an even smaller number become suicide bombers, fully accepting the belief
that fallen warriors, martyred in battle, shaheeden, get a special place in heaven.
While often such shaheedentend to be boys from poor and destitute classes,
there are as many better educated young people, and even some women,
willing to die for their cause. In sum, many who suffer from various forms
of domination and social constraints, who glean little honorific status or dig-
nity but instead experience shame and humiliation, find solace in hate, revenge
and destruction of the Other, even at the cost of one’s life.
- Simplification of reality: Following what has been said, fundamentalisms
simplify vastly complex realities that are fraught with ambiguities, into a few
basic understandings, beginning with a Manichean good/bad view of the
world and other people. Complex events are personalized as the actions of
a specific people, typically involved in a conspiracy of some sort. And as so
often happens, the evil doers for fascists or Islamic fundamentalists tend to
be the Jews.^55 The fundamentalist world view reduces complex social reali-
ties to simple explanations ranging from conspiracies of infidels to the “moral
decline” of the community. Punishment of the infidels, and/or the “renewal
of faith,” becomes the solution to all problems. - Hope: For Marx, religion expressed both real pain and genuine hope for
something better. But the workers could only imagine a better life in the next
world, thus preserving existing social conditions. Horkhiemer ’s critical the-
ory of religion has said much the same. Finally, noting the communality of
Freud’s theories of dreams and daydreams as wish fulfillments, Bloch (1986)
has argued that hope was an intrinsic human quality. People were motivated
by dreams of a better life, they yearned for utopian moments without the
stresses and strains of actually existing social life.^56 In the face of the oppres-
sions, humiliations, ressentement and victimhood, imaginary histories become
refashioned into a desirable future. At such moments, cultures resurrect archaic
legacies of empowerment and dignity. These legacies often invoke tales of
“heroic masculinity”. For Nazis, there were the gods of Valhalla populated
by Wagnerian depictions of ubermenchen, courageous supermen whose will
to power (Nietzsche) was not fettered by the banalities of underlings. For
From the Caliphate to the Shaheedim• 333(^55) This is not to anyway exonerate Israel’s heinous policies toward the Palestinians,
but rather the tendency to blame all the economic problems of close to a billion
Muslims on Jewish plots and conspiracies. 56
See http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell1.html for an excellent
summary/introduction to Block by Keller (N.d.).