For ten agonising days, the family of Dr. Mahsa Taheri waited in uncertainty. Following a devastating US-Israeli attack on Tehran during the 40-day Ramadan War of 2026, the remains recovered from the seventh floor of a residential building were unrecognisable. It was only through a DNA test, matched with her father’s sample, that the heartbreaking truth was confirmed: their beloved daughter, sister, and one of the brightest scientific minds of her generation, had been martyred.

But Mahsa Taheri’s story cannot be confined to the tragedy of her death. It is a story of a life intentionally lived, of a young woman who possessed the world at her feet but chose to anchor her destiny to the soil of her homeland.

The Scientist Who Outshone Her Counterparts

Born in Arak in 1993, Mahsa’s intellectual journey was one of relentless pursuit. She earned her bachelor’s degree in her hometown, pursued a master’s in Zanjan, and ultimately completed her PhD at Tehran’s prestigious Tarbiat Modares University. There, she balanced university teaching with specialised, high-stakes research in missile technology.

Her brilliance was not merely academic; it was deeply practical and patriotic. Among the belongings she left behind was a metal missile component bearing a profound inscription:

“This missile component is for testing the radar-absorbing and heat-resistant layer. It is the first material developed by Mahsa Taheri and is more complete than its American counterpart.”

In a world that often seeks to drain developing nations of their brightest minds, Mahsa stood as a beacon of resilience. She had received invitations to work in foreign countries, including Norway, and had once considered migration to provide a more comfortable life for her family. Yet, over the final years of her life, a profound shift occurred. The allure of a life abroad faded in the face of a deepening commitment to her country’s scientific independence and dignity.

The Human Behind the Laboratory

To reduce Mahsa to just a scientist would be to miss the vibrant, tender soul that animated her work. Her family remembers a young woman who defied the austere stereotype of the isolated academic.

Her bedroom was a sanctuary of simplicity and warmth: pink curtains, an old wooden table, and a collection of named dolls. Among them was a small, two-sided doll—one side smiling, the other sad. Mahsa would turn the smiling face toward her family when she was happy, and the sad face when she was upset or missing someone. It was her quiet, endearing way of communicating her heart.

That same wooden table served a dual purpose. Due to a childhood knee surgery, Mahsa could not stand for long periods. She would sit on a simple chair by the table, drape herself in a long black-and-white chador, and pray. It was a space where her scientific rigour met her spiritual grounding.

Her brother recalls their bond with affectionate humour, remembering how she would lovingly guide him through his studies and joke about “getting his diploma for him.” She was, above all, a devoted daughter and sister.

A Destiny Foretold

In a haunting twist of fate, just one week before her martyrdom, Mahsa was involved in a severe car accident while travelling to Kahf al-Shuhada (the Cave of the Martyrs) in northern Tehran. The car overturned, yet she emerged miraculously unharmed—not even her chador had become dusty.

Looking back, her brother recognised the profound significance of that moment:

“I realised that martyrdom really was Mahsa’s destiny. Otherwise, there was only a gap of one week between dying in the accident and being martyred.”

It was as if she was being prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, having already chosen the very cemetery in Arak where she wished to be laid to rest.

An Immortal Legacy

In the wake of their unimaginable loss, Mahsa’s family made a deliberate, powerful choice. Rather than keeping her scientific notes, academic plaques, and personal belongings as private keepsakes, they donated them to the Sacred Defence Museum in her home province.

Her father articulated this beautiful sacrifice with profound clarity:

“Today, we entrusted her belongings to the museum not simply to keep them on a shelf, but so that everyone would know that our security today is the result of the pure blood that has been shed in the pursuit of the country’s dignity.”

Now, the metal component she pioneered, the certificates of her academic journey, and even the little two-sided doll that once mirrored her moods, rest in a place where they can inspire future generations.

Dr. Mahsa Taheri was 32 years old. She was a scientist, a teacher, a daughter, and a martyr. Though her life was cut short by the brutality of aggression, her legacy remains unbroken. She chose to build her nation’s future rather than seek refuge in another’s, and in doing so, she ensured that her name—and her smile—will never be forgotten.

سَلامٌ عَلَى آلِ يس

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا دَاعِيَ اللَّهِ وَرَبَّانِيَّ آيَاتِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا بَابَ اللَّهِ وَدَيَّانَ دِينِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا خَلِيفَةَ اللَّهِ وَنَاصِرَ حَقِّهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا حُجَّةَ اللَّهِ وَدَلِيلَ إِرَادَتِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا تَالِيَ كِتَابِ اللَّهِ وَتَرْجُمَانَهُ

Peace be upon the House of Yā-Sīn.

Peace be upon you, O caller of God, O one made divinely learned in His signs.

Peace be upon you, O gate of God, O judge of His religion.

Peace be upon you, O vicegerent of God, O helper of His truth.

Peace be upon you, O proof of God, O evidence of what He wills.

Peace be upon you, O reciter of the Book of God — and its interpreter.

— Excerpt from Ziyārat Āl-e Yāsīn

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of various is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence.

And he is not negligent of attending to us, and he is not forgetful of remembering him, therefore we too should not forget him.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man.

The Maqtal — “The Man with the Chisel”

I. A List of Streets

I want to tell you about a man whose name nobody wrote down.

Not the minister who signed it. Not the officer who carried it. The one at the end of it, who did the actual work.

He was given a list of streets, and a tool.

And in the morning, in the year four hundred and forty-eight, he walked into a lane in Karkh and started at the first house.

II. What Was Written Over the Door

Over the door of that house there was a sentence.

Just a line of letters, cut into the stone above the frame, the way a family does when it wants the street to know who lives there.

It said:

Muhammad and Ali are the best of humankind.

Understand what that is.

That is not a slogan.

That is a household telling the road what it loves.

Somebody had paid for those letters. Somebody had stood in the lane while they were cut, and looked up, and been pleased with how they came out.

And children had grown up walking under them without ever once reading them, the way you do not read the door of your own house.

III. He Does Not Look Up

He set the chisel against the first letter, and he struck it.

And then again.

And the stone came away in flakes, and the letters went, one at a time, and it took a while — because whoever cut them had cut them deep. They had been meant to last.

Then he moved to the next door.

And the next.

I watched him go down that whole lane, and I want to tell you the thing I have never been able to put down.

He did not look up.

Not once. Not at the windows. Not at the people standing in their own doorways watching him take the names off their house.

He was not cruel. That is the part you will find hardest.

He was working.

