TP Arbaeen Night Three: The Grades of Witness
You do not have to die to be a witness — but you must be willing to.
Arbaeen Program, – The thirteenth session of Truth Promoters’ Shahada (Witness) series took up on Saturday the seed planted the night before, and grew it into the most practical question the whole series has asked.
If shahada means witness, and every believer is summoned to bear it, then the witness of the battlefield cannot be the only kind — because almost no one listening will ever stand on a battlefield. If that were the only door, the door would be shut to nearly everyone, and the call would be a cruelty.
So the evening asked, plainly: how many kinds of witness are there? And it answered from our own jurisprudence, which has mapped the question with a precision most believers have never been shown.
Through Quranic recitation, poetic reflection, a lecture by Sheikh Shabbir Hassanally, maqtal narration, lamentation and Ziyarat Arbaeen, the session argued a single freeing and demanding sentence — one half throwing the gate open, the other half keeping it from becoming cheap.
Quran and Poetic Reflection
The evening’s recitation framed a night given over to the reckoning of ranks — that God does not waste the reward of those who strive, and that those slain in His way are not to be counted among the dead.
The accompanying reflection, The Wide Gate, gave the session its title image and its argument in miniature:
“We have long mistaken The Witness only for the wound. We searched among bloodstained fields, counted swords, measured sacrifice by the noise history made when someone fell. But Heaven was never keeping the same record.”
It set three figures side by side — one who stood before a tyrant, one who never opened her eyes long enough to choose, and one who rose before dawn for forty ordinary years and died with no army at his side — and named what they share:
“It was never death that made them witnesses. It was the life already speaking long before death interrupted the sentence. History asks, ‘How did they die?’ The heavens ask, ‘How did they live?’”
The Word That Widened
The lecture opened with a piece of honesty that set its method for the evening.
There is a saying often heard from our pulpits — that the ink of the scholar is heavier on the scales than the blood of the martyr. Sheikh Shabbir Hassanally declined to build on it, noting that the scholars of hadith have long graded it da’eef, weak. The point was made without ceremony: the true does not need the weak to carry it, and the evening would prove it.
What followed was the actual evidence, and it was considerable. From the soundest Sunni collections, the Prophet (S) is recorded naming five martyrs beyond the one slain in God’s way — the one who dies of plague, of a wasting sickness of the belly, by drowning, beneath a collapsing building. In the fuller narration from Jabir ibn Atik, the count is seven, adding death by fire, by pleurisy, and the woman who dies in childbirth. Our own tradition holds the same teaching in the words of the Imams (AS): whoever is killed defending his property is a martyr, with al-Kafi adding family, faith, and life itself.
Then the proof at the centre of the House. From Imam Musa al-Kazim (AS), in a narration in al-Kafi graded sahih by Allamah al-Majlisi in Mir’at al-Uqul:
“Verily Fatimah, peace be upon her, is a truthful one, a martyr — siddiqa shaheeda.”
Sayyidah Fatimah al-Zahra (AS) never stood on a battlefield. She died in her own home, of an injury done to her in her own home. And the seventh Imam (AS) names her, without qualification, a martyr — a matter al-Majlisi describes as among the mutawatirat, transmitted so continuously as to be beyond doubt.
The lecture drew out how the word can reach that far, citing al-Mulla Muhammad Salih al-Mazandarani’s commentary on al-Kafi: the martyr is the one slain on the battlefield of a fighting commanded by the Sacred Law — then the term widened, and was applied to everyone killed unjustly, such as Fatimah (AS).
“Thumma ittasa’a. Then the term widened. It reaches out past the edge of the battlefield and gathers in everyone struck down unjustly, until it can hold the daughter of the Prophet, struck in her own doorway.”
The mechanism was completed from Allamah Tabataba’i’s al-Mizan, which explains that witnessing over deeds is not restricted to human witnesses at all — the angels, time, place, the Book, the limbs, the senses and the heart all bear a witnessing. Which opens two voices of shahada: the active witness, who stands and testifies and chooses; and the conferred witness, whom God makes a witness, whose very blood testifies. Sayyidah Fatimah (AS) needed no sword to be a witness in the second voice.
Two Doors, and Who Walks Through
The lecture then laid two maps over one another.
