Martyrdom means witness. Witness is the most powerful form of advertisement, because it communicates personal credibility and experience to an audience. Therefore, it is not surprising that the world's missionary religions have developed the art of the promotional martyrdom into a process that is identifiable and fairly constant through different faiths. Before dealing with the specific commonalities of Islamic martyrdom (Chapter 2) we will first examine the narrative progression that historically attested martyrs and stories of their martyrdoms have laid down for us: the portrayals of the enemy, the nature of the audience participation and subsequent commitment expected from it, and the form of the martyrdom narrative, which is the method of eternalizing the act and its pathos.