The Devil We Know

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ULTIMATE SACRIFICE:
MARTYRS, SUICIDE BOMBERS, AND THE FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF ISLAM

There’s not a single known instance of an Iranian suicide bomber since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. There’s also no evidence that Iran has ordered any suicide bombing attacks by proxies since the Israelis left Lebanon in 2000. Many would argue that the fact the Iranians had ever sponsored suicide attacks at all makes them irrational and impossible to negotiate with. But that’s not the way the Iranians look at it.

A suicide bomber, for them, is the ultimate “smart bomb,” little different from the wartime soldier who rushes a machinegun nest to meet his certain death. For Iran, the suicide bomber is part of its military arsenal, a tool with a tactical military purpose. For Sunnis, on the other hand, suicide bombers are used for the vague objective of “weakening the enemy.” While the Sunnis can’t define the objectives of martyrdom, the Shia can. And the Shia are capable of stopping the violence when necessary.

The misconception many Americans have about Muslims is that they all hate the West. Not just the West’s politics, but Western culture and Westerners personally. But that’s only partially true. Yes, a small fraction of Muslims is driven by blind hate and wants to destroy the West, but most Muslims just want to be left alone. They don’t care about a jihad against the West. The problem is separating one from the other.

In January 2008, a bomber walked into the five-star Serena Hotel in Kabul with two confederates carrying automatic rifles and grenades. He blew himself up, killing eight, including Afghans—believing Muslims. The Taliban, the Sunni takfiris of Afghanistan, claimed responsibility and threatened to start attacking restaurants Westerners frequent. It didn’t matter to the Taliban that Kabul’s restaurants cater to aid workers and not NATO troops. The only thing they cared about was that they’re symbols of the West.

The intended target of the Serena Hotel attack, the Norwegian foreign minister, wasn’t a military target. Neither were the people who died in the lobby. They were just ordinary people trying to help Afghans. Norway is a neutral country in the conflict between Islam and the West. It sponsored the Oslo Accords to stop the killing of Muslims as well as Jews. So the Serena attack had no practical objective other than slaughter, a misguided attempt to “purify” Afghanistan.

Days before that, an al Qaeda group ransacked the American school in Gaza—another act of blind rage against the West. And 9/11, too, was simply an act of hate against the West, with no military objective or, for that matter, comprehensible goal. The World Trade Center could never seriously be considered a military target. Some Muslim clerics would justify its destruction by claiming the people who died there paid taxes that go to a military that kills Muslims, reasoning that won’t stand in any sort of rational discourse. In any case, it doesn’t disguise the abiding hate these people have for us—the notion that in a clash of civilizations, everyone is a fair target.

There’s a set of people in America who have focused on the radical wing of Muslim Brotherhood, on al Qaeda, and even on Iran, lumping them together, claiming they represent a wider hate that drives the Middle East. Since 9/11, without any evidence, these people have tried to make the case that Muslims intend to infiltrate the United States, bring it down from inside, and convert us to Islam. They search the Dumpsters of the world looking for evidence of this dark conspiracy.

But the truth is something different. When the Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, his real interest was reforming Egyptian society, borrowing from the Koran as social doctrine rather than a call to war. Yes, the Muslim Brotherhood is an anticolonial movement, but mainly because the purification of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood believed, would only occur if Muslims governed themselves.

Things went wrong when the Muslim Brotherhood’s military wing broke off and resorted to violence. This was a reflection of how the Sunni, unlike the Iranian Shia, lack a hierarchy, a central point of authority. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the Sunnis lack discipline because they lack a pope, an institution like Shia Islam’s grand ayatollahs.

Even during its worst periods of terrorism, Iran generally stuck to attacking military and diplomatic targets—the Israeli army, the Marines, U.S. embassies. The Sunni takfiris, on the other hand, never attempted to make this distinction. Again, Western concepts don’t transfer easily to the Middle East. Yet the Sunnis are anarchists. And this isn’t a recent occurrence: extreme Sunni movements like al Qaeda have flared up throughout the history of Islam. But they never end up attracting a broad base, and soon disappear.

Sunni takfiris believe they’re in an existential fight against the West. Like Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, Peru’s Shining Path, or even Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution, they believe the West’s influence, its intellectual and physical occupation, can only be reversed by erasing every symbol of the West—including decimating their own Western-educated intelligentsia, blowing up the Bamiyan wall carvings, or throwing away their toothpaste.

There’s an undeniable lure for Sunnis in the promise of chaos. Osama bin Laden only began attracting a following when he called for the slaughter of Americans: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

Al Qaeda and the takfiris are a threat we will struggle with for years. But when we take that part to represent the whole of the Muslim world, we are unable to separate friends from our enemies.

In her hijab, twenty-nine-year-old Palestinian Hanadi Jaradat looked out of place in Maxim’s, a Haifa restaurant that sits at the end of a jetty. But she wasn’t enough out of place for the security guard not to let her in—many Israeli Arabs these days dressed conservatively. Besides, the taxi driver she arrived with was an Israeli Arab. And she spoke fluent English.

Maxim’s restaurant, owned by a Jew and an Arab, was the promise of what a secular Israel could be, Muslims and Jews living together. Many of the staff were Arab. Haifa, Israel’s principal port, is more cosmopolitan than most Israeli cities.

