Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 267
Islam, and continue to resist Islam, are in effect its persecutors, and
those who defend Islam and its Abode by “striving in the way of
God” are mujahideen. Those who perish in the act were and are
martyrs. The cults that developed around them—are martyrs traditionally
buried in their bloody garments, for example—were
(and are) popular, unofficial, and highly varied.
The theology of Islamic martyrdom is clear: the martyr-mujahid
will enjoy Paradise and its pleasures as surely as his Christian
counterpart. Yet during most of the history of the Abode of the
Islam, martyrdom was praised but only rarely urged in Sunni circles,
where persecution was scarcely an issue, whereas jihad, as we
have seen, was often a highly problematic concept. Among Shiites,
however, who have suffered unmistakable persecution at the hands
of their Sunni brethren and where there is a distinct and fostered
martyr culture centering around the figure of the seventh-century
Imam Husayn, martyrdom has had a far stronger appeal. Some
branches of the Ismaili Shiites, for example, recruited young men,
whom they first drugged—the term “assassin” itself may come
from the Arabic for “hashish-crazed”—and in that state allowed
them a staged but highly realistic taste of Paradise, complete with
actors and props, and then sent off on missions of assassination.
These were the fidaiyun, “those who sacrificed themselves,” Islam’s
lethal kamikazes turned against other Muslims of a different
persuasion.
A Savior Returns
As the jurists and theologians read the evidence for the approach
of the End Time, the Muslim community will be riven with schism
and sectarianism. God will send relief, however, in the form of
the Mahdi, the Guided One who will be a man of Muhammad’s
house—he too will be named Muhammad ibn Abdullah—and he
will unite Islam. The notion is not quranic: Muhammad could
hardly have foreseen the breadth of his community, much less that
it would suffer from schisms, and the mortal and dead Prophet
could scarcely serve as his own Messiah. Rather, the belief seems to