Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, a foremost authority on Islam and the West, said recently that the Bush administration needs to better identify its global campaign against terrorism.
“I feel that while we are indeed engaged in a war against terror, it is inadequate and even misleading,” Lewis said recently at a forum. “If Churchill had informed the country in 1940, we are engaged in a war against bomber aircraft and submarines, that would have been an accurate statement but not a very helpful one. To say we are engaged in a war against terror is of the same order. Terror is a tactic. It's a method of waging war. It is not a cause, it is not an adversary, it is not anything that one can identify as an opponent, and I think we need to be more specific in fighting a war. It's useful to know who the enemy is.”
Lewis, speaking at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last month, agreed with President Bush that Islamist extremism is a perversion of Islam.
“Take, for example, the suicide bomber. Classical Islamic legal and religious texts are quite clear on the subject of suicide. Suicide is what Christians would call a mortal sin. Even if a man or a woman had lived a life of unremitting virtue, by committing suicide they forfeit paradise and go straight to hell, where, according to the sacred texts, the eternal punishment of the suicide consists of the eternal repetition of the act of suicide," he said.
Under Islam, a person who poisons himself will experience “an eternity of bellyache.”
Suicide terrorism is a recent development that has come in stages. Islamic jurists recently ruled that throwing oneself to death against a superior enemy was permissible.
“And that was where it stood for centuries and centuries,” Lewis said. “Even the famous Assassins of the Middle Ages never died by their own hands and never killed anyone but the marked target.”
Recently, however, Islamist extremists were able to change the law to allow taking one’s life while taking a sufficient number of the enemy as well. Lewis called it a “radical departure” from past Islamic practice and theology.
Suicide terrorism emanated from Wahabism, in Najd, part of Saudi Arabia in the 18th Century.