Hanadi sat across from the driver. He’d picked her up at the crossing from the Palestinian West Bank, the one that serves the town of Janin.

The driver wasn’t surprised a single woman was traveling alone. Hanadi was well spoken, educated, from a good family. Palestinian mores had been changing for a long time. He remembered the sixties and seventies, when Palestinian women started wearing miniskirts in the first sign of rebellion and sexual liberation. That rebellion would never reach the level it did in the West. Still, it was a sign that Palestinian women were modernizing in spite of the hijab.

Later, the driver said Hanadi was perfectly lucid and calm, just chatting about her family and Janin. It was Saturday, October 4, 2003, the Jewish Shabbat.

Hanadi watched the surfers catching the swell beyond the breakers. Although she had studied law in Jerash, Jordan, the world outside of Janin was alien to her. She’d been a virtual prisoner most of her life, stuck in the West Bank, in a society that couldn’t quite bring itself to accept women as the equals of men. She’d been dragged into the resistance against her more cautious nature: her fiancé and her brother were Palestinian Islamic Jihad activists, and no doubt had Israeli blood on their hands. The Israelis had gunned them down in a “targeted killing” in Janin. She was standing next to her brother when he died.

The driver said she listened to a half-dozen of the kitchen staff, Arab Muslims, taking a break to eat. But more than that, she watched two Israeli Jewish families eating their Shabbat dinner. Three generations sitting together, laughing, savoring their day off. Hanadi commented to the driver on how cute the children were, running around the tables.

The taxi driver, now in prison for illegally transporting a West Bank Palestinian into Israel without a permit, isn’t a reliable witness. The story he told later to the police undoubtedly was tailored to exculpate himself. Still, Hanadi couldn’t help but have noticed those small children, seen their innocence. They were in no way responsible for the deaths of her fiancé and her brother, or the poverty in Janin.

Her last words to the taxi driver were “I’m fine. You had better go now.”

As soon as the driver left, Hanadi stood up, walked between the two families, and pulled the pin on her suicide vest. She killed twenty-one people as well as herself. Two families, three generations.

Later, I found Hanadi Jaradat’s father and mother in Janin. She was a wonderful girl, the father told me. Kind, a brilliant student. She had a future. They’d had no idea what she was planning—it came as a complete shock. Of course. The families always claim they suspected nothing.

What did surprise me was the condition of their apartment. The day after the Maxim’s attack, the Israeli military had blown up the Jaradats’ house in retaliation. The family moved to a filthy second-story apartment on a narrow street with trash piled in the front. The day I arrived, Hanadi’s mother was cooking with one of her sisters in the kitchen. But it was nothing like the elaborate meals Palestinians usually make. Most telling of all, they didn’t ask me to stay to eat. This was a family who had given up, though I had no idea whether that had happened before or after the Maxim’s attack.

I’d noticed in general that the town of Janin was getting poorer, looking more like Gaza, with Arab culture flaking away and the people coming to the end of their self-respect. Historically, along with Nablus, Janin has been a staging ground for Palestinian attacks against Israel. In turn, it has been the target of numerous Israeli sweeps, including a major offensive to clean out the terrorist cells. Hanadi Jaradat had grown up amid violence. She was taught that it was the way you solved problems.

I also met Sami Jaradat, a relative of Hanadi and one of the organizers of the attack on Maxim’s. Sami’s brother was Hanadi’s fiancé, the one killed in a “targeted attack.” Sami, who gave Hanadi the bombing vest and filmed her last testament, which aired on television, is now serving twenty-one life sentences in a high-security prison.

“By the power of Allah,” she declared in that last testament, “I have decided to become the sixth female martyrdom-seeker, who will turn her body into shrapnel, which will reach the heart of every Zionist colonialist in my country, and every settler or Zionist who has tried to sow death in my country.”

It was a telling statement—and a telling attack—because it was directed at civilians rather than a military target, completely unlike anything Hezbollah carried out in Lebanon in the eighties and nineties. Iran by this time was an ally of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but there was no evidence the Iranians assisted in planning Hanadi’s attack. The Iranians almost certainly weren’t in touch with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell in Janin that had planned it.

Sami, small and wiry with intense green eyes, was a man who’d be happy to help a foreigner who got lost in Janin, and invite him for a cup of tea. A man you might keep in touch with after your visit.

He was quite insistent that Hanadi was supposed to attack a military target—a military bus or a group of Israeli soldiers. It was never supposed to be Maxim’s. So what did Sami think when he heard she’d blown up a restaurant, killing small children?

“One cannot separate the kids from the adults,” Sami told me, his green eyes unblinking. “Israeli society is a military one.”

I’d heard this logic before. The children killed in Maxim’s were going to grow up to be soldiers. Just as the people in the World Trade Center contributed to killing Muslims through taxes they paid. Still, this logic was so contorted, it surprised me. I couldn’t help but challenge Sami.

“The Israelis say the same thing about Palestinian society,” I told him. “They’re all potential terrorists.” Meaning, anyone is a legitimate target.

Sami didn’t know what to do with that statement. He could only respond that the Palestinians, unlike the Israelis, don’t have tanks or planes to fight back. An eye for an eye was all that mattered to him. Weaken the enemy as they weaken you.

