Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation: Religious Perspectives on Suicide

339 Pages·2018·4.741 MB·English

by  Margo Kitts

Title Pages
Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation:
Religious Perspectives on Suicide
Margo Kitts
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190656485
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190656485.001.0001
Title Pages
Margo Kitts
(p.i) Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation (p.ii)
(p.iii) Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation
(p.xi) Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation (p.xii)
(p.iv)
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List of Contributors
Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation:
Religious Perspectives on Suicide
Margo Kitts
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190656485
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190656485.001.0001
(p.vii) List of Contributors
Margo Kitts
Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Islamic Studies in the School of
Global and International Studies at Indiana University. A Carnegie
Scholar, she is the author and editor of seven books, including
Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought
(Oxford University Press, 2013).
David Brick is Senior Lecturer of Sanskrit at Yale University. His
publications include Brahmanical Theories of the Gift: A Critical
Edition and Annotated Translation of the Dānakāṇḍa of the
Kṛtyakalpataru (Harvard Oriental Series, 2015); “The Dharmaśāstric
Debate on Widow-Burning” (JAOS, 2010); “The Widow-Ascetic Under
Hindu Law” (IIJ, 2014); “Bhoḥ as a Linguistic Marker of Brahmanical
Identity” (JAOS, 2016).
Louis E. Fenech , a native of Toronto, Canada, has been involved in
the study of the Sikh tradition throughout his entire academic career.
He is the author of a number of monographs and articles on the
tradition as well as co-editor, with Pashaura Singh, of the Oxford
Handbook of Sikh Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Mohammed M. Hafez is Associate Professor of National Security
Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A
specialist in Islamist violence, he is the author of Why Muslims Rebel:
Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World (Lynne Rienner,
2003), among other works. Dr. Hafez earned his PhD from the London
School of Economics in 2000.
Najam Haider is an Associate Professor of Religion at Barnard
College of Columbia University. His most recent book is Shīʿī Islam:
An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His research
interests include identity formation and historical memory in the
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List of Contributors
premodern Muslim world. His current project focuses on the link
between Late Antique and Early Muslim historiography.
(p.viii) Margo Kitts is Professor and Coordinator of Religious
Studies and East-West Classical Studies at Hawai’i Pacific University.
She is the author or editor of six books and over thirty articles
dealing with ancient literature and/or religion and violence. Her most
recent book is Elements of Ritual and Violence (Cambridge University
Press, 2018). She edits the Journal of Religion and Violence and co-
edits the series, Cambridge Elements of Religion and Violence.
Reiko Ohnuma is Professor of Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth
College. She specializes in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia. She
is the author of Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body
in Indian Buddhist Literature (Columbia University Press, 2007).
Benjamin Schonthal is Senior Lecturer in Buddhism and Asian
Religions at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. Ben’s research
examines the intersections of religion, law, and politics in late-colonial
and contemporary Southern Asia. He is the author of Buddhism,
Politics and the Limits of Law: The Pyrrhic Constitutionalism of Sri
Lanka (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Shmuel Shepkaru is the Schusterman Professor of Jewish
Intellectual and Religious History at the University of Oklahoma. He
has published on the topic of martyrdom, Jewish-Christian relations,
and Israeli culture. One of his publications is Jewish Martyrs in the
Pagan and Jewish Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Jacqueline I. Stone teaches Buddhism and Japanese Religions in the
Religion Department at Princeton University. She has co-edited two
volumes of essays on death and dying in Buddhist cultures. Her most
recent study is Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and
Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan (University of Hawai’i
Press, 2016).
Mary Storm has an MA in East Asian Studies from Stanford
University and a PhD in South Asian Art History from the University
of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Head and Heart:
Valour and Self-Sacrifice in the Art of India (Routledge, 2013). In
search of art-historical adventures, she has travelled from Ladakh to
Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan to Orissa. She lives and works in Galle, Sri
Lanka.
Gail P. Streete is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Rhodes
College. She is the author of numerous articles on women in
antiquity, asceticism, and (p.ix) Christian martyrdom, as well as four
books, the latest of which, Redeemed Bodies (Westminster/John Knox,
1997), discusses the connection between gender and martyrdom in
early Christianity.
