What is a Hero

What exactly qualifies a person to be a hero. One definition that has been used to define a hero is an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. By this definition a basketball player making a 3 point shot at the buzzer to win game 7 of an NBA finals is in the same category as a firefighter who risks his life to pull a child out of a burning home. They both are normal people who showed courage and did extraordinary things when they needed to. Yet we know that risking your life and risking a missed free throw are two completely different things. The point is that we define a hero based on different criteria.

The criteria that we will use to define a Muslim hero is one who showed exceptional courage for the cause of Islam. Who went out of their way to do unselfish things in the name of Islam. Who sacrificed themselves to ensure that other Muslims would be better off in the future. One does not necessarily need to have fought on the battlefield to be a Muslim hero, but those who have fought deserve to be in a category by themselves to ensure there is no unfair comparisons between them and those who showed courage in different ways. I will attempt to post as many Muslim heroes that I can using information already available and hopefully explaining and interpreting the actions of these heroes so that the Muslim youth of today will be able to read about these throwbacks and be inspired by them.