What struck me about the attack on Maxim’s was the randomness of the bombing, the aimless slaughter. If Sami was telling me the truth, that Hanadi was supposed to hit a military target, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was incapable of controlling its people or even mounting an effective military campaign. Killing two Israeli families in an Arab/Israeli business was anything but effective. It didn’t help the Palestinians’ cause in the least.

The notion of martyrdom is so deeply ingrained in the Middle East that even secular groups have embraced it, young men who don’t believe in the keys to heaven or the promise of seventy-two virgins.

In Tehran a couple years ago, I spent several days with former members of the Basij, the reserves of the Revolutionary Guards. They had been volunteers, some of them in their mid-teens when they were first sent to the front lines during the Iran-Iraq War.

I sat with one of the Basij on the roof of my hotel, looking over Tehran. In the distance, the Elburz Mountains were covered with snow. We were a world away from south Tehran, the poor part of the city where many of the Basij came from—as in so many conflicts, it was the poor who fought and died in the Iran-Iraq War. But if there was any bitterness or resentment on the part of this now middle-aged man, he didn’t show it. Iran was his country, and he had done his duty.

I asked about the keys to heaven, the plastic keys the Basij were rumored to carry into battle, a promise of passage into heaven if they died. The question annoyed him.

“Getting killed wasn’t our purpose,” he said. “We went to protect and defend our country against an attack. And also we knew that getting killed is a part of war. I wonder what you call a soldier who’s been killed for protecting your country. You wouldn’t use ‘killed’ would you? There should be another respectful term for it, no?”

The more we talked, the more it was clear he equated martyrdom with nationalism—a sacrifice for Iran, nothing more. He claimed never to have seen a pair of plastic keys. He also dismissed the promise of seventy-two virgins for martyrs. Heaven for him was too abstract to talk about, and he looked at the promised virgins as Western lies meant to trivialize the Basij’s patriotism.

I’d seen the same thinking in the way Hezbollah looked at suicide bombing. It was a military tactic, rather than a way to get to heaven. In all, Hezbollah produced thirteen acknowledged suicide bombers. Cheap and lethal, they were supposed to force the Israeli army to give up ground, not to “weaken” them. Unlike Hanadi Jaradat’s attack in Haifa, Hezbollah suicide attacks were a precision weapon used against military targets.

On November 11, 1982, the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, was abuzz with the morning routine, a confident optimism in the air.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was succeeding. The Israel Defense Forces had completely crushed the PLO, cornered them in the Biqa’ Valley and the far north, from where their rockets could no longer reach northern Israel. Yasser Arafat was finished. The Middle East looked as though it was finally going to be cleaned up, or at least the Palestinians subdued. Once the Lebanese civilian government restored its writ, the Israelis could go home.

The Israeli soldiers, many of them just girls with M-16s strapped across their backs, ducked into the military HQ building to get out of the rain. They would have been struck by the beauty of Lebanon’s blue-green, silver-flecked sea and the coastline around Tyre that morning. The craggy limestone cliffs poking a finger into the water, capped with limestone houses like castles, would have made Tyre look medieval to them, so different from Israel, with its modern high-rises and shopping centers.

Alexander the Great captured Tyre in 332 B.C., denying the Persians their only port on the Mediterranean. From Tyre it seemed he would march unopposed across the known world, invade Persia, and keep going. Israel, too, felt it could march as far as its political will would take it. There certainly didn’t appear to be anyone who could stop it.

The young Israeli soldiers marveled at how calm Lebanon had been, how friendly everyone had been, waving at the Israeli checkpoints. The Israelis had been welcomed by the Shia. Stories about roses thrown in front of the Israeli tanks weren’t true, but the Lebanese Shia really did seem relieved to finally be rid of the Palestinian militias. The Israelis were so confident, they were even talking to the Shia about turning parts of southern Lebanon over to them. Armed and committed, the Shia would keep out the Palestinians.

There had admittedly been some problems. A tank crossing a farmer’s field. Israeli checkpoints that weren’t always polite with the Shia. But that was seen on all sides for what it was—unfortunate mistakes, easily forgotten in the wake of an invasion.

At a little after eight in the morning, a boy driving a minivan approached the eight-story Israeli military headquarters. The van looked like any one of the thousands of vans racing around Tyre. There was no reason for anyone to be suspicious. The boy asked an Israeli soldier standing out front if he could make a U-turn. No one suspected anything until the van lurched toward the main entrance, where a group of Israeli soldiers had just walked in. By then, it was too late. Even to run.

The van exploded inside the building, killing seventy-five Israeli soldiers and fourteen Arabs. If this had been a missile fired from a helicopter, it would have been called a surgical strike. But it was a suicide bomber, an attack claimed by the Islamic Jihad Organization. The shock was so profound for the Israelis that to this day, official Israeli websites claim the blast was due to a gas leak.

This attack would mark for many Israelis the beginning of the end for the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The Israelis should have pulled out then, many thought, rather than wait for a popular confrontation, like the one that would come in Nabatiyah a little less than a year later. But then again, who knew that this would be only the first of many suicide bombers?

The driver of the van was Ahmad Qasir, a fifteen-year-old from the village of Dayr Qanun al-Nahar. Years later, I went to see his family, hoping to get clues about the event that ultimately triggered one of the most significant defeats in modern military history.

