Shaheed Practice in Islam and Shaheedism in the Contemporary World

Due to the lack of rational understanding, the religious phenomena shaheed, shaheed practice, shaheedism still remain mysterious. They are often used by radical Islamists and agents of interna-tional terrorism as religious justification for murderous attacks carried out by suicide bombers. In the article, the essence of shaheed practice is derived from the fact that a Muslim becomes a shaheed in order to exchange his earthly life for eternal existence on the path of jihad as a means of strengthen-ing faith in the One Allah in himself and in other people. At the same time, it is important that only the Muslim who, under specific conditions, by objective necessity, is ready to sacrifice his life for the sake of his faith, can claim the status of a martyr. Death in pursuit of worldly blessings or sui-cide as an arbitrary act that corrects the predetermined individual destiny of a person and is a crimi-nal refusal to obey the will of the Almighty, does not turn the one, who left the earthly world, into a shaheed of Islam. The author also denies the identity of Islamic shaheed practice with shaheedism as its transformed form. Such identification is a result of a deliberate transformation of a religious phe-nomenon into a means of solving current military-political problems and a manifestation of the ide-ology of justifying terrorism and the suicidal behavior of individual believers.