ca et Mystica, vol. 3, edited with an introduction by S. H.
Nasr (Istanbul, 1970). See also S. H. Nasr, “Suhraward ̄ı:
The Master of Illumination, Gnostic and Martyr,” translated
by William Chittick, Journal of the Regional Cultural Institute
2 (1969), pp. 209-225. S. H. Nasr, Three Muslim Sages: Avi-
cenna, Suhraward ̄ı, Ibn EArab ̄ı (Cambridge, Mass., 1964),
pp. 52–82; S. H. Nasr, “Shiha ̄b al-D ̄ın Suhraward ̄ı al-
Maqtul,” in A History of Muslim Philosophy, edited by M. M.
Sharif (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1963), pp. 372–398. For
Suhraward ̄ı’s political orientation, see Hossein Zi’ai, “The
Source and Nature of Political Authority in Suhraward ̄ı’s
Philosophy of Illumination” in The Political Aspects of Islamic
Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, edited by
Charles E. Butterworth (Cambridge, Mass., 1992),
pp. 304–344; and JaEfar Sajja ̄d ̄ı, Shiha ̄b al-D ̄ın Suhraward ̄ı
wa sayr ̄ı dar falsafah-yi ishra ̄q (Tehran, 1984).
MEHDI AMINRAZAVI (2005)SUICIDE. The topic of religiously motivated suicide is
a complex one. Several of the major religious traditions reject
suicide as a religiously justifiable act but commend martyr-
dom; among them are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These religions distinguish between actively willing to end
one’s life in suicide and passively accepting one’s death as the
divine will by means of martyrdom at the hands of another.
Nonetheless, the actions of some of the early Christian mar-
tyrs and the deaths of the Jews at Masada in 74 CE blur this
distinction.
In contrast to religiously motivated suicide one may
speak of heroic and altruistic suicide, the act of a person who
decides that he or she has an ethical responsibility to die for
the sake of community or honor. One must also differentiate
between religiously motivated suicide and suicide that may
be virtually forced upon an individual by the norms of soci-
ety and may constitute either a duty or a punishment. One
thinks of sat ̄ı, widow burning in India, and of seppuku, self-
disembowelment, when it occurred as a punishment in
Japan. In these cases too, however, no simple distinction
holds true. Sat ̄ı became an accepted practice within medieval
Hinduism, upheld by the brahmans, and accounts indicate
that even into modern times it was often a voluntary practice.
By her self-sacrifice the widow both achieved an honored sta-
tus for herself and atoned for the sins and misdeeds of herself
and her husband. Seppuku was often the voluntary last act
of a defeated warrior who chose to demonstrate both his feal-
ty to his lord and his mastery over himself.
Like the major Western traditions, both Buddhism and
Confucianism condemn suicide, but there are examples of
self-immolation by Buddhist monks and of the seeking of
honorable death by Confucian gentlemen. In contrast to
these traditions, Jainism regards favorably the practice of sal-
lekhana, by which a Jain monk or layperson at the end of his
lifetime or at the onset of serious illness attains death by grad-
ual starvation.
These few examples demonstrate the complexity of the
topic of religiously motivated suicide and the difficulty in
distinguishing it from martyrdom or sacrifice, on the one
hand, and from heroic or altruistic suicide, on the other. In
addition, the occurrence in 1978 of the mass suicides at
Jonestown, Guyana, raises the question of the relation be-
tween religious motivations for suicide and general fear of
persecution, combined with mass paranoia. This question
applies equally well to the mass suicide of Jews faced with
persecution in York, England, in 1190 and to the mass sui-
cides of Old Believers in Russia in the late seventeenth
century.On the whole, what may be termed religiously motivat-
ed suicides constitute but a small proportion of the total
number of suicides. In his classic work Le suicide, Émile
Durkheim discussed the social causes for egoistic, altruistic,
and anomic suicides. His work and that of many other schol-
ars demonstrate that suicide has most often occurred for rea-
sons other than religious ones. These include the desire to
avoid shame, to effect revenge, to demonstrate one’s disap-
pointment in love, and to escape senility and the infirmities
of old age. Suicide as a means of avoiding shame and uphold-
ing one’s honor was considered a creditable act in societies
as different as those on the Melanesian island of Tikopia,
among the Plains and Kwakiutl Indians of North America,
and in ancient Rome.Scholars have argued that the incidence of and attitude
toward suicide are largely dependent on the individual’s and
society’s view of the afterlife. Where death is perceived as a
happy existence, scholars such as Jacques Choron believe,
there is an inducement to suicide. In the first known docu-
ment that apparently reflects on suicide, the Egyptian text
entitled The Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Own Soul,
death is seen as attractive because it will lead to another and
better existence. The tendency toward suicide is strength-
ened when suicide is regarded either as a neutral act or as one
worthy of reward. Suicide rates also increase when this life
is regarded as no longer acceptable or worthwhile. For exam-
ple, Jim Jones, the founder of the Peoples’ Temple, urged
his followers in Guyana to commit suicide in order to enter
directly into a new and better world, where they would be
free of persecution and would enjoy the rewards of the elect.
In the Jonestown community, suicide on a mass scale was ap-
preciated as a religiously justifiable act that would be reward-
ed in the afterlife.
ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN CIVILIZATION. While the an-
cient Greek writers and philosophers did not consider suicide
an action that would lead to a better existence, they did see
it as an appropriate response to certain circumstances. The
fact that Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus, chose to commit
suicide upon learning of her incestuous relationship with her
son was understood and appreciated by the ancients as an ap-
propriate response to a disastrous situation. Heroic suicide
in the face of a superior enemy and the choice of death to
avoid dishonor or the agony of a lengthy terminal illness were
accepted as justifiable actions. Through the voice of Socrates,
Plato in his Phaedo did much to form the classical attitude8828 SUICIDE