The Qasirs’ home is more of a cave, cut into the side of limestone walls. I followed Ahmad’s mother into the dark living room. She turned on the lights, revealing several large portraits on the wall.

I recognized Ahmad from newspaper photos, a pudgy boy with a sad expression. After Hezbollah identified him as the driver of the van in 1985, the Lebanese and Arab press descended on the Qasirs’ house, and posters of Ahmad appeared all over Lebanon. From his picture, he looked like an improbable hero.

Another picture was of Musa, a second martyred Qasir son. The third was of Abd-al-Mun’im Qasir, a relative, who had died somewhere fighting the Israelis. And in the middle, the largest picture was of Ayatollah Khamenei. There was no doubt where this family stood.

I started by asking about Abd-al-Mun’im.

“He was martyred, but no one knows where,” Ahmad’s mother told me.

I had never heard of Abd-al-Mun’im Qasir before; for some reason Hezbollah had never announced where he’d been killed and turned him into an icon, as they did with so many martyrs. This was unusual, and I immediately wondered if he was the driver of the van that in 1983 destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Or maybe the driver of the GMC pickup that blew up the U.S. embassy there in April 1983. I doubted Ahmad’s mother knew. There was no point in pressing her.

But she did claim to know the history of the resistance, how it started. When Ahmad drove his van into the military intelligence headquarters in Tyre, Hezbollah didn’t exist, at least under that name. It was an ad hoc organization then, its leadership known only to a few people. It certainly was an unknown entity for the Israelis. If they had known about its capabilities, they would have taken precautions.

Ahmad’s mother was resigned to his death. By the time I met her, it had happened more than twenty years ago. I had the feeling this is what life had prepared her for, to lose two sons for some cause she couldn’t completely comprehend. Did she really feel the anger that had driven her son to kill himself?

I asked her how many Israelis Ahmad had killed. She thought three hundred.

“It was more like three hundred seventy-five,” a voice said from behind me.

It was Ahmad’s sister, whom I’d been introduced to when I arrived. Though both she and her mother were inflating the true number, I didn’t attempt to correct her.

“They weren’t expecting it,” the sister said. “And it was in the middle of a rotation.”

Ahmad’s sister knew the story intimately, how Ahmad approached the Israeli sentry and asked if he could make a U-turn. And how instead, as the sentry watched, he’d rammed the van through the front door.

They were surprised the Israelis hadn’t seen it coming. But the Israelis didn’t know about martyrdom, she said. They disregarded the lessons of the Iran-Iraq War, then in its second year—how tens of thousands of young men heedlessly charged the Iraqi front lines, giving up their lives. For the Israelis, the waves of Iranian martyrs in Iraq must have seemed as much ritual sacrifice as military tactic.

The sister made it a point to remind me that the Iranians exported the tactic of martyrdom to Lebanon. And that her brother was the first Lebanese martyr.

She also pointed out that Ahmad was the first martyr to drive a car into a target. In Iran, the practice was to charge Iraqi front lines on foot.

There was one delicate question I wanted to ask. In a small family village like this, the idea of agnosticism or apostasy—of abandoning your religious beliefs—was unthinkable. Religion was as much a part of the fabric of life here as anywhere in the world.

“Was Ahmad a strong believer?” I asked.

“Of course. He used to pray and fast.”

The sister caught on to what I wanted to ask, whether Ahmad had been programmed or possibly was unaware of what he was doing. For a long time we thought that suicide bombers were picked because they were psychologically flawed. She answered my question before I could ask it.

“There is nothing that makes a person rebel more than oppression, right?” she said. “So oppression gives birth to mutiny. Now when you see Israel invading and killing people, while you are not fighting back as is happening in Palestine—well, you are not fighting and dying. To fight and die is better than just dying.”

I wanted to get back to Ahmad—the “prince of martyrs,” as he is known today in Hezbollah.

“When he was in Saudi Arabia, he started saying that no one will shake Israel more than him,” she told me. “His friends in the village would ask what he could do against Israel. He would reply, ‘You will see what I will do to Israel.’ ”

The morning of the attack, Ahmad said nothing to his family. When he left the house, he asked what was for lunch. Anything he wanted, his mother replied. There was nothing unusual about him that morning.

“He was standing next to me as I was washing the dishes,” Ahmad’s mother said. But not long after he left, they heard the explosion. They were standing outside, next to the fountain on the veranda—you can almost see Tyre from there.

Ahmad’s identity was kept secret until the Israelis pulled out of Tyre, so they couldn’t take retribution against the Qasir family. In fact, the Qasirs themselves weren’t told for two years that it was their son who had driven the van into the Israeli military headquarters.

“They first told us he had been detained,” the mother said. “We would look for him in prison. We searched in the beginning in the hospitals.”

I asked what part Iran played in Ahmad Qasir’s martyrdom.

“While he was in Saudi Arabia, he became psychologically prepared for it,” the mother said, sidestepping my question.

His sister put it in historical context.

“For the Shia, the concept of martyrdom comes from the Imam Husayn”—the seventh-century martyr who died at Karbala and is celebrated on Ashura—“who is the symbol of martyrdom and resistance,” she said. “The modern concept of martyrdom started in Iran and spread. But this idea is present in the mind of every person. It isn’t because there are martyrs in Iran that there are martyrs in Lebanon. No.”

