Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

266 t CHAPTER TEN
thought to be “in heaven,” as the Christian would put it, or “in
Paradise,” as a Muslim would prefer to think of it.
The mistreatment of the Muslims at Mecca appears to have
claimed no lives, but once it was revealed that forceful resistance
to forceful oppression was legitimate for a Muslim (22:39–40),
there began to be Muslim “witnesses” (shuhada; sing. shahid), believers
who shed their blood or gave their lives for their faith. It is
in that very political context that the Quran addresses the issue,
after the Medina Muslims had suffered a reversal at arms and several
had died. There were those who were against the resistance to
the Quraysh—the Quran calls them hypocrites—and who mocked
those who had died in the fighting. “Do not think of those who
were slain in the way of God as dead,” the Quran says at that
point. “No, they are alive and have provision with their Lord”
(3:169; cf. 2:154), which was taken to mean that they were with
God in Paradise. The Book goes on: “Those they have left behind,
who have not yet joined them in their bliss, (the martyrs) glory in
the fact that they have no fear nor cause to grieve.”
There are differences between the Christian and Muslim attitudes
toward martyrdom, however. Christian martyrdom was an
act of personal heroism, whereas its Muslim counterpart, however
personal and however heroic, was a political act, that is, it occurred
in the context of what the Muslim jurists were already defining
as a holy war (jihad). The Muslim martyr was also of necessity
a mujahid, a holy warrior. The second difference was in the
recognition granted the martyr. In Christianity both the recognition
and the acknowledgment of the martyr quickly became, like
many other things in the Church, highly formalized. The Christian
martyrs were exemplars, of course, but chiefly during the great
persecutions, and once the persecutions were suspended, then
abolished, Christian exemplarism shifted quickly to the “confessors,”
the men and women who “witnessed” to their faith by a
lifetime of virtue. The martyrs meanwhile became more simply
saints, the blessed in heaven whose intercessory powers rather
than whose heavenly joys—which tend to be highly spiritualized
in Christianity in any event—became the focus of the cult. There
was no suspension of persecution in Islam. Those who resisted