In this paper, I examine the logic that radical Islamists use to promote martyrdom beyond their reference to Islamic religious tenets. I argue that death through martyrdom is presented as ‘existence’, a paradoxical claim that is based on linking certain circumstances of being to ‘not-Being’ or ‘death’. With reference to radical Islamist discourse drawn from temporally and contextually varied Islamist extremist groups and movements, I argue that radical Islamists equate passive existence to ‘not-Being’ or ‘death’ and, conversely, death through agency – martyrdom – to ‘Being’. This logic is fundamentally premised on a distinction between two modes of existence: ‘natural existence’ that is simply ‘being’ even if in servitude, and ‘existence as Being’ that is agency and autonomy and a rejection of servitude. This distinction then forms the basis of the radical Islamist deconstructive notion that ‘real’ existence can transcend being and that therefore death should be valued if it disrupts the master-slave dialectic. To this end, both existence and death have a metaphorical meaning in radical Islamist discourse, logic that makes possible two related claims: (1) existence can transcend being; (2) death is a state of being. The former claim is based on a view of the self as inseparable from the collective, the ummah, and the latter claim forms the basis of the violent rejection of oppression and servitude. The philosophical basis of the radical Islamist promotion of martyrdom, I argue, may be further understood with reference to both Tolstoy’s Master and Man and the epic of Gilgamesh. In Tolstoy’s tale, as Mohammed Bamyeh points out, death for the master was the opposite of power not life, and so the master feared death since it meant his complete negation. This fear is not unlike the fear that had obsessed Gilgamesh, the semi-god cursed with mortality. Here, the only equalizer of power differentials between Gilgamesh and his subjects was a shared mortality. Radical Islamists promote martyrdom, I argue, with logic that echoes of the Tolstoyian satire and the irony in the epic of Gilgamesh. Here, the tenuous nature of the master’s mastery is exploited through dialectical reason that challenges the servitude of the self and the master’s mastery with logic that is both central and characteristic of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: the truth of the master is the slave. It is thus that self-destruction is promoted in radical Islamist discourse with reason that is empowering for the self, the Hegelian slave.