The Martyrdom Complex

"We are heartbroken to share that we've received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller has lost her life."
"We are so proud of the person Kayla was and the work that she did while she was here with us. She lived with purpose."
Carl and Marsha Mueller,  Arizona, United States

"Everyone, if you are receiving this letter it means I am still detained but my cellmates ... have been released."
"Please know that I am in a safe location, completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I have been treated w/utmost respect + kindness."
Kayla Mueller, American aid worker

 Kayla Mueller (Family photo)

Kayla Mueller, as the saying goes, died doing what she loved best; proffering kindness and assistance to those whom she viewed as being in dire need of both. Perhaps the conviction of her compassion extended also to those who held her hostage in reflection of Christ's plea to his father that his transgressors should be forgiven because "they know not what they do". She found it within herself to speak kindly of her vicious wardens, bypassing their commission of atrocities. Those who slaughtered thousands of innocents had "treated her with respect".

Her parents profess to pride in their daughter's determination to bring comfort to the afflicted.

Kayla Mueller perhaps can be said to have developed such a deep well of compassion for other human beings whose fortunes in life have been existentially dismal that she sought to sacrifice her own well-being -- or thought little of her own well-being in responding to their plight - on their behalf. Her instinct to comfort and bring hope and whatever small modicum of aid to those who are victims of oppression, violence, and war whom others prey upon for their own implacable ends, led her to expose herself to danger.

In Islam, jihad, a fixed idealistic personal responsibility of the faithful, celebrates martyrdom as the ultimate sacrifice a pious, or obsessively fixated Islamist is eager to offer to prove his/her complete surrender. That martyrdom comes complete with the intention  of forcing martyrdom on others to complete the goal. This religion that seeks to spread itself like night falling upon day when the source of light is removed, uses faith and psychopathy to obliterate reason, where the passion of fulfilling one's obligation to a proselytizing, conquest-driven ideology overrides the very concept of human rights as a travesty imposed upon theocracy by the blighted 'enlightenment' of the West.

But one needn't be a psychopath to embroil oneself wholeheartedly in that martyrdom complex. Those who die in defiance of Islamist fascism, do so as martyrs to the obligation placed upon humankind as thinking, reasoning creatures, spurning a religion which is divided within itself by its precepts expressed in its sacred writings. Where on the one hand, followers are urged to regard Islam as the ultimate religion of peace, where a single death is to be regarded as a blow to all of humankind. And on the other hand, urges the killing of those who spurn Islam for another religion.

Islamism, Muslims from all points of the geographic compass who express their firm belief that Islam must reflect its founding values, find inspiration in the examples to be found in the Koran of reasons to slaughter non-Muslims, and to consider Jews their mortal enemies. Beheadings, crucifixions, immolation, are hardly forbidden after all, in Sunni Arab countries of the Middle East, and in Shiite Iran the punishment of death is meted out to apostates, to dissenters and those who oppose totalitarian regimes by methods familiar to the Koranic scriptures.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham who held  the daughter of Carl and Marsha Mueller their prisoner made the gesture of providing to them a last look at their daughter. Not quite hale and hearty as proof of their kindness to her, however. Three photographs of her face; two of their daughter in a black Muslim head coverage complete with visible facial contusions. The third photograph wrapped in a white burial shroud. Kayla, in whose given name those of her parents were meshed, no doubt meant the world to her parents. Their grief will be unassuageable.

They express pride in her commitment to humanitarian aid to others.

Given the circumstances in which Kayla Mueller delivered her compassionate aid to refugees in their desperate to survive against all odds, in a geography where life is casually and brutally taken, she cannot have been totally unaware of the danger she placed herself in by exposing herself as a figure of mercy in an atmosphere and a landscape where mercy is an unacknowledged quality, and the appearance of Westerners a goad to Islamist rage.

Kayla Mueller was then, a martyr to her belief in the common humanity of all of us. She set aside her own fears, if she had any, for the greater burden of presenting herself as a beacon of light in a landscape of darkness. The light was destined to be dimmed by the greater power of the hatred that people steeped in an ancient liturgy of searing hatred and blame preparing the faithful to separate themselves from those damned by their unwillingness to surrender to a religion that urges peace and conflict in the same breath.

Peace is found in death, the death that the faithful of fanatical Islam are all too ready to deliver.