Shaheed (Martyr): Difference between revisions

The word شَهيد "shahid" in Arabic is derived from the tri-lateral Arabic root ش-ه--د sh-h-d, and the most basic verb which can be derived from this root is شهد "shahada" with a meaning "to witness" (other verbal derivations of the same root include the meaning of seeing or watching). The Muslim declaration of faith is the شهادة "shahaada" "witness, testimony (also degree or certification)" and goes أشهد ان لا إله إلا الله ومحمد رسول الله "I (bear) witness(ashhadu) that there is no god but God(Allah) and that Muhammad is the apostle of God." A "shahid" is thus literally a "witness." The meaning, though, is someone who dies for their faith (in Islam, although in contemporary Arabic media any Arab or Muslim who dies an innocent or for any cause deemed worthy, is often referred to as a "shahid", and the word is also used by Christian Arabs for their own martyrs). The use of "witness" to mean someone who dies for their faith goes back to Greek Christian idiom from the days of the persecutions of Christians by the Roman Empire. Under numerous Roman Emperors such as Decius the mere act of being a Christian and refusing to sacrifice to Roman gods and/or the cult of the emperor was viewed as sedition and perversion, and Christians were on these grounds persecuted with imprisonment and execution by the Roman state. Under the Roman system citizens and many subjects even when accused of such a crime viewed as vile were entitled to a procedural trial. Those Christians who were called to trial for the crime of following their faith would be made to give witness (testimony) on their own behalf as to whether or not they were a Christian, and the strongest of conviction amongst them would openly declare their faith at the trial, thus sealing their fate to be executed by the state. So in this manner the Greek word μάρτυς "martys", a witness at a trial, came to mean a believer who is willing to die for their faith, and it is from this Greek word that English and other European languages get the word "martyr." In calling those who die for the faith "witnesses" the nascent proto-Islamic and later Islamic movement was burrowing a Greek Christian idiom which was by the time of prophet hundreds of years old.  

{{Quote|1=[http://www.deathreference.com/Ke-Ma/Martyrs.html Martyrs]<BR>Lacey Baldwin Smith, Encyclopedia of Death and Dying|2=An Athenian jury ordered that Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.), the Western world's first recorded martyr, die by poison (the hemlock cup) when he refused to give up his dangerously public insistence that all men and women possessed souls, which knew the difference between good and evil, and were obliged to question historic and religious authority so as to discover the truth for themselves.}}