Synopses & Reviews
Review
“Bishop Cragg offers a comparative study of suicide in the Abrahamic religions, and deep theological reflection. The second is largely rooted in religious studies, drawing on insights from critical theory and post-colonial studies. It is informed by a hermeneutics of suspicion. . . . As ever, we are led back to exploring the nature of God as it is understood in Christianity and Islam, and how his victory is to be understood. Cragg believes that Muslims are possessed of resources and religious perspectives that could de-legitimize the zealotry of the suicide bomber—especially if they draw on the first Meccan phase of the Prophets life, when the commendation of truth was not yet wedded to the military pursuit of power. The urgency of the task and what is at stake is captured in a neologism, ‘fideocide.” —Church Times
Synopsis
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 interrogatesor is interrogated bythe 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 overtonesbe they Islamic or Christian or otheris an inherent contradiction of our common humanity, as expressed in human birth which expressly involves us in mankind.
About the Author
Kenneth Cragg was first in Jerusalem in 1939, and subsequently became deeply involved in areas of faith between Semitic religions under the stress of current politics. He later pursued doctoral studies in Oxford where he first graduated and became Prizeman in Theology and Moral Philosophy, and where he is now an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College. He was a Bishop in the Anglican Jurisdiction in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, and played ecclesiastical roles in Africa and India. A Certain Sympathy of Scriptures is a companion book to his Readings in the Quran (1988; 1999), and more broadly to his Faiths in Their Pronouns: Websites of Identity (2002). Other works by Bishop Cragg, and published by Sussex Academic Press, include: With God in Human Trust Christian Faith and Contemporary Humanism; The Weight in the Word Prophethood, Biblical and Quranic; and The Education of Christian Faith.