Lowell:

Technically, you may be correct. On the other hand, the notion of strapping a bomb onto one’s self started with the Tamil Tigers; the Tamil Tigers pioneered suicide bombing on land. The Japanese had kamikaze planes, which used in naval warfare. For that matter, Russian aviators sometimes rammed enemy aircraft.

I tend to argue that the suicide bomber derives from western and specifically American theology (People’s Temple). Yes, Islam does have a tradition of the assassin who would come into court, stab a monarch, and then expect to get tortured to death (and he usually was). Pro-suicide Muslim theologians typically look for legal precedent, but they typically use mental gymnastics to do so.

Still, I would argue that explosives existed for over five hundred years in the Middle East. Yet, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Muslim warriors for all of that time to strap on a bomb to kill anybody. Yes, there were suicidal charges in battle; “banzai charges” were standard in the history of Islamic warfare. However, there were no suicide bombers. Think about it. In 1453, the Ottoman Empire had some of the best artillery in the world to batter down Constantinople’s walls, and yet nobody strapped a bomb to himself. Throughout all of my researches, at no time during the entire Ottoman Empire’s history did any Muslim strap a bomb to himself to kill anybody. That’s quite a record.

And then, all of a sudden in the late twentieth century, with the Tamil Tigers pioneering the suicide bomber, the IRA pioneering the car bomb, and People’s Temple advertising the ideal of “revolutionary suicide”, Muslim suicide bombers sprout out like weeds. Yes, there is something wrong with Islam. The suicide bomber is a recent innovation in Islamic theology.