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"Sacrifice Islam"
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Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
An examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions
In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham's story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment.
This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to \"sacrifice\"-not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals.
Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.
eBook
Al-Qaeda and Sacrifice
Al-Qaeda and Sacrifice is a pioneering critical intervention into the study of terrorism. Challenging the commonly held idea that ‘suicide-bombings’ are motivated by a nihilistic hatred of life, Melissa Finn argues that it is more honest and helpful to examine such violent agency through the concept of ‘sacrifice’. The book provides a unique look at the way ‘sacrifice’ is used in the Arabic language and in the writings of Islamists and jihadis. Finn offers penetrating insights into jihadi thought on its own terms, arguing that it constitutes a political theory which can be usefully compared and related to western political theorists, from Machiavelli and von Clausewitz to Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. She critically examines the strategy of ‘sacrifice’ in martyrdom operations and ultimately concludes that the heedless certainty of such violence undermines attempts to redress political grievances. Al-Qaeda and Sacrifice is a unique contribution which goes beyond simplistic or apologetic explanations of terrorism and allows the authentic jihadi voice to speak for itself.
eBook
Understanding Islamist Terrorism in Europe
This book argues that guilt, shame, and remorse, associated with a history of substance abuse, explain why a minority of Islamist extremists carried out suicide terrorism in Europe between 2001 and 2018.
Since 9/11, Islamist terrorism has dominated the European security landscape, but there has been little systematic analysis of either the attacks or the men responsible. This book addresses that gap, drawing on terrorist discourse, court transcripts, elite interviews, government reports, and three years of ethnography to provide an exhaustive account of how and why Islamist terrorism has occurred in Europe. Making a detailed analysis of 48 terrorist attacks carried out by 80 suicide terrorists, the book introduces two new theories. The first argues that most of these men first engaged in Islamist extremism as an alternative to substance abuse. The second contends that, following a five-stage process of radicalisation, cognitive dissonance triggered guilt, shame, and remorse over previous misconduct. From this emotional distress, suicide terrorism emerged as a rational choice ahead of either suicide or a return to active addiction. This book argues that the root cause of suicide terrorism in Europe is not so much politics or religion but is more about personal crisis and a search for redemption.
This book will be of great interest to students of terrorism/counterterrorism, de-radicalisation, political Islam, and security studies in general.
eBook
Raise Your Voices and Kill Your Animals
This research analyses how groups of people in Tanga discursively construct Islam by animal slaughter. Central to the project are the sometimes conflicting tendencies of grounding ritual practice in authoritative texts and constructing ethnic, social, and religious identity through ritual practices. The discourse on and the practice of daily animal slaughter at the abattoir, sacrifice as part of the annual hajj, the slaughter of sheep after the birth or death of a child, and the Swahili New Year sacrifice all reproduce assumptions of what Islam and Islamic behaviour should be.
\"Raise Your Voices and Kill Your Animals\" is een antropologische studie van G.C. van de Bruinhorst naar het verband tussen Islamitische teksten en rituelen zoals beschreven in het jaarlijkse Offerfeest in Tanzania.
eBook
The Devoted Actor
Uncompromising wars, revolution, rights movements, and today’s global terrorism are in part driven by “devoted actors” who adhere to sacred, transcendent values that generate actions dissociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Studies in real-world conflicts show ways that devoted actors, who are unconditionally committed to sacred causes and whose personal identities are fused within a unique collective identity, willingly make costly sacrifices. This enables low-power groups to endure and often prevail against materially stronger foes. Explaining how devoted actors come to sacrifice for cause and comrades not only is a scientific goal but a practical imperative to address intergroup disputes that can spiral out of control in a rapidly interconnecting world of collapsing and conflicting cultural traditions. From the recent massive media-driven global political awakening, horizontal peer-to-peer transcultural niches, geographically disconnected, are emerging to replace vertical generation-to-generation territorial traditions. Devoted actors of the global jihadi archipelago militate within such a novel transcultural niche, which is socially tight, ideationally narrow, and globe spanning. Nevertheless, its evolutionary maintenance depends on costly commitments to transcendental values, rituals and sacrifices, and parochial altruism, which may have deep roots even in the earliest and most traditional human societies. Fieldwork results from the Kurdish battlefront with the Islamic State are highlighted.