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List of Contributors
Anne Vallely is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of Ottawa since 2004. She is an anthropologist of South
Asian religion whose research centers on asceticism, devotional
practices, animals, human/non-human boundaries, and death and
mourning rituals in India, especially among the Jaina community.
Catherine Wessinger is Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of
the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans. She is
author of How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to
Heaven’s Gate (Seven Bridges Press, 2000); editor of Millennialism,
Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse University
Press, 2000), and The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Jimmy Yu is Associate Professor at Florida State University, where he
teaches courses on Buddhism and East Asian religions. His research
interests include the history of the body in Chinese religions,
Buddhist material culture, Chan/Zen Buddhisms, and popular
religious movements within the broader context of fifteenth- to
seventeenth-century China. He is the author of Sanctity and Self-
Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500–1700 (Oxford University
Press, 2012).
(p.x)
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Introduction
Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation:
Religious Perspectives on Suicide
Margo Kitts
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780190656485
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190656485.001.0001
Introduction
On Death, Religion, and Rubrics for Suicide
Margo Kitts
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190656485.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
All of the terms in this volume’s title may be contested, not the least of which is
“suicide.” Broadly condemned as cowardice across the world’s moral codes,
suicide under different rubrics—such as martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or self-
immolation—is conferred a dynamic quality in a number of religious legends,
some tragic and others uplifting. Audiences respond to those legends
presumably because choosing death in certain circumstances is seen as heroic
and often as catalyzing redemption, for the individuals who die, for their
communities, or for humanity. Yet this choice is rarely unambiguous. This
chapter surveys some of those ambiguities. It ponders the themes and
controversies associated with each of the title’s terms, as well as the religious
ardor implicated in some celebrated elective deaths.
Keywords:   martyrdom, sacrifice, self-immolation, violence, heroism, ascetic death, narrative, ritual,
imagination
HOWEVER BROADLY OR narrowly one conceives the sphere of religious
imagination, death is one element at its core. Analysts from Sigmund Freud to
Giorgio Agamben have pondered religion’s fascination with death, and religious
art is saturated with death-related spectacles: not only hells and Armageddons,
but also tortures and mutilations—that is, images of suffering unto death. But, as
this volume shows, religious fascination with death extends beyond speculation
about suffering, punishments, and end times to the notion of elective death, its
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Introduction
desirable or baleful circumstances, the virtue or scandal of those who perform it,
and how best to commemorate it.
This volume’s chapters address the legendary foundations for those elective
deaths which might be framed as religiously sanctioned suicides. With the
exceptions of three contemporary perspectives often ascribed classical roots
(those of two Christian apocalyptic groups [Wessinger], contemporary Salafist
Islamists [Hafez], and some Tamils [Schonthal]), most perspectives herein focus
on originary visions which lie at the heart of classical religious traditions and
which continue to shape the imaginations of adherents. This introduction
sketches some underlying themes in those visions by reflecting on the title’s
terms: suicide, religion, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and self-immolation.
(p.2) Suicide
“Suicide” is perhaps the most contested of these terms. Broadly condemned as
cowardice across the world’s moral codes, suicide under different rubrics—such
as martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or self-immolation—is conferred a dynamic quality
in a number of religious legends, some tragic and others uplifting. Audiences
respond to such legends presumably because choosing death in certain
circumstances is seen as heroic and often as catalyzing redemption, for the
individuals who die, for their communities, or for humanity. It is obvious that
envisioning suicide as virtuous clashes with popular conceptions of suicide as
weak, immoral, and even criminal, but that is precisely the point. Suicide as
elective death (hereinafter so named), its heroic connotations, and its
redemptive framings are legendary, and they continue to resonate in both
religious and nationalist lore.1
Compelling lore about elective death might be surmised too as behind the
contemporary profusion of terroristic self-killings enacted under religious
banners. Despite the focus on origins in these chapters (with the aforementioned
exceptions), we would be remiss here to ignore this pressing reality and some of
the analyses typically offered to explain it. Since at least the 1970s, historians of
religion have been forced to confront the violence in inspirational religious texts,
whether that violence is meant as actual or symbolic, and whether perceptions
of its origins are historically apt. Over the last five decades we have been
immersed in a robust and often bombastic discourse on religion and its
destructive effects.2 Despite this discourse, many analysts of suicide terrorism
downplay religious inspirations in favor of, say, regional tensions and their
complex historical contingencies, ethnic humiliation and the degrading impact of
colonialism, disenchantment with Western mores (fanned by social media), or
the strategic aims of asymmetrical warfare; occasionally, they treat charismatic
leadership and the cultural construction of altruism. These last two factors
implicitly relate to the power of religious (p.3) modeling,3 even as interwoven
with many other motivations, all of which are not easy to disentangle.