He had a list, and the light goes early in Safar, and he wanted to finish.

IV. There Was a Door Before This One

And I stood in that lane and I could not breathe, and it was not because of the dust.

It was because I have seen a door before.

They came for a door once, long before Karkh. And there was a woman behind it, and she was the daughter of the Messenger of God — peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions — and she was my grandmother.

And she did not live long after.

Now look again at what that man was chiselling off the stone.

Two names.

The name of the Messenger of God, and the name of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — her father, and her husband.

Four hundred years apart. The same two names. Somebody coming to a door to take them away.

And on a plain by a river, between those two doors, they set fire to the tents with the children still inside them, and left the bodies three days, and carried the heads of the men of my house through the streets of two cities on the points of spears.

So do not tell me a chisel is a small thing.

I have watched them come to my family’s doors for four hundred years, and they always, always start by removing the names.

V. He Goes Home

And at the end of the afternoon he finished the last house on the list.

He put the chisel in his bag.

And he walked home — past his own door.

I do not know whether he had anything written over it. I know he had a family behind it, and that they were glad to see him, and that he ate something and slept.

That is what I want you to sit with tonight. Not the fire. The ordinariness.

Every catastrophe that has ever happened to my house was carried out, in the end, by somebody who was just doing his job and wanted to get home.

VI. What Are You Building?

So — you.

You have a threshold. Everybody does. Something you have let the street see, or something you have kept carefully inside where it is safe.

What is written over yours?

And here is the question I actually want to ask, because it is harder than the first one:

Whose door are you standing at, with a list, doing your job?

Because the man in that lane did not think he was in this story. He thought he was at work.

What are you building?

Build something with the names still on it.

Build it where the street can read it.

And when they come with the chisel — and they will, they always do — let them find that the letters were only ever a copy.

That the real thing was cut into the people inside the house, and no tool has ever been made that reaches that.

Sources Cited

• The black banners, the altered call to prayer, and the inscriptions محمد وعلي خير البشر torn off the doors of the houses and the heads of the lanes, in the year 448 — Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam fi Tarikh al-Muluk wa’l-Umam, Volume 16, Page 8 (Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Ata). The chisel, the lane and the doors are all in the chronicle. The workman is not: he is the necessary implication of the sentence, and he is presented as such — the maqtal invents no fact about him beyond the fact that somebody had to do it.

• The order came from the caliph’s own chief minister — same passage. Named in the write-up (footnote 2), not from the minbar.

• The door, and the daughter of the Messenger of God — narrated in the maqtal register, deliberately without elaboration, per the standing rule. The maqtal states that they came, and that she did not live long after. It makes no further claim and names nobody.

• The tents fired on the afternoon of Ashura; the bodies left three days; the heads carried to Kufa and to Damascus — the standard maqtal tradition, as carried in al-Luhuf and the classical maqatil.

• “Four hundred years apart” — from the events of 11 AH to the events of 448 AH is four hundred and thirty-seven years. “Four hundred years” is used as the round figure and is safe; do not sharpen it to a precise number in delivery.

There were those who never knew your voice,
who turned away from your fatherly tone,
who called you stubborn, called you old,
who laughed at warnings of the storm—
and now they press their ears to every door,
restless, hungry,
aching for one more word from you.

There were those who walked another road,
who stood, for a season, in the enemy’s ranks,
who let the well grow deep around them—
and you, even in leaving,
threw them a rope of light.

You left,
and forty million became one ocean,
no longer grasping for their share of dust,
but selfless, burning,
searching for the hand that struck you down,
settling the score with grief made iron.

You left,
and those who competed for the world
forgot the world existed.
You lifted them past material things
into a country with no name
but sacrifice.

And I keep asking—how?
How does one death remake a nation?
How does one chest, offered as a shield,
wash clean a thousand misunderstandings?
And the answer comes, the only answer:
You loved us too much.

Every breath you drew was for our stepping
one inch closer to the truth.
The world, with all its narrow walls,
kept blocking the way—
so you asked God to let your very going
be the final sermon,
the last and greatest lifting.

You said, I’ll walk to the front line.
I’ll make my chest the shield.
You said, I’ll take Zahra’s small hand in mine,
so even the blindest soul
might catch her light and see.

You always told us,
I love each one of you. I pray for all of you.
And we smiled, and we nodded,
and we did not believe—
because our own love is so small
we cannot even whisper a name in prayer
unless we’re asked.

But you meant it.
You meant it with your blood.
You meant it with your last breath
and the breath before
and every breath between.

You left, and we were changed.
You left, and we woke.
You left, and in the red language of your leaving,
you said the only word that mattered:

I love you.

And we stood in the wreckage of your love,
ashamed,
awakened,
finally, finally yours.

In her latest artwork, renowned Iranian sand artist Fatemeh Ebadi pays tribute to Iran’s martyred commander, Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, conjuring his face from sand and light alone. What emerges over the minutes is not merely a portrait. It is a pilgrimage.

The Making of the Martyr’s Portrait

The camera lingers on Ebadi’s fingers as she sculpts: the gentle smile the Ummah came to know so well, the white hair, the weathered skin — and then the keffiyeh, its checkered pattern dotted grain by grain; the scarf he wore not as a rank, but as a servant of the Resistance.

Then the scene widens. Beyond his smiling profile rise the domes and minarets of the holy shrines, and beneath them an ocean of people — mourners and lovers waving black banners of loyalty, the same sea of humanity that filled the streets of Baghdad, Karbala, Najaf, Tehran and Kerman to bid him farewell. In the artwork, the martyr does not look at us. He looks at them — the people, the shrines, the path he gave his life for.

Even the film itself moves from cold monochrome into warm, living sepia tones, as though the martyr’s presence turns mourning into light.

Sand: The Most Honest of Mediums

There is a profound honesty in Ebadi’s choice of medium. Sand is what we are made of and what we return to. It is ephemeral — a single breath can erase it. And yet in her hands, it holds the face of a man no empire could erase.

The United States believed a missile at Baghdad airport on that January night in 2020 could end Qasem Soleimani. Instead, they scattered him like seeds across the earth — and now he rises everywhere: in the hands of artists, in the flags of the Resistance, in the eyes of a generation that learned from him that America can be defeated.

The tribute closes as all true remembrance does — with the calligraphy of his blessed name glowing against black. The sand may be wiped from the table. The name remains.

