Considering the enormous body of literature, albeit of wildly varying quality, on martyrdom and Muslim suicide bombers in the contemporary Middle East, it is surprising that, a few short encyclopedia entries aside, there are only three historically grounded articles dedicated to suicide anywhere in the Arab world before the twentieth century (Rosenthal, 1946; Denaro, 1996; Martel-Thoumian, 2004). This paucity stands in sharp contrast to the vast and nuanced scholarship on suicide in medieval, early modern, and modern Europe, which has demonstrated how changing attitudes to self-murder have reflected deeper societal changes. This paper takes early modern Ottoman Syria as a case study to challenge the widespread assumption that killing oneself was so rare in Arab-Islamic societies that there is simply nothing to write about. The paper draws from numerous cases of suicide reported in chronicles, first-person narratives, biographical dictionaries, and court records from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century (e.g., Ghazzi, Muhibbi, Muradi, Ibn Ayyub, Ibn Budayr, Ibn Tulun, Ibn Kannan). These narratives are supplemented by contemporaneous legal sources such as fatwas and legal compendia, whose foremost concern was the permissibility of funerary rites for self-murderers. The paper first sketches the men who killed themselves (no cases of women could be located): their age, family circumstances, socio-economic and educational background, how they took their lives, and why. It then focuses on how these cases were narrated and represented. Although there is no clear-cut evidence that the Qur'an itself prohibits suicide, the Hadith unambiguously declares it an unlawful act that dooms the perpetrator to eternal Hell. Why is it, then, that many presentations of suicide are either matter-of-fact or decidedly empathetic? And why did the authorities routinely choose to attach no penalties, unlike the post-mortem punishments, sometimes spectacularly savage, inflicted on the bodies of suicides in parts of early modern Europe? One possible answer, I argue in the conclusion, is that in Ottoman Syria, unlike in Europe, self-murder was not perceived by the political and religious authorities as a significant threat to the public order. Ultimately, this paper hopes to open the way for serious historical studies of suicide in Middle Eastern history.