Legacies of 9/11: On Suicide and Paradise

The recent 25th anniversary of what Americans confusingly call ‘9/11’ (it would have been 11/9 over here) should make us think about what goes on in the minds of suicide bombers. The idea that Islamist terrorists are partly motivated by the prospect of two-and-seventy virgins is hardly new but not many people seem to have asked where that idea originated. The answer may be embarrassing for Christians, but it is discouraging for unbelievers. Embarrassing because it mainly originated with Christianity. Discouraging because the last time Christianity tried to prevent its adherents from jumping the queue for heaven en masse, it was a couple of hundred years before anything changed.

Islam incorporates many ideas and characters from both Judaism and Christianity. (It also denies Christianity’s central claim that Jesus was crucified, though that doesn’t stop Muslim and Christian legislators from collaborating to block assisted dying laws.) However, the idea of heaven as a really good retirement home with a variety of 24/7 spiritual, gastronomic, and fleshly delights didn’t come from Judaism, which was always a bit vague about the possibility of a physical afterlife (and still is). Christianity’s biggest selling point was the promise of resurrection, a particularly attractive prospect at a time when half your children died in infancy, childbirth was lethally dangerous, and many adults didn’t make it far beyond forty. The imprecise nature of the Christian heaven merely encouraged Christians to put their own interpretations on it.

Naturally, quite a few people argued that if heaven is such a wonderful place, why wait?  Let’s crash the party! The first Christians who took this idea to its logical conclusion were extreme members of the Donatist sect. In the fourth century, many of them opted for suicide, even inviting their friends to watch. Possibly worried about empty pews, the church—led by St Augustine of Hippo—progressively anathematised suicide, penalising it with posthumous excommunication as well as denial of funeral services and burial in unconsecrated ground. As I described in a recent Freethinker article, this remains Catholic doctrine, now fudged by pretending that all suicides are insane. Yet despite the penalties, it was two centuries before Donatism disappeared, though Christianity continued to celebrate martyrdom. The plenary indulgence that soldiers were offered if they died in the Crusades must also have sounded very like a shortcut to heaven.

The garden theme is common to both faiths, but unlike the typical Christian heaven (chaste family reunions, pretty but asexual angels, perpetual Choral Evensong, and white and gold interiors like Buckingham Palace), Islam’s version is unashamedly hedonistic and sensual. Muslims, like Christians, are supposed to enjoy the perpetual presence of God, but for them it doesn’t stop there. They get to enjoy the company of heavenly virgins, or houris, who are supposedly both virginal and well-endowed—and far from coy: ‘And (there will be) Companions [i.e. houris] with beautiful, big and lustrous eyes,- Like unto Pearls well-guarded. A Reward for the deeds of their past (life).’ (Qur’an 56:22-24, Yusuf Ali translation.) (Incidentally, the 72 virgins come from less authoritative hadith collections; according to the more ‘reliable’ accounts, the chosen get just two houris.)  

And, according to verses 56:15-21, these lucky participants recline

on Thrones encrusted (with gold and precious stones)… Round about them will (serve) youths of perpetual (freshness), With goblets, (shining) beakers, and cups (filled) out of clear-flowing fountains: No after-ache will they receive therefrom, nor will they suffer intoxication: And with fruits, any that they may select: And the flesh of fowls, any that they may desire.

Add a bottle of decent Burgundy, and Muslim heaven might as well be a fusion of Love Island and a Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay restaurant. (As it happens, some Qur’an translations are less coy in explicitly naming the contents of those goblets as wine—but even then, it is apparently non-alcoholic wine, which prevents drunkenness and hangovers. So even the hedonism of this conception of heaven has its limits.)

In contrast, religions that encourage suicide (as Hinduism used to do for widows until the Raj outlawed suttee), or at least don’t anathematise it, have less need to offer celestial carrots. Paradise gardens are much less prominent in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shinto. Paradise-free Confucianism also accepts honourable or altruistic suicide.

Barring the more obvious types of insanity, dying—and killing—for an idea usually requires the sort of shared ideas that we call ideologies. (Fidel Castro was prepared for Cuba to be wiped out if the USSR would initiate and, he hoped, win a nuclear war against the USA.) During the Second World War, the kamikaze pilots’ basic ideology was that dying for the Emperor was what good Japanese did if commanded, a hi-tech version of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Surrender was shameful, and kamikaze attacks were airborne versions of the suicidal ‘banzai’ charges of the remnants of Japanese garrisons when the Americans had almost conquered a Pacific island. More recently, some North Korean soldiers captured by Ukraine tried to kill themselves or asked their Ukrainian captors to do the job for them.

