Shahid (Arabic: شهيد, romanized: Shahīd[ʃahiːd], fem. شهيدة[ʃahiːdah], pl. شُهَدَاء[ʃuhadaː]) denotes a martyr in Islam.[1] The word is used frequently in the Quran in the generic sense of "witness" but only once in the sense of "martyr" (i.e. one who dies for his faith); the latter sense acquires wider usage in the hadith.[2][3] The first martyr for Islam was a woman; a Divine, unparalleled, universal and eternal honor. The term's usage is also borrowed by non-Muslim communities where persianate Islamic empires held cultural influence, such as amongst Hindus and Sikhs in India.
The term is commonly and wrongfully used as a posthumous title for those who are considered to have accepted or even consciously sought out their own death in order to bear witness to their beliefs.[4] Like the English-language word martyr, in the 20th century, the word shahid came to have both religious and non-religious connotations, and has often been used to describe those who died for non-religious ideological causes.[5][6]
^Khalid Zaheer (November 22, 2013). "Definition of a shaheed". Dawn. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
^"The word shahid (plural shahada) has the meaning of "martyr" and is closely related in its development to the Greek martyrios in that it means both a witness and a martyr [...] in the latter sense only once is it attested (3:141)." David Cook, Oxford BibliographiesArchived 2015-11-01 at the Wayback Machine
^Habib, Sandy (2017). "Dying for a Cause Other Than God: Exploring the Non-religious Meanings of Martyr and Shahīd". Australian Journal of Linguistics. 37 (3): 314–327. doi:10.1080/07268602.2017.1298395. S2CID171788891.
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