Faith at Suicide: Lives Forfeit : Violent Religion--human Despair

Purposeful suicide in contemporary Islam and the deep pathos in its frequency for religious ends is the main impulse behind Faith at Suicide. The Islamic phenomenon needs to be set in a wider context which reckons with suicide's incidence elsewhere, with its uneasy associations in martyrdom and with how it interrogates-or is interrogated by-the ethics of religious faith. The enigma of willful suicide is no less a challenge to sanity or compassion when such faith is absent from the deed or dimly yearned for by it. Faith at Suicide sets out to explain how the issue of suicide belongs with the conscience of Islam today, and how suicide in all circumstances, with or without religious overtones-be they Islamic or Christian or other-is an inherent contradiction of our common humanity, as expressed in human birth which expressly involves us in mankind.