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While suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, according to the book “Making Sense of Suicide Missions,” when religion is involved, it is ALWAYS Islam.
The question: why?
According to Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, there’s an evolutionary psychological explanation for this.
Well, actually two of them.
The first has to do with sex, or as the authors say “the absence of sex.”
Islam tolerates polygyny which means one married to multiple women.
Consequently, young men of low status feel increased competitive pressure to find a mate and have increased odds of ending as “reproductive losers,” i.e. no offspring.
The authors explain that tolerance for this in societies around the world leads to increase violence of all kinds, but while this is necessary to explain the phenomenon, it’s not sufficient, since there are plenty of cultures that tolerate polygyny, but don’t have suicide bombers (west Africa, for example.)
They then point to the line in the Koran that says a martyr receives 72 virgins in heaven for himself which provides the final motivation.
Faced with the prospects of total reproductive failure on earth and the prospect of a personal harem, young Muslim men of low status (and the data supports this) are most likely to become suicide bombers.
