Collected here are the proceedings of a conference held in April, 2011 and co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame London Center, and Birkbeck College, University of London, on a neuralgic topic, ‘Religious Martyrdom and Terrorism’. Kate Cooper challenges two well-lodged, popular misconceptions in ‘Martyrdom, Memory, and the “Media Event”’. Contrary to common belief, she insists there is no non-Christian evidence of any systematic Roman persecution of believers. A second misconception concerns the requirement of suffering and violence for martyrdom. Christian apologists in the 2nd and 3rd centuries ‘created the impression in the imagination of their readers’ (p. 29) that they had been singled out for persecution. Martyros originally signified anyone who gave witness, the most spectacular – but not only – being, of course, through suffering and death. Within the context of the conference’s theme, Copper states very clearly that Christians never ‘sought to involve others in their suffering’ (p. 35). On the contrary, as Asma Afsaruddin explains in ‘Martyrdom in Islamic Thought and Praxis’, martyrs included those ‘who [are] killed in the way of God’ (p. 47), a position subsequently developed by some into jihad. More recently Islamists have forsaken jihad’s prohibition against maltreatment of non-combatants in favour of suicide bombers deemed martyrs because of self-sacrifice due to faith and homeland.
Susannah Brietz Monta concentrates on potential tension between faith and homeland in ‘Rendering unto Caesar: The Rhetorics of Divided Loyalties in Tudor England’. An introductory juxtaposition of marginal notes on such debated passages as Romans 13:7 and Matthew 22:21 in contemporary Protestant and Catholic translations reveals intriguing possibilities for future research. Unlike Islamic martyrs pondered in this collection, Monta stresses the patient suffering of English martyrs, a suffering that testified to the depth and purity of their convictions, and their loyalty to the government. They died, as Thomas More so succinctly stated, ‘the king’s good servant[s] but God’s first’. Monta revisits the famous printed debate, briefly noted in her Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), between William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and William [later Cardinal] Allen, during which the former portrayed Edmund Campion and other Catholic martyrs as traitors, terrorists avant la lettre. Elizabeth’s position as queen and her role as supreme governor of the Church in England exacerbated the problem. Facile attempts to divide Caesar’s things from those of God foundered as a theological refusal to acknowledge Elizabeth as supreme governor had implications in the political sphere. A proper balance between divided allegiances continues to elude Christians.
Many wonder what is the ‘stuff that martyrs are made of’? Garry Waller’s exposition of ‘[Julia] Kristeva’s “New Knowledge”: Terrorism, Martyrdom, and Psychoanalytic Humanism: Insights from Two Early Modern Instances’ formulates a psychological profile of those who deem martyrdom and terrorism praiseworthy and natural. The author returns to John Carey’s debated interpretation of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes as the ‘celebration of a xenophobic suicide-hero . . . [who] exemplified the motives, planning and behavior of a suicide bomber’ (p. 93), selected by, and dedicated to, his God. Samson’s destruction of a temple full of pagans (aka infidels, heretics, apostates) perhaps demonstrates more than Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac the Kierkegaardian ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’.
The French Revolution introduced the word ‘terrorism’ into the universal vocabulary, and advocated martyrological status for secular heroes. In separate articles Julia V. Douthwaite, David Andress, and Ronald Schechter study ‘martyrs’ of the Revolution, especially Jean-Paul Marat and Maximilien Robespierre. In an especially riveting article Schechter delineates the role played by the ‘shades’, ghostly martyrs with bloodthirsty demands for retribution, in the Terror. Dominic Janes moves the conversation back to the British Isles with a fascinating study of the effect of the Revolution on nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism, and English Protestant interpretations of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.
‘Whereas cultivation of martyrs’, Guy Beiner argues in ‘Fenianism and the Martyrdom-Terrorism Nexus in Ireland before Independence’, was ‘central to their self-perception and popular politics of Fenianism, its engagement with terrorism was marginal and, as a rule, terrorists were not elevated to martyrdom’ (p. 199). Unlike other contemporary revolutionary movements, Fenianism never encouraged suicide missions. Certain strands of contemporary Islamic jihadist thought, however, laud the suicide bomber. Mainstream Islam may denounce such tactics but, as Akil N. Awan points out, 224 of 300 suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003 were in predominately Moslem countries or carried out by Islamists (p. 225). Unfortunately, the recent successes of ISIS undermine the author’s claim that ‘Jihadism is now largely a spent force’ (p. 250). Alex Houen’s ‘Martyrdom and Hostage Executions in the Iraq War’ studies the murders of hostages Kenneth Bigley and Margaret Hassan. The Islamists portrayed the former as a type of anti-martyr in contrast to their own faith and conviction. The latter, according to Houen, illustrates contemporary linkage of ‘Christian martyrs to political conflicts’ (p. 259). Jolyon Mitchell concludes the collection with a survey of cinematic presentations of martyrs and martyrdom.
The introduction’s opening sentence ‘Martyrdom and terrorism have histories that are interlinked in fascinating and important ways, a fact that has been highlighted by the recent rise in suicide bombing’ (p. 1), alerts the early modern religious scholar that the collection contains more things than we have learned in our study of philosophy, Foxe, Campion, and pseudo-martyrs. The contributors consistently emphasize that the Christian tradition, despite an evolution in the understanding of martyr and the current widespread application of the term to almost any innocent, tragic death, never sanctioned its use for suicide bombers or terrorists. The Christian practice that most approximated jihad with its soldier-martyrs with taking up the cross, plenary indulgences, and the Crusades, is oddly not treated in the collection. Claiming that he used ‘the word advisedly’, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor labelled Margaret Hassan a martyr because ‘“martyr” means “witness”’ (p. 267). Perhaps we should use the word even more advisedly. Frequently, this reader at least wished to inject a healthy dose of Augustinianism into the discussion: ‘It is not the torture, but the cause which makes the martyr’. Not all the articles will interest readers of this journal, but many will facilitate a greater understanding of contemporary problems, and a few, a deeper comprehension of martyrdom in early modern Britain and Ireland.
