with such oppressors as tribulation, and death as
martyrdom.”
And there it was, out in the open: martyrdom—
shahadat—the destiny toward which Hussein had been
journeying, and that had been journeying toward him.
Shahadat is a word of subtle shadings, though as with
the double meaning of jihad, this may be hard to see
when the image of Islamic martyrdom is that of suicide
bombers so blinded by righteousness that they sacriɹce
not just their own lives but all sense of humanity. In
fact, while shahadat certainly means “self-sacriɹce,” it
also means “acting as a witness,” a double meaning that
originally existed in English too, since the word
“martyr” comes from the Greek for witness. This is why
the Islamic declaration of faith—the equivalent of the
Shema Israel or the Lord’s Prayer—is called the shahada,
the “testifying.” And it is this dual role of martyr and
witness that would inspire the leading intellectual
architect of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to utterly
redefine Hussein’s death as an act of liberation.
Ali Shariati is all but unknown in the West, yet for
years he was idolized in Iran on a par with the Ayatollah
Khomeini. He was not a cleric but a sociology professor
well versed in theology. Educated at the Sorbonne, he
was widely read in Western philosophy and literature
and had translated both Sartre and Fanon into Persian,