سَلامٌ عَلَى آلِ يس

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا دَاعِيَ اللَّهِ وَرَبَّانِيَّ آيَاتِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا بَابَ اللَّهِ وَدَيَّانَ دِينِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا خَلِيفَةَ اللَّهِ وَنَاصِرَ حَقِّهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا حُجَّةَ اللَّهِ وَدَلِيلَ إِرَادَتِهِ

السَّلامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا تَالِيَ كِتَابِ اللَّهِ وَتَرْجُمَانَهُ

Peace be upon the House of Yā-Sīn.

Peace be upon you, O caller of God, O one made divinely learned in His signs.

Peace be upon you, O gate of God, O judge of His religion.

Peace be upon you, O vicegerent of God, O helper of His truth.

Peace be upon you, O proof of God, O evidence of what He wills.

Peace be upon you, O reciter of the Book of God — and its interpreter.

— Excerpt from Ziyārat Āl-e Yāsīn

A Maqtal for Prophet Muhammad and Imam Hasan al-Mujtaba

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of various is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence.

And he is not negligent of attending to us, and he is not forgetful of remembering him, therefore we too should not forget him.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man.

The Maqtal — “The Letters He Kept”

I. The Thursday

Tonight is the twenty-eighth of Safar.

You know what that is.

It is the day my grandfather died. The Messenger of God. Peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family.

And it is the day they poisoned my uncle Hasan — and would not let them lay him beside the man he had asked for, and came out with arrows to make sure of it.

So forgive me. I am not going to begin where you expect.

Four days before the end, on a Thursday, my grandfather asked for something to write on.

A shoulder-blade. A flat piece of bone, scraped clean. That is what a man wrote on when there was nothing else.

He said: bring it to me, and I will write you a writing, and you will never go astray after it.

There was an argument in the room.

The bone never came.

There was a boy in that room. He lived another fifty-seven years and could not tell it without weeping. He used to begin it the same way every time.

Thursday. And what is Thursday.

Everything I am about to tell you happened because of what was not written down that day.

II. The Hush

There is a thing men do when they cannot come.

They write.

Not a message. A message is for the moment. I mean the other kind — the kind a man folds and keeps, that is still in the drawer after he is buried, and nobody knows what to do with it, and nobody throws it away.

You have one somewhere.

Understand, my beloved, what it costs to write one.

It costs the admission that you are not coming.

III. The House in Karkh

There was a house in Baghdad, in the quarter they called Karkh, and in it an old man whose name people said carefully.

Al-Mufid. The one who benefits. They did not give that name to everyone.

He was tired by then. He had spent his life in front of rooms full of men who came to argue with him, answering them, not raising his voice.

I wrote to him.

In the month of Safar, in the year four hundred and ten, a letter came to that house. A man carried it. Nobody wrote down his name. He said only that he had brought it from a district near the Hijaz — and then he went away, and no one thought to ask him anything else.

It began: To the upright brother, and the rightly-guided friend, the Shaykh al-Mufid.

And it said, because he was old, and it was hard, and it is true:

We are not neglectful of attending to you. We are not forgetful of remembering you.

Our knowledge encompasses your reports. Nothing of your news escapes us.

Two years later, on a Thursday in Dhu al-Hijja, a second letter came to the same door.

There was no third.

IV. The Young Man

Now the part nobody notices.

There was a young man in that house.

He had come from Tus, in Khurasan — a long road for a boy of twenty-three with nothing but the name of a teacher and the price of the journey. He was twenty-five when the first letter came. Twenty-seven when the second one came.

I knew he was there.

He did not know that I knew. He carried books for older men and stayed at the back of the room, and if you had asked anyone in Baghdad who he was, they could not have told you.

I could have told you.

Within nine months of the second letter, on the eve of a Friday in Ramadan, the old man died.

They carried him out into the potash-sellers’ square, and a Sayyid of my own House stood in front of the body and led the prayer, and the square was not big enough. Eighty thousand, the chroniclers said — and they were not our friends, and they counted anyway.

Somewhere in that crowd, a young man from Khurasan. Twenty-eight years old. He had come a very long way to sit in front of that man, and he had got five years of him, and now he was standing among strangers, and could not see over their heads.

He did not know that the man leading the prayer would teach him for twenty-three more years.

He did not know what would come for his house, one night, thirty-five years later.

He did not know that a thousand years later, a room full of people who have never seen Baghdad would say his name.

He was a young man in a crowd who had lost his teacher.

And I was watching.

V. The Keeping

At the end of that first letter I wrote him one more line.

May God guard you with His eye that does not sleep.

So keep it.

He kept it.

That is why you have it. There is no chain on those letters — no line of names, nothing for the scholars to weigh. Only a bearer nobody named, and an old man who folded a piece of paper and did not put it in the fire.

And the boy at the back of the room grew up and spent his whole life doing the same thing. Keeping. Copying. Checking.

This is what it has always been, my beloved.

Not palaces. Not armies. Not a state, and never a state.

A man in a room, keeping something, because somebody who could not come had asked him to.

That is the whole architecture. That is how a Thursday with no writing in it became a thousand years of writing.

That is how the thirst at the river reached you, and the name of every one of the seventy-two.

Somebody kept it.

My mother, Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, kept it. She was the first of them. She asked to be buried where no one could find her — so that the not-finding would itself be a thing that was kept.

And my uncle Hasan kept it — and they would not let him lie beside his grandfather for it.

And my aunt Zaynab kept it, in a court in Damascus, with the head of her brother in front of her.

From her, to a house in Karkh. To a chair burning in a street. To a room in the desert beside my grandfather’s grave.

To this room, tonight.

You are not the audience of this story.

You are the next hands.

To me, the Imam of our Age, may our Lord hasten my return — my beloved, pray ardently for my return. And until then, keep what you have been given, as he kept it, and as she kept it.

I am not neglectful of attending to you.

I am not forgetful of remembering you.

Sources Cited

• The two letters to Shaykh al-Mufid — al-Tabarsi, al-Ihtijaj, vol. 2, pp. 318, 322–325 (Dar al-Nu’man, Najaf). The first is dated to the last days of Safar 410; the second to Thursday 23 Dhu al-Hijja 412. Neither carries an isnad.The text records only that “its deliverer stated that he was bringing it from a district adjoining the Hijaz.” Said here as it is said from the minbar — plainly, and without apology.

• “We are not neglectful of attending to you, nor forgetful of remembering you” — al-Ihtijaj, vol. 2, p. 322.

• “May God guard you with His eye that does not sleep — so keep it” — al-Ihtijaj, vol. 2, p. 324.

