The West should have nothing on us because many of our afflictions seem to be popping up there too.
I speak of the ‘suicide cult’. On June 5 www.wsws.org reported that police and social workers were baffled by the suicide of 19 teenagers who were reportedly happy, were doing well at school, had lots of friends and a bright future ahead of them. Even more bizarrely, many of these teenagers and twenty-year-olds ‘networked’ over the internet and posted online memorials, fueling speculation that these were ‘copycat suicides’.
Commenting on this, Labour MP for Bridgend south Wales, Madeleine Moon, had this to say: “If you are a young and vulnerable person who sees nothing in life ahead of you, if you are feeling in despair and you can see no way you are ever going to make anything of yourself, having your photograph and your way of dying splashed all over the national media is perhaps one way of gaining fame; a very sad way of getting it but one that certainly some of this coverage is exploring and exploiting.
Dying for ‘prestige’ is actually as outlandish as it sounds since in the days of the wild, wild West back in the US, the dream of almost every young man was to risk their lives by walking up to a gunslinger and testing to see if they could beat him. They were willing to get shot just to get their names in the papers and be ‘immortalized’ as the (second) fastest gun in the West. It does make some sense since that part of the US was very violent – life was short and military prowess was highly valued – and in the pre-antibiotics, pre-vaccine era life was both short and unsweet.
Hence, why prolong the inevitable if you can go out in a glorious way and be remembered forever, in Achilles fashion? All ancient peoples were obsessed with death, not least our Egyptian ancestors – mummification, tombs, pyramids, obelisks, the book of the dead, etc. But the only difference between ancient peoples was how you met your death, eagerly as a fighter or not. You can imagine which bracket the predominantly peasant Egyptians fit into, in contrast to warrior cultures like the Samurai and the kamikaze.
This is the norm in human history and it’s ironic that the gung-ho American counter-terrorism epic “The Kingdom (2007) contains this existential scene between FBI Director James Grace and Attorney General Gideon Young.
Young is furious that Grace disobeyed orders and sent his FBI team to Saudi Arabia. He threatens to ‘bury’ him, so Grace replies: “You know, Westmoreland made all of us officers write our own obituaries during Tet, when we thought The Cong were gonna end it all right there . The end comes no matter what, the only thing that matters is how do you wanna go out, on your feet or on your knees?
Writing an obituary beforehand? Wholeheartedly embracing death? Isn’t that what Hezbollah and Hamas ‘suicide’ bombers do before they go on a mission from which they have no intention to return? Isn’t there an American saying that goes: ‘If you’ve gotta go, go with a bang.’
Surely there is a difference when it comes to targeting innocent civilians but that’s got nothing to do with ‘suicide’ as such, defined as the needless wasting of one’s life. And there is a difference between doing it selflessly for a worthy cause and doing it selfishly for your own glamor. There’s actually an old pre-Islamic Arab poet who called on young men to do something, anything, even if it was bad, just to be remembered.
Islam tried to do away with that through the concepts of amal saalih (good deeds) and sadaqah jaariyah (running charity), while also punishing those who commit shahadah (martyrdom) for riyaa (for reputation bolstering).
Islam also broadened the concept of jihad to include taking care of ones parents, speaking the truth and fighting for justice, most likely to wean Arabs off of their suicidal instincts.
But the Welsh kids who offed themselves, though, don’t quite fit the selfless mould since many just couldn t hack it in life – no ‘good’ jobs waiting for them, no homeownership, and critically, no political means of changing any of this through protest politics. At least they didn’t resort to anti-social violence but the level of violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and teenage pregnancy have been on the rise in the UK as well.
Transpose that into the Egyptian context rife with unemployment, political stagnation, high prices, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and where people are still very finicky about their mortality and are hypochondriacs, you can begin to see why so many Egyptian youths are either becoming delinquents or heading off to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Sinai.
Emad El-Din Aysha is a Cairo-based commentator and lecturer at the American University in Cairo.
