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Faith at Suicide
Lives in Forfeit – Self-Bombed and Self-Betrayed

Kenneth Cragg
Kenneth Cragg was first in Jerusalem in 1939, and subsequently became deeply involved in areas of faith between Semitic religions under the stress of current politics. He later pursued doctoral studies in Oxford where he first graduated and became ‘Prizeman’ in Theology and Moral Philosophy, and where he is now an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College. He was a Bishop in the Anglican Jurisdiction in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, and played ecclesiastical roles in Africa and India. A Certain Sympathy of Scriptures is a companion book to his Readings in the Qur’an (1988; 1999), and more broadly to his Faiths in Their Pronouns: Websites of Identity (2002). Other works by Bishop Cragg, and published by Sussex Academic Press, include: With God in Human Trust – Christian Faith and Contemporary Humanism; The Weight in the Word – Prophethood, Biblical and Quranic; and The Education of Christian Faith.

“Bishop Cragg offers a comparative study of suicide in the Abrahamic religions, and deep theological reflection. The second is largely rooted in religious studies, drawing on insights from critical theory and post-colonial studies. It is informed by a hermeneutics of suspicion. The author criticises Samson’s commendation in the NT, presents Judas’s suicide as no justification for anti-Judaic prejudice, and argues that some early Christians translated a readiness to suffer into a warrant for self-slaughter – a misreading, he holds, of Gethsemane. Samson’s legacy is traced through Milton and the Zionist Jabotinsky (d. 1940), who uses the saga to justify violence. Cragg then argues that Muslim suicide bombers are different in kind. Cragg’s study does not offer a genealogy of contemporary Muslim suicide bombing – which would track its incidence to Shi’ites in the Iran-Iraq war, to its adoption by Hezbollah in Lebanon, then Hamas and radical secular groups in Israel-Palestine. Instead, he worries that suicide bombers appeal to elements of Islamic scripture and early history which can be read to justify violent conflict. As ever, we are led back to exploring the nature of God as it is understood in Christianity and Islam, and how his victory is to be understood. Cragg believes that Muslims are possessed of resources and religious perspectives that could de-legitimise the zealotry of the suicide bomber – especially if they draw on the first Meccan phase of the Prophet’s life, when the commendation of truth was not yet wedded to the military pursuit of power. The urgency of the task and what is at stake is captured in a neologism, ‘fideocide’.” Church Times

Purposeful suicide in contemporary Islam and the deep pathos in its frequency for religious ends is the main impulse to the topic of Faith at Suicide. The Islamic phenomenon needs to be set in a wider context which reckons with suicide’s incidence elsewhere, with its uneasy associations in martyrdom and with how it interrogates – or is interrogated by – the ethics of religious faith. The enigma of wilful suicide is no less a challenge to sanity or compassion when such faith is absent from the deed or dimly yearned for by it.

‘I am pregnant with my cause’, orators may boast. But they were never pregnant with themselves. Our birth was unsolicited on our part. We have all to reach a philosophy about our living, which is perpetually at stake and which we are free to curtail. Dark cynics have said that life is no more than forbearing not to commit suicide. While the sheer mystery of birth demands we disavow all such self-refusal, what then of those who resolve to make it forfeit for an end they must also abdicate in doing so? Selves are ‘banished and betrayed’ when weary despair registers what ill-fate itself has done to them. It is more darkly so when the precious human frame, the body’s wonder, by ‘self-bombing’ encases lethal death in and for and from itself.

This book sets out to explain how the issue of suicide belongs with the conscience of Islam today, and how suicide in all circumstances, with or without religious overtones – be they Islamic or Christian or other faith – is an inherent contradiction of our common humanity, as expressed in human birth which expressly involves us in mankind.

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