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My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing

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With My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing Christoph Reuter, a journalist and international correspondent for the German magazine Stern, offers a modern history of suicide terror. Over the course of nine chapters he traces a genealogy of the practice at different points in its history and across several cultures. Chapters on the ancient Persian assassins, suicidal child-soldiers of the Iran/Iraq war, Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Shahids (martyrs), and Japanese kamikazes are considered in parallel with Al-Qaeda and separatist movements in Sri Lanka and Kurdistan. Reuter writes, "This book attempts to piece together, in a logical sequence, what is known about [the origins of suicide terror]--which societies facilitate its development, what conditions are most favorable for its spread, and how the various tactics used have been developed" (6). However, the study that follows is compromised by its founding assumptions: that identifying the origins of suicide terror will shed light on its contemporary purveyors and that some cultures are more hospitable to this practice than others.

In his introduction, Reuter decries the "facile explanations for suicide attacks offered in the Western media" as merely leading to more questions and begins by asking, "If the attacks are to be attributed to radical Islam per se, why have they appeared only in the last twenty years?" (11). Unfortunately, this auspicious beginning is quickly undone as he writes, "Perhaps the thorniest question is how a society can come to tolerate, and indeed foster a practice so opposed to the survival instinct as to be pathological?" (11). The glamour of such a question for a Euro-American audience (no doubt the focus of Reuter's "we" and "us") is undeniable--what sort of people are these that destroy themselves to kill others? However, the Islamophobic assumptions that so often underlie this line of inquiry--even on the left--render the answers almost wholly in orientalist terms. Reuter asserts, "Islam, in its political form, is a well-suited ideology for war," a hyperbolic claim that could as easily be made about Christianity or Judaism and to a similarly banal effect (17). He writes, "Groups from Morocco to Iraq are linked together as though by invisible paths and secret passageways. Thus, injustices perpetrated in Chechnya or on the West Bank can stir up hatred within Morocco and Saudi Arabia, and unintentionally provide aid and comfort to opportunists who stoke the flames of righteous anger elsewhere" (18). In his view, this process, nourished by Islamic mythologizing, has led to the "reinvention of [the] historical archetype" of the martyr (3).

Reuter's focus on Islam, problematic in any case, compromises his argument rhetorically as well, causing him to make strange leaps, elisions, and outright exclusions in his history of suicide terror. For example, he notes the use of murder by suicide as a battle strategy employed by, among others, ancient Jews in Imperial Rome. Yet, he begins his timeline of the practice in the 11th century with the rise of the Persian assassins, whose cult he describes in some detail. Reuter writes, "The sect disappeared without a trace, leaving behind it no tradition, no religious heritage [and] attracting no pilgrims other than Western journalists" (27). However, a few paragraphs later he flip-flops. "On the one hand, nothing remained of the assassin sect per se. On the other hand, something did survive of them after all--a kind of negative afterimage of their deeds. . . . the popular fear of them and their readiness to die, which had just as disturbing an effect in their time as the suicide killings in New York, Tel Aviv, or Colombo do today" (27).

Therefore, Reuter, despite the utter lack of any supporting evidence--which he goes some way himself to point out--elects to draw a direct link between the 11th century assassins and the suicide bombers of our contemporary moment. The lubrication upon which he relies for this astonishing conflation is the notion that Islam itself has remained unchanged across multiple cultures from the Crusades to the present. In fact the only interpretive changes that Reuter notes since the 11th century are those that seem to justify suicide attacks. Thus, he gives tremendous weight to the declarations of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a celebrity TV cleric who has celebrated Palestinian suicide attacks as "the highest form of Jihad" (122). Al-Qaradawi, who has no special authority other than that which is conferred by celebrity, nevertheless offers his own distinction between suicide and martyrdom: "A person who commits suicide kills himself for his own benefit. But a person who becomes a martyr sacrifices himself for the faith and the nation" (122). "This is simply politics," Reuter writes, "the kind of politics that attempts to give practical decisions and popular opinions some kind of retroactive Islamic legal basis, even if a wholly fabricated one" (125).

