#link is to more rayyy

[earlycuntsets]

notable rays from beachsidebingo on livejournal 07/16/2008 unorganized

[fursasaida]

Hello! You just mentioned that you studied martyrdom in the Islamic context for a long time. Would you be so kind as to recommend any books on this topic? Martyrdom, suicide, violence to self (esp. pertaining to, but not limited to religious contexts)... any book that pops into your mind on these topics I'd so appreciate it. Thank you so much!

Hi! Sorry it took me so long to answer this. It has been quite the couple of months. 

These are organized alphabetically by author, rather than by subject (sects, specific organizations, countries, time periods, languages, etc.), because otherwise frankly I would not have gotten this done. I know without categorization it looks overwhelming. Just take a deep breath, look at the titles, and check them out one by one to see what seems useful or relevant to you. This post is not an order to read everything listed in it–though I have bolded a few things I think are particularly useful. 

The list below is weighted toward Hamas and Hizballah (and therefore, Palestine and Lebanon) solely because I’ve studied them more than other groups that engage in political martyrdom/martyrdom as warfare, but consider that a comprehensive list would deal with the Tamil Tigers, ISIS and other contemporary jihadi groups, the US Armed Forces, Kurdish pêshmerga, all hunger strikers everywhere (including Ireland, Turkey, the US, and I’m sure many more places I’m not even up on at all), murdered dissidents around the world (including many names championed by movements like Black Lives Matter such as Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, and too many more to list), and pretty much any military force that has valorized a member or figurehead after death (so, all of them). Expand your notion of martyrdom past Muslim suicide bombers to encompass the general idea of heaping praise on someone for dying for a cause and you’ll quickly see that it’s a pretty universal human value, by no means limited to one religion, one part of the world, or even one kind of political circumstance. (See also: Catholicism.) I studied Hizballah’s museums extensively and I can tell you that their “martyrdom displays” look pretty much exactly the same as some of the rooms in the 9/11 Museum in NYC. It’s all the same, when you get right down to it–but also (perhaps more strangely) in the aesthetics, iconography, and strategies of representation and commemoration.

(Please note that “Hizballah” is spelled in multiple ways, because transliteration is a nightmare mess and I’m just staying true to the titles of everything as published. Some URLs may be out of date, and citation formats may be inconsistent–I’m mining multiple bibliographies, some of which are close to a decade old. Since I’ve given you all the publication information one way or another, googling up texts should be relatively easy. Finally, I haven’t gone through to look for pdfs/open access links to all of these, because frankly there are too many and I am a tired, busy person. But I bet if you look for them you’ll find more than a few!) 

Also note that not everything here will be closely/specifically on martyrdom itself, nor specifically on Islamic contexts. You’ll also see just from the titles that there’s a lot of emphasis on memory and commemoration, which reflects my own work but also the general fact that martyrdom only has any occurrence, any meaning or existence, as a form of public remembering, and so one has to look at how others commemorate martyrdom just as much as how martyrs make their decisions to die, if they do so at all (not all of them do). That’s because I believe it’s very important to think about martyrdom in a wider social, political, and cultural context, and focusing narrowly on what are widely understood as martyrdom acts/behaviors, or on Muslims, will lead to a distorted perception. Feel free to sort as you prefer, though I hope you’ll keep that notion in mind.

Okay, first–since after putting all this down I see just how much of it I’ve bolded–here are some authors whose work I’d recommend in general:

Joseph Alagha, Mahmoud Ayoub, Banu Bargu, Lara Deeb, Werner Ende, Mona Harb, Rola El-Husseini, Laleh Khalili, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, Augustus Richard Norton. 

Alagha, Joseph.Hizbullah’s Identity Construction. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2011.

Alagha, Joseph. The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology:Religious Ideology, Political Ideology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress). 2006.