The philosopher’s map came from Shaheed Mutahhari, whose five kinds of death carried the third night of Muharram: natural death, accidental death, criminal death, self-murder, and martyrdom. Only the fifth carries the halo, and Mutahhari’s definition is exacting — the death of one who, fully conscious of the risks involved, willingly faces them for the sake of a sacred cause. Two elements: the life given for a cause, and the giving done consciously.
The lecture did not soften Mutahhari’s hardest corollary — that if Imam Husain (AS) were merely an innocent man wronged, he could not have been called a martyr, let alone the Doyen of the Martyrs. It flagged this as a wall that would appear to block the road later in the evening, and promised to find the door in it rather than knock it down.
The jurist’s map asked a more physical question: is the martyr’s body washed and shrouded, or not? And on that single question our jurisprudence splits the martyr in two.
The first is al-shaheed al-haqeeqi, the martyr of the battlefield. Citing al-Shaheed al-Awwal’s al-Lum’a al-Dimashqiyya with al-Shaheed al-Thani’s commentary, the lecture set out the ruling that our school holds almost alone: he is neither washed nor shrouded, but buried in the clothes he fell in, with his own blood upon him — because his blood is his purity, and one does not cleanse a martyr of the one thing on his body that testifies for him. Al-Shaheed al-Thani’s reason was quoted in full:
“The rest is left upon him as an honour to him — and so that it may bear witness for him on the Day of Resurrection.”
The lecture was precise about the limits, citing Ayatullah al-Khoei and Ayatullah al-Sistani’s Minhaj al-Salihin and Imam Khomeini’s Tahrir al-Wasilah on the condition of ramaq — the lingering spark: the dispensation belongs only to the one whose soul departs on the field itself. And it noted what our jurists insist upon even so: the funeral prayer is still prayed. The washing was lifted; the prayer never was.
“He is so honoured that we will not wash the blood from him — and so beloved that we will not let him go into the earth without the whole community standing over him in prayer. The honour is doubled.”
The second is al-shaheed al-hukmi, the martyr of the Hereafter — washed, shrouded, given every ordinary rite of every ordinary believer, and given the full reward of a martyr.
The lecture pressed the point that the human heart will resist: the washing is not a demotion. It is the ordinary dignity of a believer returning to God in purity, and God adds to it, unseen, the rank the eye cannot see. The glory is hidden in the soul, not written on the skin.
And it read the roll the Imams (AS) themselves recited — the plague-stricken, the drowned, the one crushed beneath a building, the one killed unjustly, the woman who dies in childbirth, the one killed defending family or property or faith, the murabit at his post, the stranger who dies far from home, and sweetest of all, the one who dies upon the love of the Family of Muhammad (S).
“Look hard at that list. There is not one battlefield in the whole of it. And every single one of them is a shaheed, in full reward.”
That last station drew a warning. The love that confers the rank, the lecture insisted, is not a warm feeling or a claim on the tongue. Citing Surah Aal Imran (chapter 3, The Family of Imran, Verse 31) — if you truly love God, then follow me — and Imam al-Baqir’s (AS) rebuke to Jabir in al-Kafi: is it enough that he should merely say “I love the Ahl al-Bayt”? By God, none are our true followers except whoever is mindful of God and obeys Him. The widest gate of all is open to everyone, and free to no one.
The lecture closed the section on the jurists’ own technical grammar. When the hadith calls the drowned man or the woman in childbirth a shaheed, this is tanzeel — a true elevation, a real conferring of rank and reward by God, and not a change in the law of burial. And our jurists explicitly refuse to extend the ritual exemption by qiyas, holding it exactly at qadr al-mutayaqqan, the limit of certainty.
“The fiqh itself drew the wide gate. It marked the narrow door the battlefield, and it set Imam Husain at the summit of it. And then it drew a second door, an enormous one, and wrote over the arch, in effect: all reward; no battlefield required.”
The Scholar Who Chose His Field
The first of three figures brought through the wide gate was the one who chose a field with no sword on it.
Citing Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq’s (AS) hadith that the scholars of our Shia are the murabitoun stationed at the frontier that faces Iblis, and Imam Musa al-Kazim’s (AS) that the believing scholars are the fortresses of Islam as a city’s wall is a fortress for it, the lecture identified the desk, the lectern and the pen as a frontier — and the one who keeps that post, knowing what it can cost, as a witness who chose his field.
