The Phenomenon of Martyrdom in Islam

Despite the importance of martyrdom as a religious driving force, it remains a poorly studied phenomenon both in theology and in academic religious studies, and this is especially true of mar-tyrdom in Islam. The uncritical transfer of Christian understanding of martyrdom to Islam leads many researchers to the depiction of martyrs of faith as martyrs of Islam and, as a result, to declar-ing everyone who meets a painful death in a variety of life circumstances a martyr of jihad, one-sidedly interpreted as a holy war waged by Muslims against the rest of the world. This study shows that, as distinct from Christianity, in the Islamic religion, due to the peculiarities of its doctrine and the specific historical circumstances of its approval and spread, the perception of martyrdom did not develop, and the worship of martyrs does not exist. Moreover, Islamic martyrdom, in a number of its characteristics, differs significantly from the Christian worship of matyrdom established through the centuries when Christianity was a persecuted religion. Islam went through a similar period in a little over a decade and turned into an offensive a religion that requires from its followers not just to passively adapt to circumstances, but to actively promote the values of the new religion around the world. The author also establishes a fundamental incompatibility of the suicidal behavior of terror-ists, declared by individual researchers and religious authorities as martyrs of the faith, with the fun-damental values of Islamic religion.