Psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed students film of a car crash in 1974. Then they asked how fast the cars were going. The only difference was one word. Asked how fast they were going when they ‘smashed’ into each other, students guessed about 41 miles an hour. Asked about when they ‘hit’, they guessed about 34. A week later, many in the ‘smashed’ group remembered broken glass. There had been none.
Ash-Shahīd is the Witness: the One who is present to everything, and sees and knows it exactly as it happened. In people, the same Arabic word also means a martyr, and the word for faith's declaration, the shahādah, means ‘bearing witness’. Even the best witnesses we know fail somewhere.
Start with what we know
Start with something we know. Then take away everything it needs. What is left is not a bigger version of us: it is the Name.
Episode 1
In us
Loftus spent the next fifty years showing how memory changes. Our recollections are not recordings; we rebuild them each time we remember, and words, questions and time can quietly change them (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). Since then, DNA evidence has cleared many people who were convicted mainly on the word of honest, confident eyewitnesses who were simply wrong. A truthful witness who speaks up at a cost is one of the bravest things a person can be. But even the most honest human witness sees from one place and remembers imperfectly.
Episode 2
In nature
In 1998, researchers in Cambridge showed that western scrub jays remember not just where they hid food, but what they hid and when. Given worms that rot quickly and peanuts that keep, the birds went first for the worms if little time had passed. Once the worms would have spoiled, they switched to the peanuts (Clayton and Dickinson, Nature, 1998). It was the first clear evidence of what-where-when memory in an animal. But the jays remember only their own hiding places, for a few days, for their own meals.
Episode 3
At our best
At Dome C in Antarctica, scientists drilled an ice core more than 3 kilometres deep. Its bubbles hold tiny samples of air from up to 800,000 years ago, a frozen witness to Earth's past climate (British Antarctic Survey, EPICA). A new project has since drilled even older ice. It is one of the most faithful records we have ever read. Yet the deepest layers are squeezed thin and blurred, some years are lost entirely, and we read only what the ice happened to keep. And no ice core can witness a single human intention.
Episode 4
The Break
Allow for the memory that rebuilds itself, the one point of view, the bird's few days, the blurred layers of ice. Every witness we know sees part of what happened, from outside, and forgets. Ash-Shahīd is present to every event as it truly is, and forgets nothing. “We shall show them Our portents on the horizons and within themselves until it will be manifest unto them that it is the Truth. Doth not thy Lord suffice, since He is Witness over all things?” (Qur'an 41:53, Pickthall).
From the tradition: Classical: ash-Shahīd is present to everything, nothing absent from Him. Genesis 31:50 'it is God who will be witness between you and me'
On screen
In Rashomon every witness tells it differently. Ash-Shahīd's witness is the one account no one forgot.
In the year 632, a few months before he died, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) made his only pilgrimage. On the plain of ʿArafah, outside Mecca, he spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands.
He told them that their lives, their property and their honour were sacred to one another, as sacred as that day, that month and that place. He told them that debts from the old days of feuds and interest were cancelled, beginning with his own family's. He told them to treat women well, for they had rights over men as men had over them.
After each part, he asked: “Have I conveyed the message?” And the crowd answered: “Yes.”
Then he raised his finger towards the sky and pointed it towards the people, and said three times: “O God, bear witness. O God, bear witness. O God, bear witness” (Muslim 1218; Bukhari 1739).
He had made the people witnesses, and God the Witness over all of them. In Islam, every person who says the shahādah, “I bear witness that there is no god but God”, takes up that same role: to be a witness to the truth, in how they live.
What each faith says
Read:
Judaism
“If thou shalt afflict my daughters, and if thou shalt take wives beside my daughters, no man being with us; see, God is witness betwixt me and thee.”
When Jacob and his father-in-law Laban parted after years of mistrust, they built a heap of stones. They called it Mizpah, ‘watchtower’, saying that God would be witness between them when they were out of each other's sight.
Jewish law takes witnessing very seriously: the Ten Commandments forbid false witness (Exodus 20:13 in Hebrew numbering), and courts needed two witnesses. The Shema, said morning and evening, is itself a kind of testimony; in the Torah scroll, two of its letters are written large to spell ʿed, ‘witness’.
On Rosh Hashanah, a whole section of prayer called Zikhronot, ‘Remembrances’, praises God who remembers everything that has been forgotten.
Christianity
“For God is my witness, whom I serve in my spirit in the Good News of his Son, how unceasingly I make mention of you always in my prayers”
Paul often called on God as his witness that he was telling the truth. The English word ‘martyr’ comes from the Greek martys, which simply means ‘witness’: the first Christian martyrs were people who would not stop bearing witness.
The letter to the Hebrews pictures all the faithful who have gone before as “a great cloud of witnesses” surrounding believers (12:1).
In many churches, people stand to say the Creed, from the Latin credo, ‘I believe’, as a public witness to their faith. Quakers call their lifelong commitments to truth, peace, simplicity and equality ‘testimonies’.
Islam
“On the day when Allah will raise them all together and inform them of what they did. Allah hath kept account of it while they forgot it. And Allah is Witness over all things.”
Ash-Shahīd appears about twenty times in the Qur'an, often in the phrase “Lo! those who believe (this revelation), and those who are Jews, and the Sabaeans and the Christians and the Magians and the idolaters - Lo! Allah will decide between them on the Day of Resurrection. Lo! Allah is Witness over all things.” (22:17, Pickthall (1930); 58:6). Classical scholars said it means God is present to everything; nothing is absent from Him. The Qur'an says: “On the day when Allah will raise them all together and inform them of what they did. Allah hath kept account of it while they forgot it. And Allah is Witness over all things.” (58:6, Pickthall).
In people, shahīd also means martyr. Muslim scholars stress that it is a word for someone who dies wrongfully while being faithful, not a word for violence. According to several hadith, it includes those who die of illness, by drowning or in childbirth. The shahādah, the declaration of faith, is the heart of the same root: to witness.
Same and different
All three faiths call on God as the true witness when no one else sees. All three treat bearing witness to the truth as a sacred duty and forbid false witness. Strikingly, both Greek (martys) and Arabic (shahīd) use the word for ‘witness’ for those who die faithfully. Judaism writes ‘witness’ into the letters of the Shema; Christianity speaks of a cloud of witnesses; Islam makes the shahādah its first pillar. They differ in what they witness to, but agree that God sees what we forget.
A moment to reflect
Have you ever remembered something confidently and been wrong?
What truth would you be willing to stand up and witness to, even if it cost you?
Does the idea that nothing true is ever lost, even what you forget, comfort you or unsettle you?
Watch
Elizabeth Loftus at TED: how reliable is your memory? The ‘In us’ rung.
The British Antarctic Survey on Antarctica's most ancient ice core record: the ‘At our best’ rung.
Do it together
schools / familiesThe witness game
Show a short, ordinary video clip. A week later, ask everyone the same questions, but use ‘smashed’ for half and ‘hit’ for the other half. Compare answers, then talk about why courts, scientists and faiths care so much about honest witness.
faith groups / neighboursMizpah stones
After a disagreement has been resolved, or at the start of a new partnership, each person brings a small stone to make a little cairn in a garden or pot. Read Genesis 31:44-50 and Qur'an 41:53.
faith groups / schoolsA cloud of witnesses
Hebrews 12:1 speaks of ‘a great cloud of witnesses’. Make a wall of names: people, famous or not, whose honest lives bore witness to something true. Each person adds one name and one sentence about them.
Episode 1