It was then precise about which door they walk through, citing Imam Khamenei’s Ajwibat al-Istiftaaat on the ritual exemption: it belongs to the one killed in battle under the Infallible Imam (AS) or, in the age of occultation, under the command of the Wali al-Faqih. The scholar shot at a lectern is therefore washed and shrouded like any believer — and his station as a martyr of the Hereafter is held entire.
“They are the living proof that the witness-station is won where no army ever marched. The assassin’s bullet was their injustice, and the desk was their field.”
The roll was read, and read deliberately: Shaheed Murtadha Mutahhari, shot in a Tehran street in May 1979 by men who could not answer his pen; Ayatullah Muhammad Mufatteh, gunned down in December 1979 on the steps of his own faculty for the work of building a bridge between the seminary and the university — and whose murder-day the Islamic Republic named the Day of Unity between the Seminaries and the Universities, turning the date of his killing into the festival of the very thing he died building; Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Husaini Beheshti, killed with more than seventy others in the bombing of June 1981, remembered ever since by a nation as the seventy-two, a number no Shia heart anywhere needs explained; Ayatullah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Sayyidah Bint al-Huda, taken together in Najaf in April 1980, tortured and killed — a brother and a sister martyred side by side for the same truth; and Ayatullah Sayyid Hassan al-Shirazi, shot in Beirut in May 1980 on his way to the memorial gathering for al-Sadr, killed in the very act of mourning a martyr.
The lecture’s emphasis fell on the one thing they held in common: none of them was conscripted. Each chose the post, knowing what was happening to scholars in the streets of that country, and got up the next morning and chose it again.
The Ones Who Could Not Choose
The evening then turned to its hardest question, and the one the room was already carrying.
The child at her desk. The teacher at the board. The family asleep under a shelter. They chose nothing. So what are they — given that Mutahhari himself described the one killed in another’s cruelty as shocking and pitiable, but neither praiseworthy nor a matter of pride?
The lecture gave three answers, and took the first from inside the House itself.
Ali al-Asghar (AS) was six months old. He could not hold up his own head, let alone weigh a risk or choose a cause. And there is not a Muslim alive who would call him anything but a shaheed of the highest rank. From which the lecture drew the resolution: Mutahhari’s condition is the bar for the one who is able to choose. It was never a wall against the one who cannot. Mutahhari describes the active witness; the infant is a witness in the conferred voice — and God does not require an infant’s consent to make that infant His witness.
“If the infant of Karbala is a martyr without choosing, then the infant of Gaza is a martyr without choosing, and the child of Minab is a martyr without choosing.”
The second answer was the widening of the word already established — everyone killed unjustly, al-maqtool zulman, a named category of the jurists sitting in the roll beside the woman of childbirth and the frontier-guard. The child’s rank is not an open question to be won by argument; the jurists answered it centuries before the bomb was forged.
The third came from the Quran itself. Surah al-Nisa (chapter 4, The Women, Verse 75) names the oppressed among the men, the women, and the children — God Himself naming the children, and calling them not regrettable losses but the very cause the believer is commanded to fight for. Surah al-Isra (Chapter 17, The Children of Israel, Verse 33) binds an unbreakable promise to the one killed wronged: God stands as the authority behind that spilt blood.
The lecture drew the distinction that answers the most stubborn form of the objection — the difference between a man stabbed in an alley for the coins in his coat and a child killed in a school. The first is a private cruelty for a private greed; the second is a collective assault aimed at a whole people, which places the child, by the very structure of the event, among the mustad’afoon God commands the believer to defend.
The lecture then brought this out of abstraction, naming the school at Minab and what the lecture described as a double-tap strike: a first missile, the surviving children moved by their teachers into the prayer hall, the principal telephoning parents to come — and a second missile into the prayer hall as the parents arrived. It gave the number as one hundred and sixty-eight children, and let the survivors speak: a father who could identify his daughter only by the school bag she was still holding; an eleven-year-old who, asked what she remembered of the morning, said only before the bomb hit, we had Qur’an classes; and a teacher, Zohreh Shahriyari, six months pregnant — the age of Ali al-Asghar (AS).
