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the Crusades, entire commumtJes committed collective suicide in
response
to
pogroms and demands to convert to Christianity. Christian
violence was internalized by its victims, and they experienced their
response as acts of Sanctification of the Name, and this time the sacrifice
was completed. Those slain by decree and during the Crusades reverber–
ate in midrashim, liturgical poems, and prayers as mythic trauma-antic–
ipating future waves of persecution, pogroms, or annihilation.
The Crucifixion of Jesus restored to Christianity the human sacrifice
who atones by his suffering and death. This atonement is a testimony to
the grace of God, who, unlike the God of Abraham, did not have mercy
on His son. The martyrs are witnesses of faith, as stated by Tertullian,
one of the early Church Fathers: "The blood of the martyrs constitutes
the seeds of the Church." Suffering and death, borne with humility and
love and as a sign of the grace of God, evoke feelings of compassion and
grace and establish it in the observing community. The holy position of
the martyr does not disappear from Western culture in its secular man–
ifestations, and it serves as a central stratum in the writing of the West–
ern Christian myth.
It
is even renewed in the holy status recently granted
to those murdered on September
II,
especially to the members of the
fire department (as Elizabeth Castelli emphasized in
Sacrifice, Slaughter,
and Certainty: Reflections on Martyrdom, Religion, and the Making of
Meaning in the Wak e of September
II) .
Islam, like Judaism, rejected sacrifice and adopted the principle of
exchange, and in the Koran, Abraham binds his son and saves him. (The
identity of the son is not Isaac, but a Muslim son, and begins the quar–
rel of the first-born between Islam and Judaism.)
Shahada
basically
defines an act of faith and self-sacrifice in mortifications and prayer, and
shahid
is the term for the believer. Only with the death of Hussein,
Mohammed's grandson and the founder of the Shi'ite dynasty, in a bat–
tle against the khalif of the Omayia family, is the aspect of war and mar–
tyrology added to the term
shahid
(among other things, with a Christian
influence). Annual Shi'ite memorial rituals in Karbala that restore Hus–
sein's torment of death in battle on a mass scale have preserved the tra–
dition of suffering and conflict, and have even shaped the Muslim
revolution against the regime of the Shah. Ever since Islam came to
power in Iran, the terms
shahada
and
shahid
have moved to the center
of theology and become the model of self-sacrifice in a holy war against
corrupted Arab regimes and non-Muslim sinners. (A discussion of the
process of radicalization of the term in Iran and in the teachings of the
Ayatollah Khomeini is in Minoo Moallem's "Transnationalism, Femi–
nism, and Fundamentalism.")
