“You won’t go to paradise. Killing yourself and killing others is forbidden in Islam.” It is hard to escape the impression that this program is for Western non-Muslim publicity, and is not really designed to dissuade jihad/martyrdom bombers. The reason why is that Muslims who recruit jihad/martyrdom bombers do not consider it suicide, and teach that to their recruits, emphasizing this passage of the Qur’an: “God has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of God; they kill, and are killed…” (9:111) It would be hard for this “elderly cleric: to maintain to a group of knowledgeable Muslims that “killing yourself and killing others is forbidden in Islam” in light of that verse.
“Afghans aim to defuse failed suicide bombers with holy Quran,” from the Pak Tribune, June 12:
In a room full of would-be suicide bombers at a high security detention centre in the Afghan capital, an elderly cleric quietly reads out verses from the holy Quran, telling the young men the act of killing oneself is itself a crime in Islam.
“You won’t go to paradise. Killing yourself and killing others is forbidden in Islam,” he tells the men sitting on chairs arranged in rows in the brightly lit room, and points to pages in the holy book. Some of them nod, others stare vacantly….
Most of the men in the room, some with just the beginnings of a moustache, were Afghans but they had spent their lives in Pakistan. Several million Afghans have moved to Pakistan over decades of Afghan turmoil. Some of the bombers said they been sent across to Afghanistan after being told Islam was in danger because of the foreign military presence and that women were being raped. “As a Muslim I wanted to do my part and I agreed to do the mission,” said Abdul Wahab. He said he made four unsuccessful attempts to detonate his explosive-laden car on foreign military convoys in northern Afghanistan before he was caught last month….
Not everyone has had a change of heart. Ahmad Zubair, 18, was caught two weeks ago with a suicide-bomb vest in the eastern city of Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border, where he planned to attack US soldiers. “I wanted to blow them up. They have desecrated our holy book and made cartoons of our Prophet. As long as Americans are in Afghanistan, there will be suicide bombers,” he said quietly, before the NDS agents led him away.