teens to Germany, where he adopted a European life style, becoming among other things  an avid boxer. But the secular life and boxing proved unfulfilling, and in 2010, after five years in Germany, he returned to Syria,  where he studied the Koran and became a devout and militant  Muslim. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he turned the aggressiveness that he previously found an outlet for in boxing against those he considered the  enemies of Islam. Opposed to the government of  the dictator Bashar-al-Assad, he joined Liwa Suqoor al-Sha‘ba, a radical Islamic rebel group as a sniper. As a devoutly Islamic sniper, his rifle became  not just a physical extension of himself but an expression of his faith.  He told the Time reporter, “My rifle has become not just a part of my body. It is my life, my destiny.” His rifle became his passport to paradise. In his  first encounter, an ambush of government troops on a road to a town on the outskirts of  Alleppo, he felt intensely religious. “My heart was filled with faith,” he said.  A seasoned Islamist comrade reminded him during the ambush that if he was killed  he would go straight to paradise. “I was sorry that I lived,” he admitted to the reporter.  Only twenty-one, he wanted to die a martyr.  So did the nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as he lay bleeding in the boat in Boston.  The ongoing undeclared religious war among Abrahamists was misnamed the War on Terror by the Bush administration. In that religious war, non-Muslims underestimate at their peril the appeal of the Islamic heaven to Muslim males, particularly to younger Muslim males, who are not only willing but eager  to martyr themselves.  The Sniper admired the rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra, and was in awe of the suicide attacks they made against government targets, no doubt envying  those who had been killed because they were now in paradise. When he was pure enough, when he had succeeded in completely cleansing his mind and body, he hoped to join Jabhat al-Nusra. While the Sniper looks forward to dying a martyr,  Dzhokhar  Tsarnaev, in the meanwhile, awaits his trial, praying perhaps he will be found guilty and executed, achieving  the martyrdom he had been denied when he did not bleed to death  in the boat in Boston.

Postscript

When he arrived in court for arraignment on Wednesday, July 10, a group of Dzhokhar’s supporters cheered. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. It is possible that in our celebrity-drugged American culture he could become, and perhaps already is,  a teen idol,  and in the Islamic world, if he is finally executed, he will be a martyr. If Islam is the culmination of the Abrahamic tradition, and if what Muslims preach is true, he will go directly to heaven, to the Seventh Heaven. And who knows, maybe even the god of Abraham, disgusted with our corrupt, materialistic  American culture, might say, as Dzhokhar  reportedly scrawled on the inside of the boat, “Fuck America.”