Al-Amin,Sayyid Muhsin. Sīrat al-Sayyid Muḥsinal-Amīn; wa-hiya juz’ min kitāb A‘yān al-Shī‘ah. Beirut: Riyād al-Rayyislil-Kutub wa-al-Nashr, 2000.

Ayoub,Mahmoud. Redemptive Suffering in Islām: AStudy of the Devotional Aspects of ‘Āshūrā’ in Twelver Shī‘ism. The Hague:Mouton Purblishers, 1978.

Bell, Vikki. “The Politics of Suicide Bombings: Horror and the Humiliated Witness.” Economy and Society (34) 2, 2005: 1-16.

Biggs, Michael. “Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002.” Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Diego Gambatta, ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [page numbers weren’t showing up for some reason]

Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

Brown, Thomas J. ThePublic Art of Civil War Commemoration (Boston: Bedford, 2004).

Deeb,Lara. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2006.

Deeb,Lara. “Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice.” ComparativeStudies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (25) 1, 2005: 122-137.

Ende,Werner. “The Flagellations of Muharram and the Shi’ite ‘Ulama’.” Der Islam 55(1), 1978: 20-36.

Fadlallah,Sayyid Muhammad. Ashoora: An Islamic Perspective. Beirut: Dar Al-Malak,2006. 

Halawi, Majed. A Lebanon Defied: Musa al-Sadr and the Shi‘a Community.Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. 

El-Husseini, Rola.“Resistance, Jihad and Martyrdom in Contemporary Lebanese Shi‘a Discourse.” TheMiddle East Journal 62(3), 2008: 399-414.

Fearon, James D. andDavid D. Laitin. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” The American Political Science Review 97 (February, 2003), pp. 75-90.

Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James. Commemorating the Nation: Collective Memory, Public Commemoration, andNational Identity in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Chicago: Middle EastDocumentation Center, 2004).

Gharbieh, Hussein. “Hizbullah and the Legacy of Imam Musaal-Sadr.” The other Shiites: From theMediterranean to Central Asia. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007): 59-80.

Goldstein,Kaylin. “Citadel into David’s Tower: Palestinian Memory and the MulticulturalFantastic.” Radical History Review 99(Fall 2007): 173-186.

Hamas, “ArticleEleven,” The Covenant of the IslamicResistance Movement, The Avalon Project http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp,Aug. 19, 1988.

Hamas, “ArticleThirteen,” The Covenant of the IslamicResistance Movement, The Avalon Project http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp,Aug. 19, 1988.

Hamas, “ArticleTwenty-Seven.” The Covenant of theIslamic Resistance Movement. The Avalon Project http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp,Aug. 19, 1988.

Hamzeh, Ahmad Nizar, In the Path of Hizbullah (Syracuse, NY:Syracuse University Press), 2004.

Harb, Mona and Deeb, Lara. “Culture as History and Landscape:Hizballah’s Efforts to Shape an Islamic Milieu in Lebanon.” Arab Studies Journal 19(1) (2011):10-41.

Harb, Mona and ReinoudLeenders, “Know Thy Enemy: Hizbullah, ‘Terrorism,’ and the Politics ofPerception.” Third World Quarterly 26:1(2005), pp. 173-197; pp. 187-188.

Harper, Ken. “AugustusNorton on Hezbollah’s Social Services.” Harper’sMagazine (March, 2007), http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/03/sb-augustus-no-1173896326.

Hilal, Jamil. “Hamas’sRise as Charted in the Polls, 1994-2005.” Journalof Palestine Studies 35 (Spring, 2006), pp. 6-19. 

Hilal, Jamil. “Problematizing Democracy In Palestine.”Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africaand the Middle East (2003), pp. 163-172.

International Crisis Group, “Islamic Social Welfare Activism In the Occupied Palestinian Territories: A Legitimate Target?” Crisis Group Middle East Report No. 13 (April 2, 2003), http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1662.