In the final months of the European war, the Nazis toyed with a ‘Leonidas’ suicide squadron using a piloted adaptation of the V1 flying bomb like the Japanese purpose-built rocket-powered ones, and though that incarnation of the project never went anywhere, the ‘Leonidas Squadron’ did indeed conduct desperate suicide missions. That seemed to be the final manifestation of the suicide bomber. Afterwards, there was the occasional self-immolation—Buddhist monks in Vietnam, Jan Palach in 1968 Prague—but they harmed nobody apart from the suicides themselves. These suicides harboured no murderous motives; quite the opposite, in fact. They were political statements against oppression and affected public perceptions of the Vietnam War and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that ended its brief ‘Prague Spring’.

By the 1980s, aggressive suicides seemed to me so much a thing of the past and so unthinkable that I included them in one of my very few experiments with fiction. Having been co-opted to the committee of the old Voluntary Euthanasia Society and predicting, correctly, that legalisation in Britain would take a very long time, I made some notes for a blackly comic short story involving an imagined group of elderly Society members with near-terminal cancer who had once been politically active. Now, instead of dying uselessly and unpleasantly, they would start attending political meetings again and get to know selected movers and shakers. Then, at the right moment, they would conceal explosives in their clothes or colostomy bags and explode both themselves and the politicians and bishops opposed to law reform. As the military historian Clausewitz might have said, it was ‘the continuation of individual politics by other means’.

Apart from its very questionable taste, one reason the idea never got beyond the note-making stage was that life started imitating my embryonic art. In 1983, suicide bombers driving a lorry filled with explosives destroyed the US embassy in Beirut and several hundred sleeping marines. Then the Tamil Tigers turned my tasteless fantasy into a terrible recurrent reality when, in 1984, a woman wearing an explosive belt blew up India’s Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, at an outdoor political meeting. This set an enduring precedent that became a regular news item after the Soviet- and American-led invasions of Afghanistan, followed by the invasion and implosion of Iraq and the rise of Islamic State—and, of course, most notoriously of all, 11 September 2001. Now that 11/9 is being remembered and residents of Western conurbations wait uneasily for the first AI-assisted chemical or biological suicide bomber, I have been updating my thoughts. It has not turned out to be an optimistic exercise.

Being a psychiatrist is not much help here. The typical psychiatric suicide is depressed (which usually means ‘understandably unhappy’) or, less commonly, schizophrenic. The change from coal gas to non-toxic natural gas and the phasing out of barbiturates and other once-popular farewell drugs has made traditional suicide methods less lethal, forcing a change to hanging and car exhausts. Catalytic converters make the latter method difficult, so hanging is now a common method for the unskilled, unemployed, and all too often unemployable young men who now contribute disproportionately to European suicide statistics. Among the suicide bombers, there may be some young men of this kind. If you feel that life has little to offer and are thinking of ending it all anyway, there could be an obvious attraction in dying in notoriety rather than failure, but most Muslim suicide bombers don’t seem to come from this underclass. The 11 September group and their UK imitators on 7/7, for example, certainly didn’t, and far from being depressed, they were probably high on martyrdom. One psychiatrist, evidently of the psychoanalytic faith, claimed that these generally young, unmarried, and thus—he alleged—sexually frustrated bombers experience their sacrifice as ‘a massive explosive orgasmic catharsis’, an explanation that seems to me as unlikely as it is therapeutically, prophylactically, and politically unhelpful.

Though the nearly 3,000 death toll from 11/9 was high, we should not forget the steady accumulation of deaths from US mass shootings since then. AI gives a figure in the thousands, counting only those that involved at least four deaths, excluding the shooter. That figure would be much higher if recent wars hadn’t enabled doctors to develop much better techniques for keeping people alive once they have reached medical and surgical help. In many cases, the assailant either shot himself or was shot dead by police. Often that is what the shooter had expected or even wanted to happen to him. Very few of those mass shooters were Islamists/jihadists.

Running Amok: Inside the Mind of the Lone Mass Killer, a 2025 book by British-Australian psychiatrist Paul Mullen, is very informative about the personalities of people who do that sort of thing. Many of them are obviously troubled and disturbed, and there are warning signs, but so are lots of people who never kill anyone. Mullen concedes the difficulty of both identifying and stopping them before they cause mayhem. The recent report on the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana showed that even when several red lights were flashing, the system impeded timely intervention. Mass shootings would be less likely if the media didn’t report them, thus depriving many shooters of their longed-for moment of notoriety, but that is not in the nature of the media in democracies. Only totalitarian states can hope to suppress the news.