• Shaykh al-Mufid’s death, the eve of Friday, 3 Ramadan 413; the funeral prayer led by Sayyid al-Murtada in the Maydan al-Ushnan; “and it was too narrow for the people, wide as it was” — al-Najashi, quoted in Hayat al-Shaykh al-Tusi.

• The figure of eighty thousand — Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam, under the year 413; repeated by Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa’l-Nihaya, vol. 12, pp. 18–19. Both Sunni chronicles, reported as the chroniclers report them.

• Al-Tusi’s arrival in Baghdad in the year 408 — his own words, Kitab al-Ghayba.

• The request for writing materials in the Prophet’s final illness, and “Thursday — and what is Thursday!” — Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jizya wa’l-Muwada’a, hadith 3168; also Kitab al-Ilm, hadith 114. “The calamity, the whole calamity, was what came between the Messenger of God and his writing” — Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Maghazi, hadith 4432. Taken deliberately from the Sunni canon, and told without naming who objected: the argument is not the lesson.

• The martyrdom of Imam Hasan al-Mujtaba, peace and blessings be upon him, on 28 Safar 50 AH, and the arrows at his bier when burial beside the Prophet was sought — al-Mufid, al-Irshad. He was buried in Baqi’.

There is an old proverb among the oppressed:

In the subterranean torture chambers and black sites of the Zionist entity, the occupier believes that darkness is its greatest ally. It believes that by dragging Palestinian men into the abyss, severing them from the world, and silencing their voices, it can break the spirit of Gaza. But the occupier fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the Palestinian soul. In the deepest dark, where the chains of the apartheid state are heaviest, the light of martyrdom burns the brightest.

Today, we bow our heads in reverence and raise our fists in defiance to honour the martyr Ehab Mohammad Abdel Qader Diab, a 36-year-old son of Gaza whose physical body was destroyed by the cowardice of the occupation, but whose spirit has ascended to join the eternal caravan of the resistance.

The Long Night of Forced Disappearance

Ehab’s ordeal began on December 12, 2023, when occupation forces abducted him from the besieged Gaza Strip. From that day forward, he was swallowed by the Zionist entity’s sprawling archipelago of death camps and military prisons. For his family, the agonising nightmare of forced disappearance began—a psychological torture deliberately inflicted by the regime to shatter the families of the resistance.

The regime kept Ehab in the shadows. According to the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, Ehab was martyred on September 18, 2024. Yet, the apartheid state, terrified of the truth, kept his martyrdom a secret. It took nearly two years of silence, cover-ups, and bureaucratic stonewalling before the occupation authorities finally admitted to his death in August 2026. They held his body hostage in the dark, denying his family the basic human right to mourn, to pray, and to bury their son.

The Cowardice of the Oppressor

When the regime finally broke its silence, it attempted to cloak its war crime in the sterile language of bureaucracy. The occupation’s prison administration claimed Ehab had died from a “health condition.”

His family, knowing the truth of his vitality, vehemently rejected this lie. Ehab was a healthy man, full of life and strength, when he was dragged from his home. The Zionist entity does not kill healthy Palestinian men because of “pre-existing conditions”; it kills them because it is terrified of them. It kills them through systematic torture, deliberate medical neglect, starvation, and the crushing weight of a fascist prison regime. To blame Ehab’s biology for his murder is the ultimate cowardice of an entity that fears a living Palestinian breathing free air more than it fears death itself.

Joining the Brotherhood of the Unbroken

Ehab Diab did not die alone, and his legacy is not an isolated tragedy. He is now woven into the sacred fabric of Palestinian history. He joins the 91 Palestinian prisoners who have been martyred in the dungeons of the occupation since the onset of the genocide on October 7, 2023—53 of whom, like Ehab, were sons of Gaza.

He joins the 328 detainees who have been executed or tortured to death in Israeli captivity since the 1967 occupation. Every single one of these men and women is an indictment of the so-called “international community,” which watches in complicity as the American-backed apartheid state operates its gulags with absolute impunity. The empire that funds the bombs dropping on Gaza also funds the shackles binding Ehab and his brothers in the dark.

A Vow to the Martyr

To the family of Ehab Diab: your son was stolen from you, hidden from you, and murdered by a regime that has abandoned all humanity. But know that his blood has not been spilled in vain. Every drop of blood shed in the dungeons of Ofer, Sde Teiman, and Megiddo waters the roots of the resistance.

The Zionist entity believes that by hiding its crimes, it can erase the memory of those it slaughters. But the Axis of Resistance and the free people of the world do not forget. We remember Ehab. We remember his health, his youth, his stolen years, and his ultimate sacrifice.

The physical chains of the apartheid state could bind his wrists, but they could never touch his dignity. Ehab Mohammad Abdel Qader Diab walked into the darkness of an Israeli prison as a captive of the occupation, but he emerged into the eternal light as a martyr of Palestine.

From the river to the sea, the blood of the martyrs is the ink with which the victory of the resistance is written. May God have mercy on his soul, grant patience to his family, and hasten the day when the dungeons of the occupier are torn to the ground.

Refernce: Purewilayah

اَلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا بْنَ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ
اَلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكَ يَا بْنَ سَيِّدِ الْأَوْصِيَاءِ
نَشْهَدُ أَنَّكَ أَمِينُ اللَّهِ وَابْنُ أَمِينِهِ
عِشْتَ سَعِيداً وَمَضَيْتَ حَمِيداً وَمُتَّ فَقِيداً مَظْلُوماً شَهِيداً
وَنَشْهَدُ أَنَّ اللَّهَ مُنْجِزٌ مَا وَعَدَكَ
وَمُهْلِكٌ مَنْ خَذَلَكَ وَمُعَذِّبٌ مَنْ قَتَلَكَ
وَنَشْهَدُ أَنَّكَ وَفَيْتَ بِعَهْدِ اللَّهِ
وَجَاهَدْتَ فِي سَبِيلِهِ حَتَّى أَتَاكَ الْيَقِينُ
فَلَعَنَ اللَّهُ مَنْ قَتَلَكَ وَظَلَمَكَ
وَلَعَنَ اللَّهُ أُمَّةً سَمِعَتْ بِذَلِكَ فَرَضِيَتْ بِهِ
اللَّهُمَّ إِنَّا نُشْهِدُكَ أَنَّا أَوْلِيَاءُ لِمَنْ وَلاَكَ
وَأَعْدَاءُ لِمَنْ عَادَاكَ
بِآبَائِنَا وَأُمَّهَاتِنَا يَا بْنَ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ

Peace be upon you, O son of the Messenger of God.
Peace be upon you, O son of the Master of the Successors.

