Was Brahim Abdeslam’s abjectness just a figment of the CCTV footage, or was Brahim Abdeslam actually abject? His mother, Faklan, certainly seems to think it was the latter. Her son, she told a reporter, “did not mean to kill anyone.” According to a cousin, he took his own life because of “stress.” In an interview with the British tabloid Daily Mail, Abdeslam’s former wife, Naima, who was married to him for two years until they separated in 2008, said “his favourite activities were smoking weed and sleeping. He often slept during the day. The number of joints that he smoked was alarming. Despite his diploma as an electrician, he found no job, it made him lazy.” He was also, she said, religiously lax and neither prayed nor attended a mosque, although he did reportedly “keep Ramadan because his family forced him to.” This suggests that far from being an ideological fanatic, Brahim Abdeslam may have been depressed. Of course it is impossible to know this with any degree of certainty, since so much about his life remains opaque. And it is clearly naïve to take at face value the testimony of a dead jihadist’s relatives, since they have an obvious interest in expressing incredulity about how their ever-so-normal, soccer-playing, Kim Kardashian-loving, Chelsea-supporting, Vans-sneakers-wearing kin could have joined ISIS. But it is not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility that Abdeslam was more interested in ending his own life than those of others—which, in the end, is exactly what he did.

In Islam, as in Christian and Jewish traditions, suicide is generally prohibited: Only God has a right to take the life he has granted. For those who are suicidal, one way of getting around this prohibition would be to sign up to a cause that rhetorically redefines suicide as a communal act of heroic self-sacrifice. As the legal scholar Stephen Holmes puts it in a chapter of the edited collection Making Sense of Suicide Missions:

The social stigma of suicide probably deters some clinically depressed youths in Muslim societies from taking their lives. But the ideal of militant jihad gives them a way to circumvent this taboo. By enlisting in a [suicide mission], a suicidally depressed individual can kill himself with social approval. All he has to do is agree to kill an enemy of Islam in the process.

Even if Brahim Abdeslam was in fact secretly an atheist and didn’t believe for a second that he would forever burn in hell for taking his own life, he would still have had a strong interest in presenting his death as an act of religious martyrdom, in the hope that this would forestall the shame that a suicide for personal reasons would have elicited from the wider community of Muslim believers in which he and his family lived. The fact that he didn’t succeed particularly well in conveying this impression, since he didn’t kill anyone, is beside the point.