Suicide-Bombing
Today, in line with their degenerate communal mindset, a phenomenon has emerged among Muslims which is an extreme form of tahleel-e-haram, or wrongly seeking to make the unlawful lawful. And that is suicide-bombing—or, in other words, strapping bombs onto oneself and blowing oneself up in order to kill a supposed enemy.
This action is, without any doubt at all, forbidden or haraam according to the sources of the Islamic Shariah. Some Muslim scholars have, on their own, sought to claim that suicide-bombing is legitimate by terming it as istishhad or seeking martyrdom. But this sort of reasoning is baseless. No self-styled fatwa of this sort can make a clearly and unambiguously forbidden act like suicide-bombing legitimate.
A hadith provides clear guidance in this matter. This report is found in various books of Hadith—for instance, in Sahih al-Bukhari (hadith no. 3062), Sahih Muslim (hadith no. 112), Musnad Imam Ahmad (hadith no. 8090), etc. The narrative in these different texts is worded roughly identically. According to this narrative, a Companion of the Prophet relates:
We were accompanying the Prophet in a war (ghazwa). Along with us was a person named Quzman who had already embraced the faith. During the war he suffered a serious injury. People began to praise him before the Prophet for the bravery he had exhibited in the war. But the Prophet said: Innahu min ahl in-nar. That is, “He is surely one of the people of Hell.” The Companions were taken aback by the Prophet’s words, so he asked them to go and investigate the matter. It was then that they learnt that Quzman had been severely injured during the war and when he could not bear the pain anymore, he killed himself with his own weapon. When the Prophet was told about this, he uttered these words: “God is great, and I bear witness that I am His messenger.”
It is a fact that in Islam, suicide is something that is completely haraam or forbidden—so much so that even if a person who appears to be a Companion of the Prophet and exhibits great bravery while fighting on the battlefield but, finally, kills himself with his own weapon, his death will be an unlawful death on account of his suicide. Under no pretext or excuse can it be made legitimate.
Suppose some Muslims are attacked and they fight in defence, and, in doing so, they die. In this case, their death is legitimate or jaiz. But if they knowingly and deliberately strap bombs around their bodies and then go amidst their supposed enemies and explode these bombs and thereby kill others and themselves, it is, very clearly, a form of suicide, and so it is definitely illegitimate in Islam.
It is legitimate for believers to take to self-defence when attacked. If they are not in a position to do so, the way for them is to exercise patience, not to resort to suicide-bombing. But the obsession with suicide-bombing has become so acute among certain Muslims today that they are not even willing to seriously reflect on the fact that it is clearly forbidden in Islam.