We bear witness that you are the trustee of God, and the son of His trustee.
You lived a blessed life, departed praiseworthy, and died a martyr — deprived, wronged, a witness slain.
And we bear witness that God will fulfil what He promised you, and will bring down those who abandoned you, and punish those who killed you.
And we bear witness that you kept faith with the covenant of God, and struggled in His way until the certainty came upon you.

So may the mercy of God be made distant from those who killed you and wronged you, and from the people who heard of it and were pleased.

O God, we make You our witness that we are friends to those who befriend you, and enemies to those who are hostile to you.
May our fathers and our mothers be your ransom, O son of the Messenger of God.

— Adapted from Ziyarat al-Arbaeen

Introduction

A maqtal — a sacred eulogy and historical recounting — for the fortieth day: the long road of the captives from Karbala to Kufa to Damascus and home again, and the witness they bore along it.

For Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the Master of the Martyrs, peace and blessings be upon him, for Sayyedah Zaynab, for Imam Ali Zayn al-Abedeen, and for the captives — the sabaya — of Karbala. Recited on Arbaeen, the twentieth of Safar.

This is the refresh of the earlier Arbaeen maqtal, The Victory of Blood, the Legacy of Clarification — carried over into this year's series, Shahada — The Theology of Witness and the Grades of Martyrdom.

Last year the road was told through the lens of tabyeen, clarification; this year it is told through the lens that contains it — shahada, witness.

For clarification was only ever the form the witness took: when Sayyedah Zaynab stood in the tyrant's hall and made the truth plain, she was doing what the ziyarah of this day does line after line — she was bearing witness.

As with the series maqatil, the voice speaking it is the voice of the Awaited One, the Master of the Age — Imam al-Mahdi, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return — the living inheritor of Imam Husayn's stand.

Since the fourteenth night, when the first pilgrim reached the grave, that voice — broken since the noon of the tenth — has come home; here it speaks whole.

The historical narrative draws on the same principal sources as the series:

• Luhuf of Sayyed ibn Tawus,

• Nafas al-Mahmoum of Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, and

• Chronicles of the Martyrdom of Imam Husayn by Ayatullah Muhammad Muhammadi Reyshahri.

• Kitab al-Irshad of Shaykh al-Mufid; and

• Bihar al-Anwar of Allamah Majlisi;

• together with the devotional texts of the day —

  • Ziyarat Nahiya al-Muqaddasah

  • Ziyarat al-Arbaeen,

  • Dua al-Nudbah, and

  • Dua al-Ahd.

Please see the bottom of this post for a full list of the sources used, as well as an important note on the telling, and a detailed changelog that explains what has changed since the 2025/1447 version of this special maqtal for the Day of Arbaeen.

Arbaeen - The Fortieth Day and What A Maqtal Is

Arbaeen is the fortieth day — forty days after Ashura, the day on which Imam Husayn, the beloved grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions, was massacred upon the plain of Karbala by the armies of Yazid ibn Muʿawiyah, in the year 61 of the Hijrah, barely fifty years after the Prophet was laid in the earth.

What follows is a maqtal — a sacred eulogy, and a recounting.

It is dedicated to the remembrance of Imam Husayn, of Sayyedah Zaynab, of Imam Ali Zayn al-Abedeen, and of the captives of Karbala: the women and children of the House of the Prophet who, after the tragedy of Ashura, were bound in chains and driven — abused, uncovered, paraded as spoils — from Karbala to Kufa, and from Kufa to Damascus, and home again.

And it is a maqtal built on a single word, the word the day itself is built on.

Again and again in the Ziyarah (visitation) you have just heard, the pilgrim says nashhadu — we bear witness.

That is what the fortieth day is: the day the Ummah (the community) takes the stand and testifies.

And it is what the House of the Prophet did, all along that terrible road.

There are grades to the witness.

There is the witness sealed in blood — Imam Husayn, and the seventy-two, who bore witness with their bodies at noon.

And there is the witness carried in word and in captivity and in survival — Sayyedah Zaynab, and the sick Imam, and the little ones, who bore witness with their chains, their sermons, their refusal to be silenced or to disappear.

The first witness is the more glorious.

But the second is the one that carried the first out of the desert and into every century since — for a witness sealed in blood, and never spoken of again, the empire could have buried.

It was the second witness, the witness in word, that the empire could not kill; and it is why the blood was victorious over the sword.

To recite a maqtal is not merely to recount the past.

It is to be brought into a living covenant with Imam Husayn, and with the witnesses of God in every age.

It is natural — it is blessed — to weep here.

But the sorrow is not the end.

It is the beginning.

Every tear is a testimony, and every testimony is a covenant: that we will not let their witness fade into memory, but let it shape us — until every mourning heart becomes a witness, and every remembrance a step toward the promised justice of God.

The Special Arbaeen Maqtal

Karbala, the Night After the Massacre

In the Name of the One whose Throne trembled when Husayn fell,
the One who let the Quran be raised on spears,
so the world would learn to read it in chains.

Where were you?

Where were you when the night came down,
and the smoke of the looted tents stood in for the clouds?
When the wind, heavy with blood,
could no longer carry the cries of the orphans up to heaven?

The battlefield lay still — but it was not silent.
The earth itself was weeping.

There were bodies.
And the bodies had no shrouds.
And the shrouds had been torn.
And the torn cloth had been stolen — even from the slain.

Sayyedah Zaynab sat beneath the same sky
that had once shaded the Prophet.
She sat among the severed limbs of her brothers,
gathering the children whose cries had gone hoarse with thirst.

I was not there —
but I remember.

I remember the moan of Sayyedah Ruqayyah in her sleep.
I remember the stillness of Abbas’s arms.
I remember the headless body that still gave light, even in death.

I was not there —
but I inherited that night like a sword handed down through time.

And hear me — for this is the whole of it:
that night, when every human eye that should have watched had turned away,
only the sky bore witness.
The sky — and I.

Behind the veils of my absence, I cried for the unveiled.
Behind the curtain of the years, I wept with the timeless.
And I made the oath a witness makes:
that what the world refused to see,
I would carry, and I would not let it be forgotten.

The Chains on the Road to Kufa

They tied iron to what the angels would not touch.
They chained the wrists of Imam Sajjad —
wrists still trembling with fever,
wrists that had once held the Quran the way a child holds the sky.

They led him like a criminal
through the dust where his father had fallen —
dust still wet, still holy —
but not to them.