The lecture cited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the strike, and set his phrase — who pays the highest price for war: civilians, with no power in the decisions that led to the conflict — directly against the Quranic word mustad’afoon, noting that a diplomat had arrived at the verse without reading it.
It then set that against what the responsible power said afterwards: that mistakes are made, that war is nasty, that nobody did that on purpose. And it placed the pattern in a longer line — the systematic destruction of schooling in Gaza that the UN has named scholasticide; Human Rights Watch’s finding on the strike at the Khadija girls’ school in Deir al-Balah; the shelling of the UN compound at Qana in 1996, where a hundred and six sheltering civilians were killed, more than half of them children, and which a UN inquiry found deliberate; and the destruction of the Kunduz hospital in 2015.
All of which converged on a single word, which the lecture identified as the counterfeit the whole series exists to expose.
“When the powers of this age kill a school full of children, they have a word ready for those children. They call them collateral damage. In the law of God, there is no such category.”
Surah al-Ma’idah (chapter 5, The Table Spread, Verse 32) was cited as the answer — that whoever kills a single soul unjustly, it is as though he had killed the whole of mankind — with Allamah Tabataba’i’s commentary that this meaning attaches to every killing within the human species, restricted to none.
“The empire built a word to make one child weigh nothing. God revealed a verse to make one child weigh everything.”
The lecture was careful to name where the cry falls and where it does not: against the dhulm, never against a people. The American mother who buried her son; the citizen whose schools are starved while bombs are shipped in his name; the Jewish child raised to fear his neighbour — these are not the enemy. The witness against a regime is, in the same breath, the witness for the peoples that regime consumes.
The Witness of an Ordinary Life
The third figure through the wide gate is the one most of those listening will actually turn out to be — not the scholar at the frontier of ideas, and, God protect every child, not the little one under the bomb. Simply a believer who got up in the dark, went out to earn honestly, lived a clean life, and one ordinary day did not come home.
The narrations the lecture assembled here were, it argued, more generous than most believers have ever been told. From Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (AS) in al-Kafi: the one who toils for his family is like the mujahid in the way of God. From Imam al-Rida (AS): such a man has a greater reward than the mujahid. From the Prophet (S) in Mustadrak al-Wasa’il: whoever seeks the things of this world lawfully, in dignity and restraint, is in the rank of the martyrs. And in Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, an image almost unbearable in its vividness — the one who toils for his family is like the one drenched in his own blood in the way of God.
“The very picture of the man fallen at Karbala, laid by the tongue of the Prophet over a weary father walking home from a day’s lawful work.”
The lecture then identified what makes this witness structurally different from the other two. The battlefield martyr’s death is his testimony. The wronged child’s death is her testimony. But the honest worker’s testimony is not his death at all — it is his life, and his death only seals it. And what did his life testify to? One quiet, unglamorous thing, said every morning for forty or fifty years: I will feed my family by what is lawful, because my God asked it of me — including on the days when the unlawful was easier and no one would ever have known.
That opened the conditions, and the lecture did not soften them. Lawful does not mean legal. A wage drawn from the grinding of the poor, from a weapon that tears children apart, from a hungry people’s need, or from the service of a regime that murders the innocent is not the honest living the Prophet (saw) crowned, though every ledger on earth call it lawful.
And the oldest excuse of the complicit was named directly: if I do not do it, someone else will — the sentence the looters of Karbala told themselves as they raced one another to the tents. A sin you commit because another stood ready to commit it in your place is still, wholly and only, your sin.
The standard was set from the household itself, which never held labour beneath it — the Prophet (S) earning in trade, Imam Ali (AS) gathering firewood and drawing water, Sayyidah Fatimah (AS) grinding and kneading and baking. And the exactness of the standard was set by the narration of Musadif, whom Imam al-Sadiq (AS) sent to Egypt with a thousand dinars, and who returned delighted with a profit equal to the capital — earned by a traders’ pact to double prices on a people in scarcity. The Imam (AS) took back only his own purse and pushed the profit away untouched:
“O Musadif — crossing swords is easier than seeking the lawful.”
By the market’s arithmetic it was a perfectly legal trade. To the Imam (AS) it was no lawful gain at all. The lecture drew the conclusion for our own age — the false scholar whose tongue is bought before he mounts the pulpit, the whitewashing donation laid neatly over an unclean gain — and offered the remedy in the Prophet’s own words from al-Kafi: worship is seventy parts, and the best of them is the seeking of the lawful livelihood. Earn your own bread, and no regime owns your tongue.