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Introduction
But it would be foolish to deny that some individuals who choose to perform
terroristic self-killings may do so based on seemingly sincere religious
motivations, however bewildering those motivations may seem to most of us. To
so deny would be to ignore the hagiographies and martyr videos that celebrate
them as pious heroes who exude extraordinary selflessness and dedication, both
to otherworldly goals and to eliminating suffering for their own communities.
The cosmic war scenario and the thrill of individual participation in it have been
well described by Mark Juergensmeyer,4 while the valorization of selflessness is
conspicuous in artifacts such as the last will and testament of Muhammad Hazza
al-Ghoul: “We do not sing songs of death, but recite the hymns of life . . . We die
so that future generations may live.”5 Strategic end goals aside, it is undeniable
that elective death here is lionized, as it is in a variety of the traditions discussed
in this volume. Not only in the West but in Asia, personal motivations do matter
for evaluating elective death, which is why the study of felt religious triggers,
however slippery to analytical grasp, also matters.
As a point of comparison, it would be inconceivable to eliminate religious
triggers in analyzing elective deaths in ancient Christianity, which, albeit, lacked
the dimension of suicide terrorism. Yet elective deaths as represented by early
Christians were not short on militaristic trope and spectacular suffering, which
they saw as intrinsically religious. Hence Tertullian: “We [Christians] want to
suffer, just as a soldier wants to fight,” “[Christians are] a race ready for death,”
and “If he is denounced, he glories in it . . . when he is condemned, he renders
thanks.”6 And, Clement of Alexandria: “Be of good courage like the man in the
arena . . . [who] nobly confronts toils rendering thanks to God.” And, Cyprian:
“In the battle line the soldier is tested.” And, Justin: “Although we are beheaded
and crucified, and exposed to wild beasts (p.4) and chains and flames, and
every other means of torture, it is evident that we will not retract our profession
of faith; the more we are persecuted, the more do others in ever increasing
numbers embrace the faith and become worshipers of God through the name of
Jesus.”7 There is an agonistic tone to this “rhetoric of resistance,” as Gail Streete
points out in Chapter 3.
Just as it is today, one target of that agonistic rhetoric was those who were prone
to resist its logic. Christian apologists adeptly exploited the tropes of warrior,
athlete, and victory with an astute ear for Roman sensibilities, which they sought
both to defy and to reshape. Yet, the flamboyant suffering of Christians caused
some Romans to recoil. For example, the marriage of religious ardor with bloody
torture in the arena scandalized Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic who approved
autothanasia, but was repulsed by the contumacious displays of victimhood by
Christians.8 Epictetus, Lucian, and their contemporaries were just as appalled,
not only at the theatricality, but at Christians’ devout desire for death, as
illustrated in Ignatius’s petition to die gruesomely and with joy9:
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Introduction
Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. I
am God’s wheat and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be
found the pure bread of Christ . . . Then shall I be truly a disciple of Jesus
Christ, when the world shall not see my body . . . If I suffer I shall be Jesus
Christ’s freedman. (Ad Romanos 4.1– 3)10
While not self-effacing, as Marcus would have preferred, such sufferings must at
least have piqued the curiosity of Roman spectators weaned on Greek legends of
Iphigenia, Polyxena, Menoeceus, and acts of devotio by Roman generals such as
Decius.11 Those patriotic and selfless deaths helped to set the stage for the
reception of early Christian suffering, with the startling difference, per
Tertullian, Clement, and others, that Christians sought glory in the next life, not
for themselves or their brethren in this one.12
(p.5) Similar valor but also controversies inform virtually every tradition
treated in this volume. Under the same Roman halo as the Christians, Philo and
Josephus eloquently ascribed heroism to the Jews who embraced death during
the Roman siege at Masada, although the two denied the virtue of elective death
elsewhere (see Shepkaru, Chapter 2). The earliest Islamic discourses
unambiguously disparaged elective death, and heavenly rewards were not
predicated on struggle. Yet the merit attributed to those embracing death in
battle shifted in some later hadiths (Afsaruddin, Striving, “Martyrdom,” and
Chapter 5). Shīʿī Imāms, nearly all of them, are adored for having stood for
justice while murdered, but their heroism is complicated by a presumed
foreknowledge of their imminent murders, in tension with the general Islamic
prohibition on suicide: in other words, if they were prescient, why didn’t they
avoid their impending deaths (Haider, Chapter 6)? On the Sikhs, Lou Fenech
notes (Chapter 11) the essential role of the martyrologist in constructing the
famed soldier-saint; reverence for the self-sacrificing śahīdī rose in waves from
the late eighteenth century up to the last decades of the twentieth, retrojected
back onto the earliest gurus via increasingly glorifying poetry and prose. In the
case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (hereinafter LTTE), Ben Schonthal
points out (in Chapter 12) that speeches commemorating the self-killing Black
Tigers were restrained in tone, and judiciously ambiguous, lest the subject of
their elective deaths offend religious tastes. Note that, while a tenor of righteous
struggle pervades some of these memorializations, it is often attenuated by
theological caution.