I asked her about the details leading up to Ahmad’s attack. Was there a fatwa? Was he recruited by the village imam? How was the attack put together?

“God only knows about these things.”

I was particularly interested in the fatwa, because it fit my conceptual framework of discipline among the Shia.

She said a fatwa wasn’t needed. You only needed oppression and the example of Imam Husayn, the Koran. I still had my doubts. In the 1988 Kuwait Airways hijacking, Mughniyah specifically asked a cleric for a khayra, something like a fatwa, before ordering the two Kuwaiti passengers executed. And there were dozens of other incidents we knew about where Hezbollah sought the blessing of religious authority before making an attack.

I asked her whether it was worth it, sacrificing her brother.

She looked at me with an ironic smile that made me wonder whether she’d known about it from the start. Had she talked it over with Ahmad, pushed him, kept up his resolve?

“Of course it was worth it,” she said. “Until that day, Israel had never tasted defeat.”

“Where is Ahmad now?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“In heaven, with Imam Husayn,” the mother answered.

The sister added, “For us, in the holy Koran, it says that heaven’s beauty is beyond anything you have seen. And those who go to heaven have done great things. The highest ranks are for martyrs.”

A conversation I had with Ayatollah Sanei, a reformist grand ayatollah who lives in Qum, only confirmed my impression that Shia ideas about suicide bombings differ substantially from those of the Sunni takfiris. The Shia, at the very least, are able to articulate the purpose of martyrdom.

It was April 2005. I walked through a courtyard and up to the second floor of a nondescript building to the ayatollah’s office, where I was offered a seat and a cup of sugared tea as I waited for the man who was revered as a marja’ al-taqlid, a source of learning and moral rectitude, a living paradigm to be emulated by his followers.

I asked him how martyrdom came to be adopted at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War.

Sanei told me that the idea of martyrdom was not unique to Islam but found in many societies. It was something a society needed, a simple matter of self-defense. It is within human nature, he said, to defend oneself. “Martyr,” then, is only a name for those who died defending the greater good.

“Is martyrdom a personal choice?” I asked.

“It’s a personal choice,” the Ayatollah replied. “Anyone can decide to go or not to go. But the law of God is you should go and fight.”

Was martyrdom an important weapon of Islam?

“Yes. In the same way that defense is a worthy value, so is martyrdom. Martyrdom is the great and worthy child of defense.”

Did martyrdom make a difference in the Iran-Iraq War?

Sanei wouldn’t answer my question, other than to say, “We had no other options.”

I persisted and asked whether Iranian suicide bombers helped demoralize the Iraqi army. Or did he think it was just throwing away lives?

“It did have an effect,” Sanei said. “But because foreign powers supported Iraq, it wasn’t decisive.”

I’ll say it for Sanei: Belief alone wasn’t enough to win a war.

Sanei was quick to defend Ayatollah Khomeini. He said Khomeini had managed to drive all the Iraqi forces from Iran. His military strategy, the embracing of martyrdom, had been worthwhile.

I asked Sanei what he would say if a young man came to him today and asked to go on a suicide mission.

“I would tell him to look at the politics of the world, think about the enemies’ plans, think about the people,” he told me. “And if martyrdom serves a higher objective, well, then, he decides for himself.”

I pressed him further. In that case, why were there no more Iranian martyrs? How were Iranians able to keep an individual choice like that under such remarkable control? Did they have an ability to turn it off and on?

I was getting at the discipline question. I wanted to ask directly if the Shia were more disciplined than the Sunni. But I sensed that framing the question precisely in those terms would offend him.

“At the war’s end,” he said, “Iran no longer needed suicide bombers to defend itself.”

But I wasn’t prepared to let it go at that. A few days before our meeting, Jewish Israelis were caught trying to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. They were arrested. Could this not be construed as an act of martyrdom? The defense of Judaism—a legitimate act of defense?

Sanei answered with a non sequitur. “Whoever wants to desecrate holy places must be stopped by force. With all your souls,” he intoned, “eradicate oppression.” This was, he said, the same way Khomeini’s guidance had inspired the Lebanese. “He had a great impact and saved Lebanon from captivity.”

I pressed further. “What about the Sunni suicide bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan?” I asked. At the time of our meeting, Sunni takfiri suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in markets and schools every day. Weren’t these people doing the same thing Sanei suggested? Looking around, seeing what they perceived as an intolerable injustice, and making the decision to defend themselves?

Sanei started softly, almost whispering. He said he didn’t think the chaos in Iraq would lead to a general war among Muslims. Ayatollah Sistani and Iraq’s other learned mujtahids would prevent it, he said.

“But who are these people?” I pressed. “These suicide bombers?”

“They are criminals,” Sanei said, his voice rising. “They are against humanity. Not only are they not human beings, they’re not even feral animals. They are worse than desert wolves.”

Sanei was angry. And his anger was clearly not summoned for my benefit.

What if these suicide bombers didn’t stop?

“They will be stopped by force,” he said.

Sanei’s point was clear enough now: Suicide bombing wasn’t meant to be a free-for-all, a decision made independently by anyone with a grievance, to be carried out when and where he felt like it. It had to be controlled by someone, carefully aimed at a military target, by a leader, a military, or even a state. Otherwise, it was an act of aimless slaughter.

