Madam, - Paul Gill (August 16th) denies the religious motivation of Islamist terrorists as argued in the excellent article by Susan Philips (Head2Head, August 13th).
For them, he tells us, religion is merely a "tool" for inculcating something called "groupness" in their cells.
Yet, amid the behaviourist jargon he uses it is possible to make out self-contradiction, as when he writes of cultures of martyrdom being "socially constructed". How is this to be done if not by use of sacred texts such as those quoted by Ms Philips?
The Koran contains at least nine verses telling of the superiority of the believer who dies fighting in the cause of Allah, and the rewards awaiting him in paradise. Sixteen others exhort Muslims to fight unbelievers until they convert or pay the jizya (poll tax).
A text constantly cited in Hamas propaganda, and taught to children as young as three in the Palestine Authority areas, is used to motivate recruits for the jihad to eliminate the "Zionist entity" (not, as Western self-deluders fondly imagine, to win a two-state solution). It comes from both the Bukhari and Muslim haditha (oral traditions), and has nature herself colluding with the jihadist: "The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' "
The monstrous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed last year, published a manifesto in 2004 which laid out his justification for the war he was about to launch on the heretical Shias. He wrote: "Someone may say that, in this matter, we are being hasty and rash and leading the nation into a battle that will be revolting and in which blood will be spilt. That is exactly what we want. . . God's religion is more precious than lives and souls. . . The best proof of this is the story of the Companions of the Ditch, whom God praised. . . that, if the city and the desert fought each other until all without exception perished unless they professed belief in the oneness of God, this would be good."
Here again, is a clear religious mandate for the savage campaign of suicide car and truck bombings against Shia marketplaces and mosques which followed, and which brought the intended civil war.
Paul Gill's claim that Islamist terrorism can only be understood by taking "political conditions" into account is a truism. For the Islamist terrorist, religion and politics are inseparable. And Islamism, so far from being merely reactive to these "conditions", is pro-active in defining what they are. For 1,400 years it has divided the world into the dar-al-Islam (zone of submission) and the dar-al-Harb (zone of war). The very names are sufficient to convey the political agenda. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.