TITLE: No Ticket to Paradise

AUTHOR: Amyn B Sajoo

PUB: The Guardian

DATE: September 4, 2001

At the funeral of Abu Ali Mustafa, the most senior Palestinian politician to fall victim to Israel's new policy of "targeted killings", a Palestinian official warned that the assassination had "opened the doors to hell, which will burn the Israelis first". It's the kind of imagery that is popular in the Middle East, where the languages of faith and secular politics tend to be inseparable. Alas, it also reflects a tendency - within and beyond the region - to assume that religion is politics. Faiths don't operate in a vacuum and the dominant context in the West Bank and Gaza has been the Israeli occupation, Faisal Bodi wrote on these pages, referring to recent suicide bombings, and adding that "resurgent Islam has expressed itself in the language of resistance". Which leads him, like many others, to the conviction that "in the Muslim world, we celebrate what we call the martyr-bombers" - all in the spirit of securing tickets to paradise. Implicitly, Islam endorses the currency of political violence. Except for the awkward fact that Sri Lankans, Japanese, Jews, Christian Europeans and Americans, among others, have all found it in their ethos similarly to turn to political violence for assorted causes. From Buddhist self-denial and Kamikaze mythology, to parables from the Jewish Torah or Christian Bible, take your pick and quote your scripture. The necessary ideology never fails to furnish itself from a vast corpus of civilisational wellsprings.  A favoured choice when it comes to Islam is the idea of jihad, popularly translated as "holy war". The relevant bit of scripture is about fighting "in the cause of God" for the promise of eternal salvation. Yet jihad is foremost about striving for spiritual values and its aim was to limit warfare only to the loftiest of religious motives. The same Koranic verses cited as political slogans by militants warn Muslims to "not transgress limits" - that is, forbid any harm to civilians or recourse to disproportionate action. And, say those verses, "God is with those who restrain themselves". In the face of such constraints, the temptation to give a sacred colour to secular conflicts is quite irresistible. It's about the only way to justify what the individual and his community know to be contrary to their ethical values - notably those extolling the sanctity of life and reason. A classic parable speaks of Muhammad being told of the virtues of a man, only to respond: "But how is his reason?" On receiving a garbled response, the Prophet kept repeating his question until the message got through.  Yet the Palestinians could almost be forgiven for thinking that reason has abandoned them. After all, the rest of the world has long known their plight. A United Nation report last December said that a third of the population in the occupied West Bank and Gaza survives on £1 a day, next to Israeli settlers subsidised to First World standards. Unemployment is close to 50% and infectious and chronic diseases are rife . Health and economic indicators have actually declined since the vaunted Oslo "peace process" began in 1993. After Israel's assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the United States called on Israel to "alleviate the hardships and humiliations of the Palestinians", while condemning the killing. Britain and the European Union followed suit. That is as far as these upholders of the international order will go in response to a plight they have actively abetted for decades. Plainly, it is not that resurgent Islam has expressed itself in the language of resistance, but resistance that is expressing itself in the language of religion. Countless reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN attest to Israel's denial of self-determination and violation of the most basic human liberties, including freedom from torture and arbitrary killing. If having the law on one's side isn't enough, what is to be done? An obvious response is an appeal to higher justice. But what if that higher justice - in this case Islam - says one may only resist oppressive behaviour with humanity and restraint? Then it might be time for slogans - like the claim that there is no greater virtue than political violence or suicide, even for the disabled, children and elderly (whom the Koran pointedly declares hors de combat ). As political militants see it, the Palestinian demand to exist as a people with dignity is only heard when "human bombs" go off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or when adolescents get killed throwing stones at Israeli armoured personnel carriers and tanks. Alternatively, one may embrace the Abdal Qadr al-Jaza'iri option; he led the Algerian resistance to the French colonisers in the 1830s, when severed Arab heads and ears became trophies of war. Abdal Qadr issued an edict to reward the capture of every French soldier, provided the prisoner was well-treated. And what would be the reward for a dead Frenchman, he was asked? "Twenty five blows of the baton, applied to the soles of the feet", was his answer. Saladdin and some of his Crusader foes would surely have approved. Amyn B Sajoo is a human rights and Muslim affairs scholar based in London END top