Behind him walked the orphans.
And behind the orphans —
Sayyedah Zaynab.

O my aunt —
O mountain wrapped in fire —
how did you carry them?

You, who had only just washed your brother’s blood from your own hands,
now driven through the desert as a portion of the plunder.

Their spears carried heads.
Their spears carried what they thought was triumph.
Their spears carried the most honoured flesh of Islam —
as trophies.

They marched through the ruins of prophecy.
The river turned its face away.
The palm trees wept without a sound.
No Quran was recited on that road —
for the Quran was bleeding on a lance,
and the reciters had gone over to the murderers.

A child asked,
“Will they take us to our grandfather’s city now?”

Sayyedah Zaynab said nothing.
She only drew her torn chador closer,
and held her silence the way a witness holds a testimony
that the court is not yet ready to hear.

O my Shia —
when you carry the banners on Arbaeen,
do you carry this day as well?

When you set your feet on the road from Najaf to Karbala,
do you feel, beneath your heels,
the road from Karbala to Kufa?

For on that road,
the truth was dragged in chains —
and would not stop testifying.

You weep for Husayn.
But do you walk for Sajjad?
Do you walk for the ones who walked that road in shackles —
without water, without shoes,
without a single voice in the crowd to answer “Labbayk”?

The wind called their names.
The people shut their windows.

Only the sky bore witness —
and I,
the son of the one they slaughtered,
I walked that road beside them, unseen,
and I swore never to forget.

What the Sister Made Plain — the Court of Ibn Ziyad

They brought the sabaya into Kufa —
not as guests,
not even as prisoners,
but as a spectacle.

They were made to wait at the gate
while the crowd gathered to gawk and to gloat.
Children threw stones.
Old men spat.
And the women who had written the letters of loyalty
now whispered their insults from behind veils of shame.

They did not see the family of the Prophet.
They saw the vanquished.

Inside, the blood was still on the spears —
but the court had already gone back to its laughter.
Ibn Ziyad reclined like a jackal at its ease,
soft cushions beneath the feet that had trampled the Book,
and the severed head of Imam Husayn in a dish before him,
and he struck at its lips with his cane.

And then the tyrant, thinking himself clever, turned to Sayyedah Zaynab,
and he asked her the question that the whole empire was asking —
he asked her how she had found what God had done to her house:

“How did you see what God did to your brother?”

And she gave the answer that forty days, and four hundred years,
and fourteen centuries have not been able to bury.

She did not weep. She did not break.
She looked at the massacre of everyone she loved,
at the chains on her own wrists, at the head in the dish,
and she bore witness:

“I saw nothing but beauty.”

Understand what she did.
This is the summit of the whole theology of witness.
To bear witness in blood, as her brother did, is the more glorious grade.
But to stand in the wreck of everything,
uncovered before the man who ordered it,
and to testify that in it you saw only the beauty of God’s decree —
that is the witness that no sword can even reach,
let alone silence.
The empire could kill the body that testifies.
It could not touch the soul that says I saw nothing but beauty.

And when the tyrant, shaken, turned to the boy in chains
and snarled, “And who are you?” —
the sick one, the one whose body had failed him
but whose soul was the flame of the Wilayah,
lifted his chin and bore his own witness:

“I am Ali, son of Husayn, son of Ali, son of Abu Talib.
I am the son of the one you slaughtered beside the river you now drink from.
I am the son of the one you abandoned with your tongues,
and then murdered with your swords.”

A silence fell.
Even the spears seemed ashamed.
The tyrant ground his teeth —
but he did not strike.

Because in that moment he understood
that he had not silenced anything.
He had put the witnesses on a stage.

O my people —
what sermons do you preach when the pulpit is safe?
What do you dare to say when the tyrant is already dead and buried?

Sayyedah Zaynab bore witness while the wolf’s teeth still dripped.
Imam Sajjad testified while the iron still bit his flesh.

That — that is the witness.
That is shahada.
The clarification you praise was only ever its shape;
the witness was its soul.

And you?
You wait for the Imam of your age
to return with the angels and the sword.
But have you spoken while the blade was still raised?
Have you borne witness to the truth while it was still unpopular —
while it still cost you comfort,
or standing,
or safety?

The Road of the Witnesses — Kufa to Damascus

They did not take them by the shortest road.

They paraded them —
village to village, market to market.
The family of the Prophet,
shown off like trophies, like criminals,
like beasts dragged back from a rebellion.

The roads from Kufa to Damascus twisted like a whip,
and every mile left a scar.

Imam Sajjad walked with chains that bruised the bone.
Sayyedah Zaynab walked with memories that would never heal.
The children walked barefoot
through towns that threw stones in place of bread.

In some cities they were cursed.
In others, pitied.
And in a few —
a veil was lifted, and someone bore witness.

An old woman fainted when she saw the head of Husayn,
recognising the face of the Prophet in its profile.
A Christian monk lit incense and stood in prayer,
and testified, in a tongue not our own,
to what the Muslims of that road would not.

These moments were rare.
And they were quickly silenced.

But mark them — for they are the point.
Even here, on the road of humiliation,
the witness was spreading, mouth to mouth,
and the empire could not stop it.
The sun beat down on the sabaya,
but not as hard as the eyes of those
who knew the truth,
and held their tongues.

O people of the minarets,
O lovers of the recitation —
did you not hear the Quran
being recited from lips upon a spear?

A little girl fell in the dust.
She had not eaten in three days.
A soldier kicked her onward.
Sayyedah Zaynab shielded her
with arms already purpled by the iron.

No water.
No shade.
No mercy.

They passed through Raqqa, and Mosul, and Aleppo —
cities that would one day boast of their loyalty,
but that day, threw not a single stone at the oppressor.

And I —
I walked behind them.
Behind the one whose tears soaked the chains.
Behind the one whose sermon had pierced a palace.
Behind the orphans who would never laugh again.

I counted every step.
Every groan.
Every scar.

And I have not forgotten.

O walkers of Arbaeen —
do you walk in honour of Sayyedah Zaynab’s march?
Or have you turned her chains into garlands,
and her bruises into banners,
and walked the road as a ritual,
and left your witness behind you in the dust?

The Throne That Trembled — Yazid’s Court

The palace stood like a scar in the heart of Damascus —
pillars carved from wealth stolen from widows,
walls hung with silk
while orphans wept in the alleys outside.

And into that palace
they brought the sabaya.

They were driven through a gate too low to carry their dignity.
The heads of the martyrs went first,
raised on spears,
throwing shadows across the marble like a stain.