Perhaps we can get some useful information by looking at suicide in the military. Most Muslim suicide bombers are of military age and apparently see themselves as soldiers fighting in a just war. If they don’t play it by the Geneva Convention, well, neither did many British and Allied soldiers and agents who operated without uniforms behind enemy lines in WW2. Here we come up against a problem: the generals apparently don’t like talking about suicide. British figures for both world wars are unobtainable because suicide was not recorded separately from other deaths in areas of combat, and a computer search at the Public Records Office drew a complete blank.

The short-lived rise in firearm suicides in Britain from 1939-45 suggests a connection, but the numbers were small. That terrified or exhausted soldiers occasionally use guns to shoot themselves rather than the enemy is hardly surprising, though the deaths are often disguised as ‘accidental’. However, soldiers not infrequently do things on their own initiative that are virtually certain to cause their deaths, like throwing themselves onto a hand grenade to protect their comrades from the explosion. Such ‘heroic suicides’ were recognised as a special category by Émile Durkheim, the 19th-century pioneer of suicide research. He also thought that such acts were commoner among NCOs than officers, and among the leaders rather than the led. Some of this ‘heroism’ (such as charging an enemy machine-gun post single-handed) is actually thinly-disguised suicide but sometimes earns a posthumous decoration because acknowledging the truth would be bad for morale. Occasionally, of course, the equally frightened enemy surrenders and the would-be suicide undergoes a rapid change of role to living war hero.

One reason for the ease with which several thousand kamikaze pilots were recruited was the very high attrition rate among ordinary pilots as Japan started losing the war. If your chances of both hitting the target and returning alive are small, and if a one-way ticket looks as if it might achieve at least the first objective, and if surrender is simply not part of the national or personal ethos, why not try to die usefully rather than uselessly? The Japanese imperial kamikazes died with WW2, but I see no early end to their latest incarnation. Islamic would-be martyrs will hardly be argued out of martyrdom by appeals to secularism.

My fictional technology also needs updating. Many drug-smuggling ‘mules’ can swallow, with practice, twenty or thirty packets of cocaine to pass through immigration undetected, motivated simply by money and with no ideological agenda. There is no need to imagine what a young fanatic might be willing to swallow (or insert) to glorify God because a few suicide bombers have already detonated internalised explosives in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. The Tamil Tigers have gone; the Islamists have not. Islam is very much opposed to ‘ordinary’ suicide and even more to assisted dying, but being a suicide bomber in the service of Islam gets you the equivalent of those Crusade-era plenary indulgences.

Compared with Japan’s tradition of honourable or altruistic suicide and its equivalents in ancient Greece and Rome, Christianity’s excommunication of suicides and the ritual desecration of their bodies that continued in the United Kingdom until 1824 possibly reduced suicidal behaviour but certainly didn’t abolish it. Suicide notes often indicate a hope that God will understand and forgive. The Pope still wields near-total authority among Roman Catholics, but male suicide rates per 100,000 in largely Catholic Poland (21.6) and Lithuania (33.9) are notably higher than in England (17.1). In contrast, the struggle for doctrinal ownership in the Anglican Church, increasingly split between the Church of England and the Church of Africa, is as nothing compared with the lack of any central authority in Islam.

Like the wider Protestant church(es) since the Reformation, Islam contains numerous nonconformist sects, some of them more puritan than the Puritans and equally determined to found their own ‘shining city on a hill’, but it is not only people who regard themselves as devout Muslims who join such sects. Puritanism also attracts sinners anxious to cleanse themselves of sin—like that repentant fornicator St Augustine—and our prisons harbour many home-grown potential converts. Justifiably pessimistic about their prospects in this world, they are willing to consider trying their luck in Islam’s tempting version of the next.

In 1911, Admiral Lord Fisher (the man who introduced Dreadnoughts to the Royal Navy) argued for a common interest and alliance between the Ottoman Empire and the British one, given that over 300 million Muslims lived in India and present-day Malaysia. (If Britain had taken his advice, Turkey might have stayed neutral in 1914 or become an ally, avoiding both the failed Gallipoli campaign and the Balfour Declaration.) However, Fisher’s advice came with a very prescient warning: ‘The world has yet to learn what the Mohammedans can do if once the holy fervour seizes them’. Well, we have certainly learned now, thanks to September 11, 2001—and all the bloody years since.

Related reading

Legacies of 9/11: Blurring the Boundaries of Terrorism, by Rahila Gupta