When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11, 2001 the discourse of religion and violence changed forever in the public spectrum. As the Bush administration escalated their reactionary statements condemning the events first as “acts of terror” and later as “acts of war”, they unknowingly catapulted the American consciousness into a strange obsession with “suicide terrorism”. Aside from ethical concerns, new questions arose such as what is religious terrorism? How exactly do Christian and Islamic ideals become implicated in killing, dying, and war itself? To help address these concerns, Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing is a collection of lectures he presented at UC Irvine in 2006 that deconstructs and analyzes the western views on violence and martyrdom. The introduction includes a series of…show more content… He draws from a large breath of scholarly work including law, ethics, psychology, and Christian doctrine to problematize and force readers to distance themselves from complacency with preconceived ideas about terrorism. In the first chapter, he briefly explores and later refutes the “clash of civilizations” theory. Asad asserts that “there is no such thing as clash of civilizations because there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond” (12). He next touches upon liberalism’s relationship with terrorism, mainly in the context of determining what is legal and what is just war. Sovereign and “civilized” states fight legal wars but terrorism is not legal because it’s uncivilized and immoral. The liberal framework allows sovereign states to fight terrorists without impunity because