Suicide Attack

Assalamu alaikum. Below is my response to Islamophobes in a website dedicated to besmear Islam and Muslims with lies and fabrications. I shall not mention the site address as mentioning them promotes their probability of being included in the first few pages of a 'search result'.


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Good Day Everyone

I agree with Archimedez's conclusion that although Islam prohibits suicide as a general rule, it does permit laying down one's life for a greater purpose such as to be killed in the cause of Allah. Thus in Islamic history you will read the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, charging enemy lines singularly until they die or come back alive.

However, everyone must know that the issue here is not merely attacking the 'enemy' single-handedly, which has some basis, but the issue is taking away one's life with one's own hands - literally.

There is a big difference between attacking the opposing forces, eliminating some of them, then getting killed in the process due to enemy's defensives, and, strapping one's self with bombs, penetrating enemy lines and blowing up everyone indiscriminately including self using one's own hands to press the trigger.

The former is an acceptable position in any religion or any military strategy that I know of. In fact those who perform such feat were celebrated as heroes. This is not dissimilar to historical occurrences where weaker forces stood ground from the overwhelming offensives of the opposing forces - such as the Alamo. Everyone was sure to die - Davy Crockett and other defenders- yet they stood their ground. The point here is being killed by overwhelming force whether one is in offensive or defensive stance.

The latter is actually killing one's self with one's own hand - which is a form of suicide. The cause of death is not from the enemy's fire but from a switch controlled by the attacker.

In other words, if somebody writes an obituary for the 'martyr' in the first scenario, it would read, 'He killed the enemies and the enemies killed him'. In contrast, the obituary of the second person would be, 'He killed himself and killed enemies in the process'. Notice that I put apostrophe on the word martyr because in orthodox Islamic belief none should be called a martyr for only Allah knows who the real martyr is.

Moreover, the second scenario involves indiscriminate killing or harm of non combatants and civilians including children and women. Perhaps you all know the hadeeth where the Prophet peace be upon him forbade this. If it is argued that all of the inhabitants of the ‘enemy state’ can be potential targets because they condone their Armed Forces’ actions or pay taxes for their salary, then, still this doesn’t put them into the category of ‘combatants’. This is because in the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him, the inhabitants of Mecca were supporting the Meccan fighters. Yet he still commanded Muslims to abide by this rule.

This is the perhaps the reason why you can find major Muslim scholars still forbid suicide bombing in their fatwa. Foremost of them are the so called ‘Wahabis’ scholars of Saudi Arabia who in their fatwas condemn these actions. See for your self and download a free e book entitled ‘Islam against Terrorism: http://www.fatwa-online.com/. I am not surprise though why their opinions are not represented in mainstream western media and forums like this.