Journal Article
Commitment through Sacrifice
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spurious nor endogenous. We use a natural experiment that rests on a peculiar time-shifting feature of Ramadan that makes the fasting duration—our measure of sacrifice—vary not just by latitude but from year-to-year. We find that a half-hour increase in fasting time during the median Ramadan day increases the vote shares of Islamist political parties by 11 percent in Turkey’s parliamentary elections between 1973 and 2018, and results in one additional attendee per 1,000 inhabitants for voluntary Quran courses. We further investigate two mechanisms, screening and commitment, that could explain the effects we find. By testing their divergent implications, we infer that commitment is the mechanism triggered by sacrifice, which drives up the intensity of religious beliefs and participation that in turn bolster the success of religious organizations.
Journal Article
'Fatwa Repositioning': The Hidden Struggle for Shari'a Compliance Within Islamic Financial Institutions
Islamic Financial Institutions (IFIs) have recently witnessed remarkable growth driven by their holistic business model. The key differentiator of IFIs is their Shari'a-based business proposition which often requires some financial sacrifices, e.g. being ethical, responsible and philanthropic. It also requires them to refrain from investments in tobacco, alcohol, pornography or earning interest. For IFIs' sponsors and managers, however, the key motivational factor for entering the Islamic financial market is not the achievement of Shari'a objectives through the holistic business model, but rather the urge to tap this highly profitable market where customers are inclined to pay a premium for Shari'a compliance. In order for IFIs to be accepted by the market, their financial instruments need to be approved by Shari'a scholars, known for their integrity and expertise in Shari'a. One can therefore expect potential tensions between IFIs' managers and Shari'a scholars. The purpose of this research is to probe the hidden struggle between managers and Shari'a scholars in pursuit of their respective objectives. The study investigates this phenomenon using grounded theory as a methodological framework based on data collected from three IFIs from two countries. The findings reveal that Shari'a scholars and managers of IFIs have divergent objectives, which creates incongruence of objectives at the strategic level. The findings illustrate the tension and latent struggle for Shari'a compliance, which has been termed as 'Fatwa Repositioning' resulting in four possible consequences: deep, reasonable, minimum and superficial Shari'a compliance. Fatwa Repositioning is the core category of this study, which exhibits how managers and Shari'a scholars struggle to position the Shari'a compliance of their institutions so as to best serve their respective objectives. Interestingly, Shari'a scholars are seemingly not always in control of what they are supposed to be controlling, i.e. Shari'a compliance.
Journal Article
Wearing fire and chewing iron: Oaths of peace and the suspension of monotheism in contemporary Alevism
This article examines the practices and discourses surrounding the ikrar oaths by which some Alevis in Turkey and the Turkish diaspora are initiated into their spiritual path. I examine a contemporary revival of this Alevi oath complex, which is a historical product of the same messianic trends in post-Mongol Sufism that shaped the Mughal imperial idea of sulh-i kull, or ‘Peace with All’ religions. I argue that the ikrar oaths are paradigmatic examples of ‘post-Islam’ or Islam after the messianic suspension of its scriptural law. I show how Alevis seek to maintain their suspension of monotheism through ritual practices of animal sacrifice and music as well as the replacement of standard monotheistic oaths with post-Islamic oaths. Focusing on a recent liturgical reform movement led by the shrine of Hacı Bektaş in central Turkey, I demonstrate how the shrine works to maintain Alevis’ suspension of monotheism within the constraints of modern secularism, in part by reinterpreting secular constraints in terms of post-Islamic Alevi values, thereby highlighting elective affinities between post-Islam and secularism.
Journal Article
The Character of David in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
One of the most central figures in monotheistic traditions is King David. The volume takes a new, critical look at the process of biblical creation and exegetical transformation of this character in the intertwined words of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
eBook