The development of The Qur’anic idea “al-Shahid” from Court Witness to the Martyr: Quranic background for the formation of the concept

Subject Areas : -

Ashraf Montazeri ¹ , Hamed Khani (Farhang Mehrvash) ²

1 - Ph. D. Student in Quran and Hadith Studies, Gorgan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran.
2 - Associated Professor in Islamic Theology, Gorgan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran.

Received: 2020-01-21 Accepted : 2020-02-17 Published : 2020-01-21

Keywords: Resurrection, martyrs, Death in the way of God, God’s Path, the History of Court Cases, the History of the concept of Martyrdom, the History of Quranic Concepts,

Abstract :

The formation of Islam, like all other great and historic movements, was owed to many sacrifices. Thus, from its earliest days, selfless death was considered an important value for the advancement of the sacred ideal. The metaphor of "death in the way of God" was used in the Qur'an to refer to this death; A Metaphor that lost its widespread use to indicate this meaning in favor of another meaning, and from the distant past whose exact time we do not yet know, the term of "martyrdom or Shahadah" took its place; The term in the post-Qur'anic Arabic language means to testify in court cases, and most of its Qur'anic uses are translated in the same sense. It is not easy to see the similarities between self-sacrificing death and the testifying which caused the use of this metaphor, we also do not know the period in which such replacement took place, and the steps that led to the application of such a term for sacred death. Searching for the applications of the interpretation of the martyr and his family in the Qur'an from a critical point of view and understanding the meaning of the Qur'anic “Shahadah” to analyze the causes and elements and grounds for establishing the mentioned replacement is the subject of this study.