The Sin of Obedience

by Barbara Smoker

THE motivation of the Iraqi woman would-be suicide bomber in .Jordan, Sajida Rishawi, has been the subject of considerable speculation in the global media. One British writer came to the conclusion that fame was the spur - the woman being willing, supposedly, to sacrifice her life, as well as the lives of strangers against whom she had no personal animosity, for the sake of her moment of glory and footnote in history. Another writer put it down to the woman's being trapped in a loveless marriage.    However, as Sajida displayed no relevant emotion when interrogated, nor any sign of general insanity, neither of those motives could possibly account for so extreme a response as mass murder linked to suicide.

Belief in an enticing posthumous reward is more plausible - but in that case, surely, some consequent feelings of guilt and frustration at her failure to detonate her belted bomb would have been apparent in the woman's demeanour during her captive confession, recorded on video and widely shown on television and the Internet. Besides, the Islamic tradition does not promise women the same tangible (notably sexual) after-life rewards for martyrdom as it does their menfolk.

No; her true motive was, I am certain, simply obedience. She explained to her captors that her husband had made two explosive belts. Wearing one himself, he fitted her with the other, teaching her how to control it and pull the detonating cord at the right time.When, in a large hotel function-room in Amman, the prearranged moment came, he successfully detonated his body-bomb, while she, in the opposite corner of the room, tried to emulate him; but her bomb failed to explode.

When interrogated, she apparently did not even contemplate claiming that she had deliberately prevented explosion of the bomb. Not only would this have ensured her a free pardon; she would still have escaped her supposed loveless marriage, and it would not have robbed her of any of her fame - in fact, rather the reverse. But it would have been an admission of disobedience to her late husband.

The Arabic word islam means submission - intended primarily as the unconditional submission of a male Muslim to Allah, but secondarily as the submission of a Muslim wife to her husband, who must interpret for her the revealed will of Allah.

Not that Islam is the only religious tradition to regard unquestioning obedience to authority as the highest moral principle. The Judaic scripture explains human suffering, in Just-So style, by positing the "sin of disobedience" perpetrated by Adam and Eve in eating "the forbidden fruit" - with dire consequences for all human beings (and even other species of animal) for ever afterwards.   This fruit is said to have conferred on our first parents the "knowledge of good and evil", which God presumably wished to keep from them; but how they could be held guilty of the sin of disobedience, or anything else, before acquiring that knowledge, is not made clear.

Since Christianity swallowed the Old Testament as well as the New, it naturally adopted approval of blind obedience - an ethical principle which proved to be so useful to rulers, feudal lords, slave owners, the military, captains of industry, and administrators, that they have all incorporated it in their jurisdiction. National dictators, particularly, have demanded total obedience from their people.

The Nazi leaders under Adolf Hitler apparently did not even consider that their highest moral responsibility might be to their individual consciences, based on a true assessment of how they were instructed to act in terms of general welfare, rather than to absolute obedience to the demands of the party machine and its Fuhrer. The outcome, at the post-war Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal, was the almost universal plea "I was only obeying orders" - which the Allied victors disdained (though citizens of the Soviet Union must have understood it from their similar ideology on the opposite side).

Small children, before they are able to reason adequately, have to be schooled, of course, in unreasoning obedience, for their own safety. (The Catholic Church has traditionally put "the age of reason" at about seven years.) But that initial principle of blind obedience to authority should be replaced gradually by ethical reasoning as young people attain maturity.

The Nazis thus exhibited repressed moral development; as, too, do god-worshippers, especially Muslim fundamentalists - and their submissive wives.