His sudden disdain for politics is Reuter's attempt to parse the religious and secular motivations for suicide attacks, while simultaneously maintaining that Islam is at their root. He writes, "It is no coincidence that such would-be martyrs (who embrace death as they strike out at their enemies) appeared first of all within Islam . . ." (16). What is not clear is exactly which Islam is at the center of Reuter's concern. He clearly disapproves of "political" Islam but also asserts that suicide bombers reinterpret "traditional" Islam via "torturously reasoned justifications" for martyr operations (64). By making the distinction between "nationalist" and "Islamist" goals of suicide attacks, Reuter assumes that these categories do not imbricate each other or, more properly, that they are homogenous categories in the first place.

"Whatever else it is," Reuter writes, "Islam is a belief system filled with infinite possibilities that can legitimate a wide range of practices as and when the need arises. Suicide bombing is one such practice . . ." (117). Tellingly, he does not interrogate the political circumstances under which suicide terror occurs, the arising "need" he alludes to but does not explain. In his chapter on Israel and Palestine, Reuter writes affectingly about the misery of the Palestinian people but never commits to naming its cause. This has the effect of naturalizing Palestinian suffering by framing it as an element of their character (a tactic he employs elsewhere, as when he suggests that affection for the film Titanic is indicative of a Shi'ite predilection for suffering). Reuter quotes Israeli psychologist Ariel Merari on the motivating factors for a suicide attack: "At the end of the day, it comes from the individual himself, from his experiences, from his beliefs" (109).

The reader is thus presented with a self-sustaining model of the suicide-bomber, whose actions, triggered from within by his "beliefs," occur in a political vacuum. Furthermore, he considers the connections between disparate terrorist enclaves as points in a vast, hidden network of power relations but does not consider the parallels between the political circumstances of each group. Reuter posits that suicide bombing has influenced the collective psychology of Islamic societies via "what German psychologists call the `Werther effect,' in which the [suicide-bomber] becomes an idol whom others strive to emulate"(13). Therefore, "belief" which travels by way of "invisible paths" between Islamic societies has "infected" them with the cult of martyrdom.

While this paradigm cannot account for the role of nationalism and resistance in the practice of suicide bombing, those outside of Islamic societies fall entirely beyond its scope. Nevertheless, he makes an effort to finesse their inclusion in the sequence of his history. To this end, Reuter compares the influence of the samurai on the Japanese kamikazes to that of the Shi'ite defeat at Karbala on modern suicide bombers (whether they are Shi'ite or not). He also reports with sufficient portent that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a secular Marxist group operating in Hindu Sri Lanka, trained with the PLO in the 1970's, despite the fact that the PLO--also secular and Marxist--has never utilized suicide terror. Nevertheless, Reuter insists, "Islamist influences have undoubtedly been manifest in less direct ways (among the LTTE), especially through extensive global television and radio coverage," an utterly speculative claim that serves only to fit his current examples into a frame based on his narrow vision of Islam (162).

The growing corpus of books devoted to the phenomenon of suicide terror all work within (or against) the matrix of assumptions that pervade western representations of Islam. Reuter's book, while arguably well intentioned, is typical of those generated by journalists who specialize in this topic. As with Barbara Victor's execrable Army of Roses, clichés and journalese take the place of scholarly analysis, a phenomenon that reinforces and legitimizes orientalist tropes. Significantly, the only comprehensive survey of data about the worldwide phenomenon of suicide terror, political scientist Robert A. Pape's Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terror, explicitly states that Islam--fundamentalist or otherwise--is not a primary motivating factor in the practice.

Reuter's original premise, exploring "an opponent who . . . has moved outside all the conventional rules of power and war in which we have always trusted," is fascinating but his penchant for mapping the indirect "secret passageways" of inter and intra-cultural influence take him far afield his original questions (2). As a result Christoph Reuter has--unintentionally--constructed a history that reveals a good deal more about contemporary Western ambivalence toward Islam than about suicide attacks and those who carry them out.

This book is strongest in providing a brief but useful overview of terrorism as a strategy used by various groups over the ages. It is not a deeply analytical book, and does not deal except in passing with the larger questions, such as when terrorism is or is not employed as a strategy, and when it is or is not successful, or even what it means to be 'successful' in this situation.

The book was published in German in 2002, and so it is more than a bit out of date in analysing Al Qaida and home-grown terrorist groups. Nevertheless, it was well worth translating, and readers will learn from it. It is also well-written, as is to be expected from a professional journalist.

