ABSTRACT
The Shahada (or profession of faith) plays a key role in Islamic rituals and religious identity, so much so that it is regarded as the cornerstone of the Islamic creed. Its development, however, is still in need of study, especially that what is often taken as the Shahada is its articulation by Sunnis (There is no god except God and Muhammad is the messenger of God), as contrasted to that of the Shiʿis (There is no god except God, Muhammad is the messenger of God and ʿs n is the sovereign of God), neither of which is attested in the Qurʾan. There are, however, statements in the Qurʾan that could have functioned as separate shahadas, which throughout the course of the seventh century became imbedded in the processes of Islamic identity formation (within and without). These processes with respect to the Shahada culminated in an intense period of experimentation under ʿAbd al-Malik, resulting in a formula, albeit in different versions, that we could call the proto-Shahada; the most popular one was the proto-Sunni version: There is no god except God, he alone with no associates, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. What we see in the proto-Shahada are two prior shahadas coalescing into one statement, and it became known in Islam as the Dual-Shahada (al-shahadatayn). The Shiʿis, whose formulation of the Shahada in the seventh century (as proto-Shiʿis) is pretty much unknown, came to call their shahada about ʿAli's guardianship as the “third” Shahada, and used it alongside the Dual-Shahada.