Some other elective deaths might appear comparatively pristine, but there are
ambiguities in virtually all cases. In the Jain tradition, for example, greatly
revered are deaths by sallekhanā, wherein fasting to death is meant to minimize
one’s burden on other living beings, but also to enable one’s self-actualization
(see Vallely, Chapter 10). So how altruistic is it? Across the panorama of
Buddhist traditions too, there is a fine irony in giving one’s life selflessly to help
other beings, but then benefitting from it by accruing spiritual merit (as noted
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Introduction
by Ohnuma, Yu, and Stone, in Chapters 13, 14, and 15, respectively). The
altruism ascribed to the Hindu sati, or self-immolating widow, is applauded for
certain castes in early law texts, but there are disputes about the widow’s
proper role: is winning heaven for herself and her husband the most desirable
goal, or should she instead strive for liberation from the cycle of rebirth through
ascetic celibacy (see Brick, Chapter 9)? The early Indian sannyāsin and sadhu,
thought to have burned off secular ties to the self, were lauded for ascetic
practices that led to their personal extinguishments, even though some texts
condemned elective death (see Storm, Chapter 8). The (p.6) cultivation of
emptiness in some Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions certainly mandates a
different lens for viewing selfless acts, particularly if there is no felt self.
Assuming, with Durkheim for a moment, that practitioners of religious
asceticism may feel engulfed in something they regard as their true essence, it
would be difficult to apply a cost-benefit analysis to acts of selflessness which
are rooted in a sublime sense of self that transcends corporeal life.
Religion
What could be such a sublime sense of self that transcends corporeal life? The
religious dimension to all this is also contested, as is conspicuous in the case of
the LTTE, some of whom deny the relevance of religion altogether (Schonthal,
Chapter 12). It is indisputable that scholarship on the nature of religion is in the
throes of a thorough refashioning. No longer do we assume that religion must
address logoi about theoi (as in “theologies”); instead, awareness of global
diversity—e.g., the varying Asian sensibilities mentioned above—has forced us to
question the lenses through which we historically have viewed religion. One
emergent lens is imagination, particularly narrative imagination, which happens
to correlate well with the study of the textual traditions explored herein. Another
lens is visceral perception, and a third, related to the others, is the generative
capacity of ritual. We can barely scratch the vast surface of religious studies in
this introduction, but we can reference briefly some scholarly insights stemming
from these emerging foci.
First, a focus on narrative imagination allows a study not only of heroes and
antiheroes, but of aesthetics, ethnic receptions, and figurative language, along
with those category-bending perceptions that may be elicited by poetic turns of
phrase. Arguably, poetic turns of phrase are the stuff of religious imagination
because, as Aristotle understood, they can evoke heightened or skewed
perceptions and bring subliminal discernments to consciousness.13 Metaphor,
catachresis, and poetic extension are well-known tools for such evocations, but
more central to our discourse these days are the existential layers of perception
that those tools attempt to evoke. No longer do we accept that all categories of
experience simply are socially imposed; rather, since the existential
phenomenologists and the perceptive theorists who harvested their thoughts,14
some of us seek (p.7) to explore those visceral dimensions to experience that
seem to elude discursive signification. Instead of pointing up to the
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