One of the most infamous terrorists in history, Guy Fawkes, who came within a whisker of destroying the English monarchy and parliament in 1605, was also acting in the name of a maligned and misunderstood religion. King James presented a list of questions to his torturers, headed by the demand to discover "as to what he is, for I can never yet hear of any man that knows him". Four hundred years later the nightmare of suicide terrorism has likewise prompted frantic efforts to understand the psychological motives of individuals who are prepared to strap dynamite around themselves and trigger the detonator whilst surrounded by defenceless citizens.

Although suicide attacks were carried out by the Japanese in World War 2 and in the 1991 Tamil Tiger assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the phenomenon is now especially linked to acts of terrorism inspired by al-Qaeda ideology. Attention is focused on the influence of institutions of Islamic education which in a small minority of cases advocate extreme views which "radicalise" students into beliefs which are inconsistent with mainstream Islam. This is believed to flourish especially in Pakistan where inadequate funding of state education has allowed unregulated madrasa religious education to take hold. About 1.5 million children attend madrasas in Pakistan, some of which are also open to foreign visitors. A number of terrorists belonging to the Jemaah Islamiyah group in Indonesia have been identified as alumni of religious schools there known as pesantrens. In the UK attendance at the radical Finsbury mosque has been traced to a disturbing proportion of known terrorists.

Inadequate democracy and corrupt standards of governance in many Islamic countries may also be a contributory factor in the supply of suicide bombers. Confused young people dislocated from the state and its institutions are vulnerable to the false promises of jihadism.