The Ethos of Jihad

A masked Hamas militant kisses freed Palestinian prisoner Mahawish al Qadi, left, who was involved in organizing the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Palestinians celebrated the homecoming of hundreds of prisoners exchanged for an Israeli soldier on Tuesday, with the crowd and a freed Hamas leader exhorting militants to seize more soldiers for future swaps. Photo: Tara Todras-Whitehill / AP

Truly, the profound mysteries
of the human mind can be
dreadfully confounding
with little basis in rational
consideration. For, consider
the awful declaration of
some among the hordes of
humanity of death-adoration.

These strange minds insist
on the ineffable value in death
for by this device may they
achieve their soul's desire;
martyrdom. In martyrdom
there is immortality for, they
imagine to live forever adored
by nubile angels in paradise.

Martyrdom, they reason
unreasonably, achievable only
by sacrificing other lives to
their deathly ambitions, who
happen, not by chance, not to
share the illusions of the death
appeal. Death, to the assassins
in-the-name-of-the-divine, is
sweeter than life to them.

Just as life is dearer than
death to those hapless victims
the jihadists select for mutually
jubilant annihilation. And another
conundrum raises its profoundly
odd and querulous head in the
enigma of those exalted clerics
who urge death upon martyrs.

Who stand above the bloody fray
themselves while interpreting the
holy word writ by God's hand alone
yet remain themselves strangely
invested with the will to defy death's
personal invitation; struggling to
fend off its generously fulsome,
morbidly unwelcome overtures.