Dying as a Shahid

<p><strong><em>Dying as a Shahid: Martyrs in Islam</em></strong> examines the motives religious and psychological which make the so-called suicide bomber tick.</p><p>What is usually so called must rather be termed Islamikaze a combination of Islam and kamikaze due to the phenomenological resemblance between the Japanese kamikaze who fought in the Pacific during World War II and the present-day Muslim terrorists.</p><p>In addition to the religious social and psychological underpinnings of the phenomenon of Shahid (martyr) there is a rich array of historical precedents that have fixated this sort of terrorism with self-immolation dubbed self-sacrifice as a prominent feature of Islamic life.</p><p><strong>(About the Author)</strong></p><p>Raphael Israeli has taught Islamic Chinese and Middle Eastern history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A graduate of Hebrew University in history and Arabic literature he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese and Islamic history from the University of California Berkeley. Now retired he has been a Fellow of the Harry Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University and the Jerusalem Center since the 1970s and is the author of over 50 research books a dozen edited books and 100 scholarly articles about Islam. Born in Fes Morocco at fourteen I left my family when I could no longer bear the oppression of Jews in an Islamic country and moved to fledgling Israel. To this day I consider that the wisest and most game-changing decision I took in my life.</p>