85As we’ve been having this dialogue there was an
especially horrifi c attack on a school in Peshawar,
Pakistan, where members of the Taliban murdered
145 people, 132 of them children. The details
are gruesome— and I don’t intend to dwell on
them— but it is im por tant to understand the irratio-
nality and horror that these numbers conceal. We
are talking about a group of young men who were
willing to burn a teacher alive in front of her pu-
pils, butcher every child they could get their hands
on, and then blow themselves up to maximize
the carnage and avoid being captured. It is very
diffi cult for most people to understand how this
be hav ior could be possi ble, and they generally
imagine that only madmen could act this way.
However, I’ve long been worried that a belief in
paradise can lead ordinary people to perpetrate
atrocities of this kind or condone the atrocities of
others. For instance, here is an excerpt from an
online conversation that Ali A. Rizvi had with a
Taliban supporter in the aftermath of the massacre
in Peshawar (translated from Urdu and annotated
by Rizvi; the speaker is the Taliban supporter):^15
- A. A. Rizvi, personal communication.
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