“Why is it that the followers of Ayatollah Sistani have such good behavior?” I asked. “They’re not committing suicide operations now.”

Sanei paused and looked at me. “It is obvious,” he said. “They are rooted in the religion. Their belief in a religious leader brings order.”

Sanei didn’t say it outright but he might as well have: The Shia are disciplined, unlike the Sunnis, the savage wolves.

In contrast to Iranian Shia, Sunni takfiri suicide bombers are less educated, less well vetted, less clear about their objectives. They’re more likely to drift off into undisciplined, aimless violence. The difference in quality of recruits was never more apparent to me than when I interviewed a would-be Sunni suicide bomber in April 2007.

I was in Kabul, one of those cities the centuries have passed by. With its stone houses burrowed into the stone hills, it’s biblical—and has the worldview to go along with it. I was escorted into an office deep inside the headquarters of the Afghan intelligence building.

A guard pushed a young man through the door toward me. He was little more than a boy, his adolescent skin pimpled and his hands shaking at the idea of meeting an American. He had never met a foreigner before, the Afghan intelligence official told me. He was terrified.

Dressed in a loose-fitting salwar kameez, the boy sat in front of me, his hands on his knees. In a soft voice, he told me he’d grown up in South Waziristan, a mountainous region in Pakistan on the Afghan border. Everyone in his family of poor farmers had been a devout believer in Islam and went to the local mosque every Friday, the men and the women segregated.

It was in the mosque where the boy’s problems started; two young men from the Taliban approached him, having noticed his piety. They asked him if he wanted to learn about the real Islam. Over the course of two weeks, they inculcated in him a crude obligation to martyrdom: if the boy sacrificed his life he would go right to heaven, to be received by seventy-two virgins amid lush green grass and rivers. This was a description I’d heard from the Sunni—but not, in contrast, from the Shia Basij, with their more reasoned and disciplined view of martyrdom.

When the handlers showed the boy a suicide vest with detonator button, they told him that when he pushed it, it would send a message to God. God then would decide whether the boy was worthy for martyrdom. If he was, God would detonate the vest. I understood now why they’d picked him.

The boy’s mission had been to put on a suicide vest, approach the governor of Jalalabad, and blow him up—and anyone else who happened to be standing around. Not only was the governor not a military target, but the bomb would also have killed dozens of civilians, innocent bystanders. But the boy didn’t care, and neither did his handlers, the logic being that if you’re anywhere near a potential target you’re somehow guilty too. (Fortunately for the governor of Jalalabad, the Afghan police discovered the plot, and the boy never got close to him.)

Trying to fathom the depth of his naïveté, I asked the kid whether he’d heard about the Iraq War. Yes, vaguely, he said. But he couldn’t fix the year it started or tell me where Iraq was. He also knew nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Finally, I asked him about General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan.

“Well, he’s a Jew, of course,” the boy said. “An unbeliever who should be killed.”

I was stunned. This was an elite recruit for the Sunnis, their ultimate smart bomb? A boy so naïve and uneducated he actually thought the president of Pakistan was Jewish? Once again, I was confronted head-on with the realization that the Sunnis in which we’ve put so much trust over the years were deranged. In comparison—can the morality of suicide bombing be put on a scale and weighed?—the Iranians and the Shia we fear so much are more reasonable, almost convincing.

Martyrdom was a pillar of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. You only need to visit Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra—Zahra’s Paradise, or the martyrs’ cemetery—to see evidence of a bright, constant readiness for sacrifice. The graves are marked with red tulips, the fountains run with red-colored water—symbols of the blood of martyrs. An endless recitation of the Koran echoes from blown speakers.

Iran encourages foreigners to visit, see for themselves the constant stream of visitors, just how real Iran’s piety is. It’s a reminder of what happens when Iran is stirred to defend itself, the nation, and Islam. I’ve found that relatives in the cemetery are more than happy to talk, indifferent to the camera and tape recorder or to even the most personal questions.

The first couple I found was a man in his fifties dressed in faded shirt and cotton slacks, his wife in a chador pinched together right below her nose. They were seated on the grass next to a flat tombstone with a picture of a clean-shaven boy. The woman sliced a cucumber for me.

The man spoke for his wife. Her brother Nasser had died on the front, during a fight for a place called Masjid Sulayman. He was with the Revolutionary Guards. They’d received a call one morning, a voice on the other end telling them to come collect Nasser’s body. When they arrived at the military morgue, they found his corpse shredded by shrapnel.

The man told me Nasser had been a pious boy. He had been wounded several times in the war but hid it from his family and kept volunteering to go back to the front. He was even hospitalized for three months once but never told his family. After his death, one of his commanders paid him the high compliment of comparing his courage to that of Abolfazi, one of Imam Husayn’s bravest lieutenants.

“Is martyrdom worth it?” I asked.

“We are Muslims,” he replied. “We believe if either our religion or our country is in danger, we have to defend it down to the last drop of blood.”

I asked where they thought Nasser was now.

“We believe he is in heaven now. Whoever is martyred for his religious beliefs goes to heaven to be near our imams.”