The women followed —
uncovered,
bruised,
their veils torn away by soldiers, not by time.

And then the boy,
Ali, the son of Husayn,
his back bent — not by his years,
but by the chains.

Yazid sat on a throne
built out of the ashes of the Prophet’s city.
He wore black as a mockery.
He smiled as though it were theatre.
He turned to the severed head before him
and struck at its lips with a staff of cane.

The courtiers laughed.
The crowd applauded.
And the angels
recorded every breath.

Then Sayyedah Zaynab rose.
Her body was weary, her robe was in tatters,
but her eyes —
those were the eyes of Haydar.

And the court fell still.

“O Yazid — do you think this is your victory?
You have only bared your teeth to the world — not your strength.
You have spilled the blood of the Prophet’s family — but you have not silenced the cause.
By God, I see nothing here today
but the disgrace of falsehood
and the triumph of the truth.”

Her words shook the chandeliers.
And Yazid, drunk on his own illusion, turned on the boy:
“Speak, then — if you dare.”

And speak he did.
Imam Sajjad rose in his chains and bore the witness of Damascus —
the sermon that undid the throne from beneath the man who sat on it:

“I am the son of Makkah and Mina.
I am the son of the one who received the revelation in the Cave of Hira.
I am the son of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra,
the mistress of all the women of the worlds.
You ask who I am, O Yazid?
I am the grandson of the one whose name you cry in your own false adhan —
while you parade his family in chains.”

And the tyrant did not speak again that day.

Here it was declared, in the enemy’s own hall:
the blood had been victorious over the sword.
Not because the blood had escaped the sword — it had not.
But because the blood spoke,
and would not stop speaking,
and turned the very throne room of its murderer
into the first pulpit of its witness.

O people of sorrow —
you gather in Damascus to visit the shrine of Sayyedah Zaynab.
But do you speak, when Yazid puts on new clothes and lives again —
when he changes his flags but not his intentions?
Do you weep in her courtyard
and keep silent in your own?

You who claim to love the House of the Prophet:
they stood in the courts that wanted them dead.
And you hesitate in rooms that only want you uncomfortable?

This is the measure of the witness.

The Child Who Bore Witness in Her Sleep — the Prison of Shaam (Damascus)

She dreamed in chains.
Her wrists were bruised by the iron,
her hair was tangled with grief,
her small ribs pressed against the cold stone —
but still, she dreamed.

O daughter of Husayn —
O Sayyedah Ruqayyah —
in the dark of that cursed prison in Shaam,
you whispered,
“Where is my father?”

And the sky held its breath.

They brought you his head,
wrapped in a cloth,
soiled with dust and dried blood —
a relic of Karbala,
delivered to break a child’s spirit.

But you wept — not from fear —
from love.
You did not scream.
You held his severed head to your chest,
and you kissed it,
and you fell asleep in the arms of your Imam,
and you did not wake.

What palace could hold such a light?

Even I,
the son of that broken caravan,
tremble when I remember
the sound of your last breath.

O my aunt Sayyedah Zaynab —
how did your soul not shatter
as you watched that little frame go still?

O my father Imam Sajjad —
how did you not tear the heavens open
when they laid her in the prison yard —
buried without a washing,
without a shroud,
without a farewell?

She died as she had lived:
alone in this world,
but surrounded by the angels.
Small in body.
Mighty in witness.

You thought you had silenced the child, O oppressor.
But her grave became a pulpit,
and her tears became a fire,
and the walls of your palace still say her name.

The Sabaya Leave the Palace — the Witness That Undid Him

They dragged them back into his court.

The chains still clung to their necks.
The dust still clung to their robes.
And the echo of Karbala
still clung to their every breath.

The blood was not yet dry.
The grief was not yet buried.
The crime was still fresh —
and still he sat on his throne,
and laughed,
and called it conquest:
“My fathers fought Muhammad,
and now I have taken my revenge.”

But he had made one mistake.

He let Sayyedah Zaynab speak.

And when she rose,
the walls of the palace shook —
not from the volume of her voice,
but from the truth it carried.

She did not shout.
She did not plead.
She bore witness.

With the courage of Sayyedah Fatimah,
with the fury of Haydar,
with the grief of every prophet’s mother,
she looked into his eyes:

“Do you think, O Yazid,
that by cornering the earth for us and the sky against us,
you have won some honour?
That you have degraded us?
By God, you have degraded only yourself.
Scheme all you scheme, and strive all you strive —
by God, you will never wipe out our memory,
nor put out our revelation.
The days are numbered.
And the banner of the truth will rise.”

And the tyrant —
the Yazid of his age —
he trembled.
Not before an army,
but before a woman in chains.

He looked for the exit.
He offered his apologies.
He put on the face of regret,
and tried to send the House of the Prophet back with honours.

But we do not bargain with false kings,
and the wounds of Husayn are not soothed with gifts.

The sabaya left his palace.
And his name remained —
a byword, on every tongue that testifies,
for the throne that the blood defeated.

O my aunt Sayyedah Zaynab,
you taught the pulpit how to bleed.
You taught the Ummah how to speak
when silence has become betrayal.

The Fortieth Day — the Return to Karbala

And so, the tradition tells us, they came back.

Not in triumph.
Not in procession.
But in silence —
like birds that had fled their nest in flame,
returning to the ashes.

It was the fortieth day.

The wind still carried the scent of the blood.
The Euphrates still flowed on,
as though it could forget
the one it had been made to deny.

And they were not the only ones at the grave that morning.
Out of Kufa had come a blind old man —
Jabir, the son of Abdillah al-Ansari, a companion of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him and his family —
led across the desert by a freed man named Atiyya.
He had never once seen the face of the one he came to greet.
And when they set his hand upon the grave, he cried out,
and he bore the first witness of the first pilgrimage:
“I bear witness that you are the son of the seal of the prophets,
the son of the master of the faithful.”
Fourteen centuries of feet upon this road began with his.

O my grandfather —
O Husayn —
we returned to you not to be honoured,
but to seek your forgiveness for having left you.
We returned not to bury the past,
but to kneel down beside it.

Sayyedah Zaynab stepped onto the plain.
She had left this place with fire in her eyes.
Now she fell to her knees, and she whispered:
“O my brother —
I kept the trust.
I preserved the message.
I carried your witness through the streets of the tyrants.
But I —
I could not protect them all.”