The one-star review by Joseph Shahadi is, in my estimation, quite unwarranted, although some of his points have at least superficial validity. I find myself bored with the "Eurocentric" critique of terrorism, and Reuter is not very culpable. On the other hand, I think he places much too much emphasis on the religous as opposed to social and political nature of Islamic terrorism. Terrorists tend not to be more religious than average, although more than a few intensified their religious observations leading up to self-sacrifice. Even Al-qaeda is more of a political and social than a religious movement, although it clearly using religion as an agent of maintaining solidarity.

Christoph Reuter provides an excellent overview of the historical origins and applications of this extreme of terrorist tactics. "My Life is a Weapon" surveys this tactic across religious and ethnic lines. That global perspective enhances the relevance of the this work. Mr. Reuter weaves antedotes from attacks as well as interviews with family and friends of martyrs. These stories greatly contribute to the read-ability of this work. Mr. Reuter delves into the various rationale typologies through his research. For us in the west to understand the "why" we need to read Mr. Reuter's research. This fast reading work should be a must for everyone in the domestic emergency services community as well as our military defenders destined for theaters overseas.

The reader's special attention should be concentrated on the descriptions of the Battle of Karbalah (680 a.d.). The west has a tendency to forget the past, a characteristic not shared by most of the world. The Battle of Karbalah is a focal point for extremist Islamic rationalization for this tactic. Practioners endeavoring to understand this tactic must accept the importance of this epic battle as a focal point of motivation for many extremist martyrs.

My Life is a Weapon is a pretty good book, for what it is. While the work addresses the topic of suicide terrorism, it does so in the exact way that it bills itself: as a history. It is a fine history that covers a variety of topics from different periods and touches all the necessary bases (al-Qaeda, Israel/Palestine, and social/religious justification). Even though it was translated from German, it reads very well and serves as a good literary history on the subject. I particularly enjoyed the two chapters on Iran and thought that the chapter on "The Feud of the Fatwas" was also quite informative.

However, even though the book draws its inspiration from the phenomenon of suicide terrorism, the book also deals with state-sponsored suicidal acts. These events, such as the Japanese Kamikazes or the Iranian Martyrs, are interesting but have generally been excluded from the examination of suicide terrorism proper, which must be committed by a terrorist or terrorist organization. The author, Christopher Reuter, certainly brings his views and ideas into the fold but they do not constitute concrete analysis and are, despite the 2004 printing of the translation with abridgement, a bit dated. It must be noted that tackling the analysis and explanation of this monumental issue was not something that the author purported to do. It appears that he wanted to do just what he did, write a good literary history of the subject.

There are a few things that I would like to opine about from the book that do not have much bearing on its overall quality but which are simply conceptual and theoretical issues.

The main piece of insight that Reuter hoped to impart upon his readership was his theory that attempts to explain an issue in the development of suicide terrorism campaigns. The question concerns the conditions that result in the development of a suicide terrorism campaign within a specific conflict (Turkey or Sri Lanka in the book). The obvious answer is the oppression and brutality of the conflict combined with various social factors. However, what is not fully understood is why certain conflicts develop into suicide terrorism campaigns while others do not. The complexity of this issue is compounded by the fact that many of these violent conflicts seem to be more horrible and desperate and, yet, the groups do not shift towards suicide terrorism (such as the Moros in the Philippines, the IRA in Ireland, or the Mayal-Muslims in Thailand).

Reuter puts forth his theory, based on the experience of the PKK in Turkey and the LTTE in Sri Lanka, that dominant, cult-like leaders are responsible for the shift to suicide terrorism. "...The cause and devotion to the leader became a substitute to religion, and considered holy." (Reuter 165) I will call this the "Leader Motivation" thesis. It is true that in these two particular cases, there was this exact type of leader and the situation was one in which the Leader Motivation thesis may have played a role. However, this idea cannot be applied across the board and only explains one reason why suicide terrorism developed in these two conflicts. It does not explain why there is suicide terrorism in some conflicts and not others. Surely, one cannot postulate that in all the heated conflicts in the world since 1983, which have not seen the use of suicide terror, that there has simply not been a strong enough leader.