I asked the wife if she dreamed of her brother. Again, I was looking for similarities and differences between the Shia and Sunni.

She said that one time she dreamed she came here to Behesht-e Zahra to dig him out of his grave. But he got angry and told her to stop—he said he did not want to bring the outside world into where he was. He then showed her a key. “I have the key to God’s house,” he said. She asked him to leave the key there and come back to them. “No!” he said. “What are you talking about? Everyone wants this key.” Though the plastic key is a myth for Shia, it is still a strong metaphor.

The couple comes every Thursday to visit Nasser’s grave. Whenever his sister is troubled or anxious, she visits his grave to look at his picture. When she does, she told me, her problems go away.

Farther along, I found a woman in her forties, holding up her chador so it wouldn’t drag on the ground. She was kneeling over a grave etched with the portrait of a young boy.

“This was your son?” I asked.

She nodded. “Seyed Mostafa.”

“How old was he?”

“Fifteen.”

“Bache bud,” I told her, trying to resurrect my rusty Persian. He was only a child.

“Fifteen and two months.”

She told me he had just started high school when he decided to volunteer to go to the front. He was a Basij. His mother argued with him that he should finish his exams before going off to fight. But he said that would be too late.

“He said he was going for the ultimate exam,” his mother told me.

She relented and signed a letter of parental approval for him to go to the front. He arrived during a fierce Iraqi assault.

“No one made him go,” she told me more than once.

Was she remorseful?

“No. He did it for a good cause,” she said. “I’m a mother. I do miss him. But I’m glad he did it for a good reason. For God!” She was convinced Iran’s martyrs had won the war with Iraq. And besides, she added, “We will all be gone someday.”

Where is he now?

“He is with our imams. He is their guest, with Khomeini.” She dreamed of her son sometimes—when she was ill, he would come to her, embrace her. She would ask where he had been. He would laugh, and say I am here now.

Did she regret her son’s death? “Not at all. I would have gone myself if I had been asked.” She told me her other two sons had fought at the front too, but they came home.

“God didn’t want them as martyrs,” she said. She insisted I eat a piece of watermelon she’d brought to the cemetery. I was to celebrate in the cult of death too.

I’ve never seen a reliable poll about the number of Iranians prepared to sacrifice their lives. But the dozens of Iranians I talked to uniformly said they would do so—even the ones who had little confidence in the regime. I’d say offhand that martyrdom in Iran isn’t going to pass with the disappearance of the mullahs.

The Iranian families of martyrs I talked to also uniformly justified the act as self-defense, a weapon of war. It served to protect borders rather than Islam. They never talked about “them”—the West—but about specific battles, on the front line, the confrontation of two nations, fighting to take and hold ground. The Iranians also kept looking for references that showed martyrdom was also a part of Western culture. The question kept coming up: Wouldn’t you do the same in the same circumstances?

By the time I walked out of Behesht-e Zahra I was convinced that martyrdom for the Iranians was just another weapon, different from their wire-guided antitank rockets, their Silkworm missiles, or the Kalashnikov in that someone had to give up his or her life. It was an articulation of martyrdom I couldn’t find among the Sunni.

It seemed to me that Khomeini’s real, lasting legacy is martyrdom as a battlefield weapon. He elevated the martyrdom of Imam Husayn into service of the state.

• • •

On July 7, 2005, three suicide bombers blew themselves up in London’s Underground. They timed their explosions for 8:50 A.M. to create the bloodiest mayhem possible at rush hour. Shortly afterward, a fourth suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus. In all, fifty-two people were killed, seven hundred wounded. Three of the bombers were British citizens of Pakistani heritage. All were Sunni Muslims.

I was in London not long after the attacks, filming a segment on suicide bombings for Britain’s Channel 4. What struck me was that the friends and family of the 7/7 bombers refused to talk, let alone try to explain or apologize. I knocked on doors of people who knew the bombers. Invariably, the doors were slammed in my face. I couldn’t help but note the contrast with the families in Behesht-e Zahra, who were more than happy to talk about sacrifice and self-defense, as was Hezbollah.

The attacks shocked Britain. The bombers had grown up in a Western democracy where there were more than enough outlets for dissent and opportunities to change the government from within. None had grown up in the Middle East. None could read the Koran in Arabic. They hadn’t been exposed firsthand to the personal grievances that normally provoke people to slaughter civilians in this way. Instead, they picked up whatever justification they needed—not to mention the formulas for their homemade explosives—from the Internet.

The London bombings were similar to Iranian-backed bomb attacks in Paris in the mid-eighties—bombings that also targeted civilian areas, including department stores. There was a difference, though. At the time of the Paris attacks, Iran was at war, the seesaw of battles on the Iraqi front threatening its existence as a nation. The bombings were meant to stop the French from sending more missiles to Iraq. So the attacks—there’s no attempt to morally justify them here, only explain the thinking behind them—had a defined military objective, unlike the 7/7 bombings.

There have been just a few other instances when Iran attacked civilians for defined military purposes. In 1992 and 1994, Iranian-backed terrorists attacked the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina, killing dozens of civilians. And in 1988, Iran sponsored a plan to bomb five civilian airliners. But as with the Paris bombings, the Iranians undertook these attacks in response to actions they considered provocations—Argentina was in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s secretary-general in 1992, and the airliners attack was a response to the U.S. Navy’s shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in the Gulf in 1988.

