Fedayeen
Arabic term used to refer to various militants willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger idea
Fedayeen (Arabic: فدائيون, romanized: fidāʻiyyūn, lit. 'self-sacrificers', pronounced [fɪ.daːʔɪj.juːn]) is an Arabic term used to refer to various military groups willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger campaign or leader.
Etymology
"Fidayun" is the plural of "fidayi" (فدائي fidāʻiyy [fɪ.daːʔijj]), meaning 'one who redeems/sacrifices themselves'.
Medieval usage
Order of Assassins
Hassan-i-Sabbah (c. 1050–1124), who founded the Order of Assassins in Persia and Syria, used the term to refer to his fanatical devotees. Fidāʼīyīn is the plural of fidāʼī, which means "sacrifice". It is widely understood as "those willing to sacrifice themselves for God".
Modern usage
Armenia
Fedayi also known as the Armenian irregular units or Armenian militia, were Armenian civilians who voluntarily left their families to form self-defense units in reaction to the mass murder of Armenians and the pillage of Armenian villages by criminals, Turkish and Kurdish gangs, Ottoman forces, and Hamidian guards between the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their ultimate goal was to gain Armenian autonomy (Armenakans) or independence (Dashnaks, Hunchaks) depending on their ideology. Some of the key Fedayi figures also participated in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution that commenced during the same period, upon agreement of the ARF leaders.
At the onset of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenians of Artsakh began forming small detachments of volunteers and often self-described themselves as Fedayeen, inheriting the name of the fighters who actively resisted the Ottoman Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries.
The public source identifies “Fedayeen” as arabic term used to refer to various militants willing to sacrifice themselves for a larger idea. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Fedayeen, Arabic and term.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fedayeen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.