The section closed with Imam al-Rida (AS) at Nishapur — the Golden Chain, and its condition. Even La ilaha illa Allah is a fortress entered only bi-shurutiha, by its conditions. So too the wage, and so too the work.
The lecture also placed here the Martyrs of Service — Ayatullah Sayyid Ebrahim Raisi and the seven who fell with him in May 2024, returning from the opening of a dam. It stated openly that no proof of foul play was found, and that the believers did not name them martyrs by how they died but by what they were doing when they died: serving. The grade was never in the manner of the dying. It was in the life of service that the dying only sealed.
And it noted that the teacher at Minab gathered all three faces of the witness into one woman in one instant — the one who chose her post, the one in the rank of al-nufasaa, and the one struck down wronged.
A Child in the Dungeon
The evening’s maqtal, narrated in the voice of Imam al-Mahdi (AJ), placed beside the candle the smallest object of the series: a child’s broken bead, and a bangle thin enough for a wrist that never finished growing.
Before the narration began, it did something the series has done consistently and did here with particular tenderness: it told the truth about the record. The books could not agree on her name; the name she is known by now settled on her only after long centuries of love. They could not agree on her age. The earliest histories, busy counting men and swords, did not pause over a small girl dying of grief in a ruin, and her story reaches us mostly through the books of mourning. Scholars who have loved her have said, honestly, and God knows best.
And then, in the Imam’s (AJ) own voice, the answer to that honesty:
“I do not need a chronicler to remember the children of my own house. I do not learn my family from a manuscript.”
The narration carried the road to Sham and what a child understands of it — a child does not understand politics; a child understands that her father used to lift her up, and now he does not. It carried the gentle lies the women of the ruin gave her to keep her father alive a few more nights. It carried the dream she woke from, calling for him. And it carried what was brought to the cell with deliberate restraint, dwelling not on the cruelty but on the child.
“He let the little one lay her grief down early, in her father’s arms — the only place she had ever wanted to lay anything down. That is not the empire’s mercy. The empire had none. That is His.”
The maqtal then made the theological turn the whole night had prepared, naming her a shaheedah — and identifying the thinness of the record not as a weakness in the claim but as the proof of it:
“The world barely wrote her down. The historians who counted the soldiers did not count her. And none of that touched her station by so much as a hair. God keeps the witness the record forgot. She is the smallest proof, and the surest.”
It gathered her cousins around her — the infant at the river, the unborn child carried into a prayer hall in a southern town earlier this year, the children of Gaza and Lebanon and every place where a roof became a grave — and drew the distinction the series has insisted on throughout:
“She is not a victim. She was wronged — God knows she was wronged — but she was not overcome. The empire that broke her heart is dust and a curse in the mouths of the living. And her name is on the lips of a hundred million people who were not even born when she died. Tell me which of them won.”
Lamentation and Ziyarat Arbaeen
The evening’s lamentation, Abaya of Tears, carried the grief of the women of the House through the captivity — and, on the night given to the smallest witness, the grief of a mother with nothing left to wrap but sorrow.
The programme concluded with the poetic English rendering of Ziyarat Arbaeen.
Taken together, the evening argued that the register of witness is far wider than our preaching usually allows, and that the widening is not sentiment but jurisprudence — drawn by the jurists themselves, held with a jeweller’s exactness, and refused expansion by analogy precisely so that it would mean something.
Two doors, then. One narrow, drenched in blood, leading out across an open field, with Imam Husain (AS) at its summit. And one enormous, marked the Hereafter, through which the scholar and the mother and the honest worker and the wronged child all walk, and not one of them died in a war, and every one of them is a witness entire.
Which leaves the sentence the evening set out to earn, standing on both its feet: you do not have to die to be a witness — but you must be willing to. The willingness is the part that is ours. God did not ask the infant of Karbala for his willingness and will not ask the child of Minab for hers; for those who cannot choose, the grade is pure gift. But those who can choose are asked — and the question is not whether we will certainly be killed, but whether there is a line we would actually hold, a truth we would not sell, a forbidden coin we would leave on the table in the dark where no one will ever know.