Questions of moral calculus aside, the Paris bombings strategy worked. The French held secret negotiations with Iran, which resulted in an end to sending arms to Saddam Hussein. The French had a return address for the terrorism in Paris, someone they could bargain with. There was a clear list of demands the French had to meet, and there was nothing on the list that wasn’t politically doable. There was a logic to it all—bloody, yes, but still, the point was the French had the option to make it stop.

The British, on the other hand, had no one to talk to to find out what had driven the 7/7 bombers, let alone to negotiate a settlement. The inspiration for the bombing was Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s war on the West. But there is no traceable al Qaeda command structure. The remnants of al Qaeda are out of touch in the mountains of Pakistan. From the testaments the 7/7 bombers left behind, it was unclear exactly what they wanted. They asked that the “oppression of Muslims” stop, but that included everything from Russians killing Chechens to Indians killing Kashmiris. These were conflicts Britain could do nothing about.

After the 7/7 bombings, Britons were shocked at how closed and hostile the British Pakistani community was, unwilling to grieve or condemn the stupidity of the act. There were exceptions, but it was clear that while the Pakistani community condemned the means, they shared the 7/7 bombers’ deep grievance, East versus West.

The 7/7 bombings were a signal of the steep descent into pure hatred these Sunnis feel for the West. Even as Iran-backed Hamas was trading rockets with Israel, they were still ready to talk. The most radical members of Hamas were not slamming the door in the face of journalists—there was still something to talk about, something to negotiate.

These British Pakistanis were different, closer to the Khmer Rouge soldiers I used to meet. They seemed nothing like the Muslims with whom I spent twenty-five years in the Middle East. They were so convinced of the justice of their cause, so convinced that it was an existential clash of civilizations, that they saw no need to explain their murderous tactics. They wanted to bring Britain down from the inside, to purify Islam, start over again, and adopt the Koran as their constitution.

In 2006, Hezbollah crossed the border into Israel. Its goal was to capture Israeli soldiers to exchange for Hezbollah “soldiers” held by Israel. During the course of the war, Hezbollah shelled Israeli cities, but it was in response to Israel’s initial shelling of Lebanese cities. And after the assassination of Imad Mughniyah in February 2008, Hezbollah said it would retaliate internationally—possibly at a civilian target—but that was because Israel had struck outside the “agreed” field of battle, Lebanon. Inasmuch as there’s order to war, Hezbollah believes it follows one.

Hezbollah’s “logic of war” gives us, and Israel, room to talk. There is a way to stop the violence if we are prepared to compromise. But the Sunnis’ violence comes from a different well. Or to mix the metaphor, there’s no head to the Sunni snake, either to cut off or to reason with. Sunni beliefs, especially when they stray from orthodoxy, are much more sweeping and arbitrary than those of the Shia. You couldn’t miss this difference in a conversation I had with a British Muslim takfiri.

Muhammad Khan lives in Derby, a small town in the Midlands, where life got worse after the factories closed. Plastic toys were scattered in the backyard of his ground-floor apartment. I walked in through a shabby kitchen, past dirty dishes stacked in the sink.

One of Muhammad Khan’s cousins had died following a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv—a suicide bombing at an American-style pub called Mike’s Place. The cousin strapped on a suicide vest and went to the bar with another bomber. When the second man blew himself up at the bar’s door, either the cousin’s vest failed to go off or he lost his nerve and ran. Days later his body was found in the sea, where he had either thrown himself or been thrown.

I talked to Muhammad Khan a year after the 7/7 bombings. He was still trying to justify the act.

“I will say that anyone who sacrifices their life for the sake of Allah,” Khan said, “hands up to him.”

I asked him if he considered himself British or a Muslim.

“I am a Muslim,” he said. “Not a British Muslim.”

Muhammad’s accent belied the claim. But the way he saw it, being born in Britain was nothing more than an accident. It in no way affected his identity. I felt that creeping anomie again, the one I got when I talked to other Sunni takfiris. These were a people who had lost their compass, socially, geographically, ethically. As we talked, Khan kept repeating a particular phrase from the Koran: “striking fear into the hearts of the kuffar”—the unbelievers.

For Muhammad, becoming a Muslim involves nothing more than repeating the shahada, a witnessing of belief—“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.” And becoming a suicide bomber is nothing more than witnessing that faith in blood, both the martyr’s and the victims’.

And what about the victims who died in the London Underground on 7/7?

“They go to heaven as well,” Khan said. “Innocent people go to heaven.”

So what did Britain need to do to avoid more attacks like 7/7?

“Accept Allah’s law,” he said. “End of story. Accept Allah’s law and I think you’ll have a peaceful life.”

In other words, we either convert to Islam or die.

There is no way to argue with these people. I have no doubt the Sunni takfiris will go away one day, as other radical Sunni movements have, the day other Muslims turn against them. The question is what happens in the meantime. At this writing Iraq is a little better than it was, at least during the first couple of years of occupation, but that won’t last forever. Chaos is never further than one mosque bombing away. The allies concede that they’ve lost a tenth of Afghanistan to the Taliban. But it’s really more like 30 percent. Which leaves us with the question: What do we do in the meantime, until the violence subsides on its own?