This thesis is inadequate and there is a much more dominant, competing model about this that is offered by Robert Pape in his study of suicide terrorism entitled Dying to Win. He explains the issue through his idea of "Religious Difference" with regard to foreign occupations. In short, he sees that in cases where the foreign power occupying or besieging the resisting population is of a different religion, the use of suicide terrorism is much more likely. He makes a convincing argument in his book and gives three main reasons why this is the case. 1) The alien nature of the occupier creates a threat to the foundation of the occupied society. This decreases the possibility of compromise and leads to the conflict's portrayal as a zero-sum game (all or nothing). 2) Religious difference facilitates the extreme demonization of the enemy, an effort that is necessary for a variety of reasons. 3) The chasm between the two parties that exists in these situations is just what is needed to accomplish the difficult task of creating social legitimacy for martyrdom and engendering support from the occupied population. As one can see, Pape's theory is much more comprehensive, detailed, explanatory, and backed up by hard facts.

There is a brief section of the book where the author gets a little political, but please let me explain something about his critique first. Once Reuter gets into his curt criticism of American foreign policy, his point of view becomes apparent and of course, predictable. He is obviously a member of the European media establishment, a group that has proved itself to be wildly anti-American. His outlook is clearly aligned with the typical Euro-think mindset: We the European elites, with our enlightened moral ideals, evolved social systems, and post-militaristic states and policies can plainly see the errors in the faulty, bigheaded, chauvinist, jingoist (a new word I learned from reading European writings) military program. Add to this worldview a healthy dose of anti-Semitism and dot it with a few crack-pot conspiracy theories and one has a concise definition of EURO-THINK.

One could say I disagree. I personally feel that European anti-Americanism is driven by a less-than-free, anti-American media oligarchy, the rhetoric of failed European political leaders, and an unhealthy paranoia of American hegemony. I also see it as incredibly arrogant and myopic, as these same critics fail to address the serious flaws in their own systems and, more importantly, ideologies. Aside from that, I commend Reuter for keeping his critique 1) RESPECTFUL 2) on point/relevant 3) commensurate to its role in his book. One should look at this in contrast to the 24 page conceited, tired, and bloated attack on American foreign policy in Iraq by the American academic Mia Bloom in her book Dying to Kill. Considering Reuter is victim to the plague of Euro-Think, I find the reserved nature of his criticism to be a plus, as it is far removed from the virulent far-left attacks that appear daily on the front pages of the European media.

A main criticism of President Bush in Reuter's book is the assertion that he stated that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Understandably, Reuter could not find a quote by Bush or any of his top officials to illustrate this point. Instead he takes a quote that Bush made concerning al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the victory in Iraq and passes it off as if it proves his point about Bush's political dishonesty. This tactic is only good enough to fool those people who want to believe it, not any discerning reader.

In fact, there were assertions made about Hussein's regime in Iraq and its involvement with terrorism, and they are true. Saddam's regime supported many terror groups including those involved in Palestinian terrorism, the PKK in northern Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, and others. There is clear evidence that Iraqi and foreign terrorists were trained in Iraq and under Hussein's authority. Communication, cooperation, and support, short of collaboration, between al-Qaeda and Hussein's regime are evident although, as Reuter points out, there is no clear proof of the involvement of Iraq in 9-11. Time will tell the true extent of these connections. What is most interesting though is that just pages earlier in Reuter's own book, he talks about Ansar al-Islam in Northern Iraq and then details their al-Qaeda heritage and involvement.

"My own investigations, conducted in the days following the capture of Ansar's hiding place by U.S. special forces and allied PUK troops after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, confirm the deep involvement of al-Qaeda in the activities of this group. Along with explosives were found collections of Islamic sermons, and instructions for making biological and chemical toxins as well as explosives...Ansar al-Islam had been created out of nothing by the Arab veterans of the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan who had trickled in after October 2001." (Reuter 148-149)

Admittedly, this group was operating in an area of Northern Iraq that was not controlled by Hussein at the time. Nevertheless, Ansar al-Islam was a dangerous threat and in Iraq.

In the final chapter of his book, which I really liked, Reuter speaks about the democratic yearnings of the Iranian people. I see in his words from this part of the book that, under that staunch Euro-Think exterior, a person who understands liberty and the struggle for democracy and freedom. "A woman who can read, write, study, and earn money has acquired something that no concealing veil can ever take away from her: independence, and a desire for more freedom." (Reuter 173) But why is this understanding limited to the Iranian experience? Why can't he see as I do that Iraqis ache for their freedom too, and that they are fighting for it? No policy is perfect, but what is there to be afraid of? The spread of democracy is what is needed, and it should be pushed for. I hear no alternatives amongst the cries of the arrogant Euro-elites because there are none. Freedom alone is what can deliver us from the threat of terror.