International Crisis Group, “Ruling Palestine I: Gaza Under Hamas.” Crisis Group Middle East Report No. 73 (Mar. 19), 2008.

Hizballah. “TheElectoral Program of Hizbullah, 1996.” in Joseph Elie Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, pp.254-260.

Hizballah. “TheHezbollah Program: An Open Letter.” 1985. (http://standwithus.com/).

Hizballah. “Hizbullah’s2000 Parliamentary Elections Program.” In Joseph Elie Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology, pp.261-268.

Hroub, Khaled. “A ‘NewHamas’ Through Its New Documents.” Journalof Palestine Studies 35 (Summer, 2006), pp. 6-27. 

Hroub, Khaled. “Hamas After Shaykh Yasin and Rantisi.”Journal of Palestine Studies 33 (Summer,2004), pp. 21-38.

Kalyvas, Stathis N.“Civil Wars.” In Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, eds., The Oxford Handbook ofComparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2007, pp. 475-494.

Khalili,Laleh. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of NationalCommemoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Khalili,Laleh. “Commemorating Battles and Massacres in the Palestinian Refugee Camps ofLebanon.” American Behavioral Scientist 51(11)(2008): 1562-1574.

Khoury, Enver M. The Crisis in the Lebanese System:Confessionalism and Chaos (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institutefor Public Policy Research), 1976.

Lebanese Center forPolicy Studies, “Grapes of Wrath: Red Red Wine.” The Lebanon Report 3 (Summer, 1996), http://www.lcps-lebanon.org/pub/tlr/96/sum96/grapes_wrath.html.

Martínez, Beatriz andFrancesco Volcipella, eds. Walking theTight Wire: Conversations on the May 2008 Lebanese Crisis (TheTransnational Institute), September 2008.

Makdisi, Samir andRichard Sadaka, “The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990.” Lecture and Working Paper Series (2003 No. 3) (Beirut: AmericanUniversity of Beirut), 2003.

Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community,History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA:University of California Press), 2000.

Mervin,Sabrina. “‘Ashura’: Some Remarks on Ritual Practices in Different ShiiteCommunities.” The Other Shiites, edited by Monsutti, Alessandro, Naef,Silvia, and Sabahi, Farian. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007: 137-147.

Mervin,Sabrina. Un reformisme chiite: Ulémaset lettrés du Ğabal ‘Āmil (actual Liban-Sud) de la fin de l’Empire ottoman àl’indépendance du Liban. Paris: Karthala, 2000.

Meyer, Miranda. “The Immortal, the Undead, and the Monster: Flagellation and Abjection in Lebanese Shi‘i Discourses of Resistance.” Zaytoon Journal (July 2015): 69-93.

Mishal, Shaul &Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas:Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press),2000.

Moghadam, Assaf. “Mayhem, Myths, and Martyrdom: The Shi‘a Conception of Jihad.” Terrorism and Political Violence (19), 2007: 125-143.

Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of theZionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage Books), 2001. 

Morris, Michael F. “Al Qaeda As Insurgency.” UnitedStates Army War College Strategic Studies Institute [Original source: USAWCStrategic Research Project] (Carlisle: U.S. Army War College, 2005), http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/ksil234.pdf.

Murray, Stuart J. “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Life.” Polygraph (18), 2006: 191-215.

Nakash, Yitzhak. “An Attempt to Trace the Origin of the Rituals of ‘Āshūrā’.” Die Welt des Islams 33 (2), 1993: 161-18.

Nakash, Yitzhak. “The Muharram Rituals and the Cult of the Saints among Iraqi Shiites.” The Other Shiites, edited by Monsutti, Alessandro, Naef, Silvia, and Sabahi, Farian. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2007: 115-136.

Noe, Nicholas. ed. Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of SayyedHassan Nasrallah (London, England: Verso), 2007. 

Norton, AugustusRichard. Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press), 2007.

