Editing Shahada (section)

==In Sufism==
The theme of martyrdom is also very important in Sufism. The Islamic world is adorned with thousands of shrines (sg., mashhad) to pious Muslims who have been regarded as martyrs (Björkman, Patton, and Arnold), though not all places known as mashhad claim to hold the remains of a bona fide martyr. (In Turkish, for example, meshed is a word for “cemetery” in general.) These tombs are the objects of special veneration and pilgrimage, the practice of which is traced to the Prophet himself, who is said to have visited the graves of the martyrs of the Battle of Uhud interred in al-Baqiʿ cemetery in Mecca to pay special homage to them. 

In Sufism, however, martyrdom acquires many of the same features associated with the type of the martyr-hero exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel accounts of the Passion, the most important example here being that of Hussain ibn Mansur al-Hallaj—whose act of martyrdom is frequently conflated with that of Hussain ibn ʿAli <ref>Chelkowski, p. 21.</ref> —who was crucified in Baghdad in the early tenth century and has been “kept alive” as an ideal of piety and spiritual valor not only in the Sufi tradition but in aspects of wider Islamic culture as well (Massignon).

But there have been many others, including his son Mansur ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, Suhrawardi al-Maqtul of Aleppo (d. 1191), ʿAyn al-Quzat Hamadani, ʿAbd al-Haqq Ibn Sabʿin in Spain, and Sarmad in Mughal India, to name only a few of the most famous. Even at the time of Hallaj's crucifixion, visitation to the tombs of martyrs was such a firmly established practice that Hallaj's remains were cremated and the ashes scattered on the Euphrates so that no tomb to him could be erected which might then become the object of a cult. The recent study of the fourteenth-century Indian Sufi martyr Masʿud Beg (Ernst) shows the literary process involved in the acknowledgment of a saint as also a martyr.