The First Murder: A Study in Criminal Psychology
Murder is one of the most recurring themes in the great works of literature. Very few in the pantheon of all-time-great storytellers from Homer to Sophocles to William Shakespeare to Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Gabriel Garcia Marquez could resist the temptation to unravel the mystery of murder. Classics apart, murder mystery or crime thriller is a popular genre both in fiction and film immortalized by some gifted writers and directors who explored the thrill and excitement surrounding the very act of killing. The questions they all sought to explore at length include: Why should one attempt a murder? What are the potential motives for killing? And what are the psychological states that a murderer goes through before and after committing the crime?
The Quran addresses all these questions succinctly in five verses in the Chapter Al Maida while referring to the first murder ever committed by a human being. While the story was told in detail in Genesis 4:1–18, the Quran’s brief narration of the murder does not get much into the background analyses of the characters, but straightaway explains the circumstances that led to the murder, its immediate motives and what happens to the murderer in the aftermath. The Quran’s narration is focused on these essential features of the murder, without mentioning even the names of the people involved, thereby lending a universal appeal to the incident. It reminds us that what were the motives for the first murder in human history will continue to be the prime triggers for murders, feuds, conflicts, confrontations, and wars in subsequent generations.
What provoked Cain’s ire and eventually made him murder his brother sound so trivial. But it was out of such silly and senseless arguments and on such flimsiest of pretexts that murders, conflicts and even world wars broke out throughout human history.
It was a complex blend of selfishness, jealousy, bigotry, despair, humiliation, arrogance, personal vendetta, and utter ignorance that prompted one of Adam’s sons to do away with his own brother. Cain was so disappointed to see that his sacrifice was rejected while that of Abel was accepted. Instead of doing an introspection and self-analysis as to what went wrong with his offering and what made it unacceptable for God, the humiliation of denial went straight to his head. He failed to recognize it as an opportunity to redeem himself but considered the very existence of his brother an obstacle placed in his path.
It was this self-inflicted sense of insecurity that led Cain to challenge his brother for a duel. There are a lot of evil ways to express one’s dislike and hatred to another person and take revenge against him or her. People give vent to their jealousy and hatred to others by indulging in a variety of nefarious activities which vary according to the nature and intensity of the evil involved in it. They are all designed and executed with the sole purpose of weakening enemies by inflicting pain, ignominy or even death and destruction on them. Of all these crimes, murder is the most heinous. It is the consummation of all evils, because while all other crimes target to weaken the enemy in certain ways, murder, the most foul, aims to eradicate the person once and for all. By committing a murder, you slam shut all doors of conciliation with your enemy and while slaying a person you are slaying not only what you see as his vices, but the whole gamut of virtues in him.
Murder is an irremediable crime because, if you, at a later stage, feel guilty and want to apologize, the victim is no longer available to accept your confession, and when it comes to sins committed against people, it’s a prerequisite to confess to them before confessing to God. But a murder, at one stroke, eliminates all possibilities of redemption and reconciliation.
By choosing to murder his brother, Cain treads the irreversible path of arrogance, crime, and destruction, as well as that of endless guilt, despair, and agony. But Abel, the victim, waged remarkable restraint by not opting to fight against his ill-tempered brother despite being challenged for a duel. The reasons he cited to avoid a conflict with his brother show one of his redeeming qualities as an ideal peace-loving person. “Even if you stretch out your hand against me to kill me, I shall not stretch out my hand against you, lo! Fear Allah the Lord of the Worlds.”
It seems avoiding a fight at any cost, even while you are invited and challenged for one, and even if your pride and life are at peril, is the right and sensible option. Neither did Abel start the battle nor did he allow himself to be a part of it, despite being the fact that he was on the right path. He understood the stupidity of waging a war with his brother or killing him to prove himself. He chose to become a martyr, rather than a killer to prove his point. Sometimes, it is not killing someone but, allowing yourself to be killed that helps your position prevail.
Even while penalizing a person for having done something wrong, the punishment should be proportionate to the sin. A murder amounts to denying any possibility of repentance for the wrongdoer. There are certain traits which you may find likeable and useful in any person; but while opting to kill a person because you don’t like certain features of him or hers, you are killing all the potential virtues in that person. In other words, killing or murdering a person in the pretext of eliminating an evil in him, risk the elimination of all virtues in him. Abel does not consider the conflict with his brother something worth a fight or cause to shed his or his brother’s blood. It was still something that can be sorted out through mutual talks.
But Cain who simply succumbed to his shortsightedness, arrogance, and stupidity, went down in history as the first to commit a homicide. But even after murdering his brother, he was far from obtaining what he wanted to achieve. His victory achieved through murder soon gave way to guilt and lamentation. He was condemned to despair and found himself on the edge of a precipice-a deepening sense of loss.
He was completely at a loss and unable to handle the consequences of the murder. His inability to decide what to do with the corpse of his brother until a raven flew in to teach him how to bury a dead body symbolizes the moral crisis and psychological void that each murderer is confronted with after being implicated in the crime. The tragedy reaches its denouement when he laments, “Woe unto me! Am I not able to be as this raven and so hide my brother’s naked corpse?”
It shows his inability to eliminate the traces of his crime, like any murderer feels when his crime is exposed. It also shows the meaninglessness inherent in some of our glorified pursuits and the dangerous consequences of our destructive campaigns on the earth. The murder was committed at the peak of vainglory when Cain was cocksure that he could sort out all his problems by finishing off his enemy. He deceived himself to believe that killing is an act of valor. But once it was done, it proved the other way around. A murder cannot invariably be driven by malice but can be an expression of ordinary human failing. However, the consequences are so sad and awful. In Cain’s case, the murder left him weaker, panicked and he grew less and less confident in himself, as the crime, contrary to his expectation, deprived him of his power and pride. This crisis is simply irrevocable because he identifies that he destroyed the path of redemption. Jealousy, greed, hatred, and arrogance bordering on vainglory, coupled with ignorance and stupidity, teamed up to conspire against and wreak havoc on Cain, the murderer.
