th? These terms get thrown around by soothe-sayers, but those who practice what they preach know that they must sacrifice everything to defend the truth, even their lives. Can anyone truly claim to stand for the truth if they are not willing to die defending it?

Thankfully, God has provided us lost sheep with several shining stars who truly adhered to the path of truth-seeking and were willing to pay the ultimate price, rather than live a mundane life passively supporting the wicked tyrants and their empires of falsehood. This book documents those martyrs whose truth-seeking path led them to accept the religion of Islam after coming from a non-Muslim background, or go from one sect of Islam towards the path of Ahlul Bayt (the Prophet Muhammad's family, peace be upon them), and then get martyred because of standing for truth, justice, righteousness, and against wickedness and oppression. These particular martyrs were not bound to one ethnicity, ranging from fair-skinned Europeans to black-skinned African Americans, nor one geography. Sometimes, they had to go to a battlefield to attain martyrdom, while for others, martyrdom came to them, as the wicked tyrants and usury-eating wealthy elites felt their existence was so unbearable that they had to be eliminated through assassinations.

All human beings will die - this is a fact. The choice we all have is whether to die a death of dignity, or one of humiliation. These martyrs chose that which Imam Hussain (as) declared over 1,400 years ago in the plains of Karbala: death with dignity is better than a life of humiliation.