Among the teeming and terrified crowd of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January 2011, a young man and an older man crouched huddled next to each other as bullets from the security services whizzed overhead.

In the din, the two spoke of how the Prophet Muhammad had once declared that whoever dies speaking truth to a tyrant will die a martyr.[1] They spoke of the great martyrs of the Prophet’s day, who awaited those latter-day believers who would one day join them in Paradise. Seized by inspiration, the young man cried, “I will greet them for you,” stood up and was shot in the head. “I touched his blood with my hands,” the elder man, a famous Muslim preacher, it turns out, recounted later in a TV interview, “It smelled like perfumed musk.”[2]

Notes

[1] Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: “The master of the martyrs is Hamza ibn Abdul Mattalib, and a man who stands (in front of) an oppressive ruler and enjoins the good and forbids the evil and so is killed for it.” (Hakim)

[2] Jonathan Brown, ‘Misquoting Muhammad’, p.1