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Full Description
Death is an element at the center of all religious imagination. Analysts from Freud to Agamben have pondered religion's fascination with death, and religious art is saturated with images of suffering unto death. As this volume shows, religious fascination with death extends to the notion of elective death, its circumstances, the virtue of those who perform it, and how best to commemorate it.
The essays in Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation address the legendary foundations for those elective deaths which can be categorized as religiously sanctioned suicides. Broadly condemned as cowardice across the world's moral codes, suicide under certain circumstances-such as martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or self-immolation-carries a dynamic importance in religious legends, some tragic and others uplifting. Believers respond to such legends presumably because choosing death is seen as heroic and redemptive for the individuals who die, for their communities, or for humanity. Envisioning suicide as virtuous clashes with popular conceptions of suicide as weak, immoral, and even criminal, but that is precisely the point. This volume offers analyses from renowned scholars with the literary tools and historical insights to investigate the delicate issue of religiously sanctioned elective death.
Contents
1. Introduction: On Death, Religion, and Rubrics for Suicide
Margo Kitts
2. To Die For: The Evolution of Early Jewish Martyrdom
Shmuel Shepkaru
3. Performing Christian Martyrdoms
Gail Streete
4. Collective Martyrdom and Religious Suicide: The Branch Davidians and Heaven's Gate
Catherine Wessinger
5. Martyrdom and its Contestations in the Formative Period of Islam
Asma Afsaruddin
6. The Death of Musa al- Kazim (d. 184/799): Knowledge and Suicide in Early Twelver Shi'ism
Najam Haider
7. Apologia for Suicide: Martyrdom in Contemporary Jihadist Discourse
Mohammed M. Hafez
8. Hindu Ascetic Death
Mary Storm
9. Sati
David Brick
10. Dying Heroically: Jainism and the Ritual Fast to Death
Anne Vallely
11. The Tropics of Heroic Death: Martyrdom and the Sikh Tradition
Louis E. Fenech
12. The Meanings of Sacrifice: The LTTE, Suicide, and the Limits of the Religion Question
Benjamin Schonthal
13. To Extract the Essence from this Essenceless Body: Self-Sacrifice and Self-Immolation in Indian Buddhism
Reiko Ohnuma
14. Reflection on Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Traditions
Jimmy Yu
15. Relinquishing the Body to Reach the Pure Land: Buddhist Ascetic Suicide in Premodern Japan
Jacquelyn I. Stone