Norton,Augustus Richard. “Hizballah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?” Middle East Policy 5 (January, 1998),pp. 147-158. 

Norton,Augustus Richard. “Hizballah and the Israeli Withdrawal from Southern Lebanon.”Journal of Palestine Studies 30(Autumn, 2000), pp. 22-35. 

Norton,Augustus Richard. “Hizballah Through the Fog of the Lebanon War.” Journal of Palestine Studies 36 (Autumn,2006), pp. 54-70.  

Norton,Augustus Richard. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2007.

Norton, Augustus Richard. “Lebanon After Ta’if: Is theCivil War Over?” Middle East Journal 45 (Summer,1991), pp. 457-473.

Norton,Augustus Richard. “Ritual, Blood, and Shiite Identity: Ashura in Nabatiyya,Lebanon.” The Drama Review 49 (4), 2005: 140-155.

Olick,Jeffrey K. “Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A dialogical analysis of May 8,1945, commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review 64(3) (June 1999): 381-402.

Peteet, Julie. “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A CulturalPolitics of Violence.” Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the ModernMiddle East, (Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb, eds.). (London: Saqi Books, 1997): 103-126.

Picard, Elizabeth. “TheLebanese Shi’a and Political Violence.” In TheLegitimation of Violence, edited by David Apter, 189-233. New York: NewYork University Press, 1997.

Pinto, Paulo G. “Pilgrimage, Commodities, and ReligiousObjectification: The Making of Transnational Shiism between Iran and Syria.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africaand the Middle East 27(1) (2007): 109-125.

Salvatore, Armando. “Tradition and Modernity within IslamicCivilization and the West.” Islam andModernity: Key Issues and Debates, Muhammad Khalid Masud, ArmandoSalvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2009): 3-35.

Sukarieh, Mayssoun. “The Hope Crusades.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(1) (2012): pps. 115–134.

Tilly, Charles. Stories,Identities, and Political Change (Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittlefieldPublishers, Inc., 2002).

The Ta’if Accord (September 1989), http://www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/lebanon/taif.htm.

Volk,Lucia. “Re-Remembering the Dead: A Genealogy of a Martyrs Memorial in SouthLebanon.” The Arab Studies Journal 15(1)(Spring 2007): 44-69.

Volk,Lucia. Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

Wahnich, Sophie. “Transmettre l’effroi, penser la terreur: Les muséesd’une Europe déchirée.” Sismographie desterreurs 5 (2007): pagination unknown. [n.p.?]

Weiss,Max. “The Cultural Politics of Sh‘i Modernism: Morality and Gender in Early 20th-CenturyLebanon.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39 (2), 2007:249-270.

Werbner, Richard P. “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun:Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.” Memory and the Postcolony: AfricanAnthropology and the Critique of Power. Richard Werbner, ed. (London: ZedBooks, 1998): [pagination unknown to meat this time].

Yoneyama, Lisa. “Taming the Memoryscape: Hiroshima’s UrbanRenewal.” Remapping Memory: The Politicsof Timespace. Jonathan Boyarin, ed. (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1994): 99-136. 

Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli NationalTradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 

And something easier to digest, though no less serious: read up on Omar Mukhtar. Try to really get it through your head how and why people would come to treat someone who died for a fruitless cause as a hero for a full century after his death. While you’re at it, think about the way many Americans talk about their compatriots who died in military service (here’s an example). Read up on the history of Masada and India’s Martyrs’ Day; contemplate the fact that the very word “martyr” comes from Greek. Think about people who famously died for your country/ethnic group/rights of some identity group you belong to (I don’t presume to know who you are or where you’re from) and why you learned about them in school or online, and how those lessons predisposed you to think. (Hell, think about Joan of Arc.) Treat martyrdom as something that every society and social group engages in (yes, with all the attendant implications that martyrdom is a process, something continually reproduced across time and generations). And then try to think about why martyrdom has become an important value in many Muslim countries.