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| 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.”