And Imam Sajjad
stood at the grave of his father,
and he wept
as though each tear were a verse of the Quran:
“Peace be upon you,
O one whose blood was poured out for the truth.
Peace be upon you,
O light of God upon the earth.”

We buried Sayyedah Ruqayyah in Shaam.
We buried Ali al-Asghar against your chest.
And here, beneath your feet,
beside your thirsty standard,
we buried our childhood.

The desert, once red,
was silent now.
But the silence was not peace.
The silence was a witness.

And we walked the ground barefoot —
one step for every drop you shed,
one step for every promise this Ummah broke.

O Husayn —
we brought no gift.
We brought no answer.
Only broken hearts, and scarred remembrance,
and trembling tongues still trying to say:

“Labbayk — even if late.
Labbayk — even if broken.
Labbayk — even if we were not among the seventy-two.”

O my lovers in the East and the West —
Arbaeen is not a ritual.
It is a reckoning.
It is a whisper in the dust:
will you come and bear witness for me — even now?

The City That Wept — Madinah

And then we came home.
If you can call it that.

Madinah —
the city of light,
the cradle of the Quran,
the resting place of the Prophet —
did not shine that day.

It wept.

The streets that had once echoed with Ya Rasul Allah
fell silent
as the broken caravan came in.

No banners.
No welcome.
Only the sound of chains,
and the rustle of garments worn thin with grief.

The doors opened.
The people gathered.
And no one could speak.

They saw the children of Sayyedah Fatimah —
without Husayn.
They saw the Family of the Revelation —
without Ali al-Akbar,
without Qasim,
without Abbas.

And then the news went out —
that the sword had not only struck the body of Husayn,
it had struck the soul of the Ummah.

My father, Imam Zayn al-Abedeen,
stood at the mosque —
not to call for vengeance,
but to raise the dead hearts of the living.
He bore his witness to the city:
“O people of Madinah —
we left with the light,
and we have come back with the shadows.
We left with seventy-two,
and we have come back with the silence.
We left with Husayn —
and we have come back with his witness.”

And Sayyedah Zaynab —
what tongue could describe her?
She entered her mother’s house
and fell to the ground.
“O Zahra,” she whispered,
“I could not bring your Husayn back to you —
but I brought his witness home.”

They say Madinah has never recovered.
To this day
the air of Baqiʿ trembles
with an unspoken grief.

And I —
your Awaited One —
I carry that grief in my veins.
I have not forgotten.

O people of the East and the West —
when you visit Madinah,
do not go seeking comfort.
Go seeking the awakening.
Stand at Baqiʿ not as tourists,
but as mourners who have understood, at last, how late they came.
And when you say “Ya Mahdi,”
know that I too am still weeping
for a return that was never a return at all.

Every Land That Waits — Our Own Time

O Husayn —
they ask me why I have not risen.

They weep for my delay.
They blame the heavens,
or fate,
or the sins of others.

But the truth?
The truth is what I whisper to you now —
at your shrine,
in the wind between Najaf and Karbala,
in the footsteps of everyone who still believes.

I did not hide because I was afraid.
I was veiled because the world refused to see.

You bore witness with seventy-two.
I am still waiting for my three hundred and thirteen.

When I hear your name in the mouths
of those who prop up thrones instead of the truth;
when I see your lovers divided
by their arrogance, or by scholars-for-hire;
when I watch Gaza burned,
and the faithful walk all the way to Karbala
and forget to walk with Karbala —

O my grandfather,
they call me the Awaited.
But I am the one who waits.

I wait for you at the graves of the unknown.
I wait for you in the alleys of Baqiʿ.
I wait in the lamp-lit halls where the truth is still taught with trembling hands.
I wait beside the steadfast of Lebanon,
and the defenders in Yemen,
and in the broken homes of Gaza,
where the mothers recite the Quran over the rubble and the bone.
I wait in the courtrooms where justice is gagged,
and the truth is made to wear a prisoner’s tag.
And I wait in the eyes of every broken child
who asks: where is justice?

You taught us that love must rise,
that faith must roar,
that silence, when the truth is trampled,
is betrayal.

And so I whisper now —
not to the wind,
but to you, O Ummah:

If you truly love Husayn,
then become his witnesses.
If you walk in Arbaeen,
then walk toward the reckoning of God —
and become, each of you,
a hand and a tongue for it.
If you seek the Mahdi,
then become the answer you keep asking for.

O Husayn —
my sword is not rusted.
My hand is not tied.
But I will not rise at the head of a caravan of sleepers.

I will rise
when the voice of Sayyedah Zaynab
becomes the voice of her followers.
When the chains of Imam Sajjad
become the sermons of the scholars.
When every Arbaeen
is no longer a march of mourning only,
but a movement of witness.

Until then,
I whisper your name in every age.
And in every age,
somebody answers.

Closing Benediction and the Living Caravan

Peace be upon Husayn,
and upon Ali, the son of Husayn,
and upon the children of Husayn,
and upon the companions of Husayn —
those who fell beside him at Karbala,
and those who have come back to him, on every fortieth day, in every century since.

And peace upon the caravan of our own age —
those who kept the covenant of the witness with their whole lives,
and have gone on to the grave they served:

Imam Khomeini, who revived the cry;
Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, struck from the sky, and not silenced;
Hajj Imad Mughniyeh, who kept the long patience of his jihad for twenty-five hidden years;
Hajj Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who fell where his brother fell;
Hajj Qasem Soleimani, who guarded the pilgrims of this very road, and became one of its martyrs;
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who, when last I came to you, stood as the unbroken lion at the front, and who has since gone on to the front he never truly left;
and Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Guardian of our own time, who for a lifetime refused what Husayn refused — who said with his own tongue, eleven days before they took him, that one like him does not give his hand to one like Yazid — and who was martyred in the month of Ramadan, the month of the Book, his blood poured into the same inheritance as the blood of this field.

May God rest the pure souls of all of them.

And to the one who carries the trust now, after them —
Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei, the Guardian of this hour —
may God protect him, and keep him firm,
and guide his steps on the road of the lonely
until the hour I am permitted to stand.

And peace upon every witness of the caravan of love —
from the stones of Palestine to the fire of Yemen,
from the hills of Lebanon to the shrine-guardians of Iran,
and upon every pilgrim on the road this morning,
and every heart that walked it without a body.

And may the mercy of God be made distant — the long, the eternal, the unappealable distance —
from every tyranny that ever killed a witness and called it order:
from the throne of deceit at Karbala,
to every coward king, every false scholar, every puppet ruler, and every seditionist tongue,
and the architects of ruin in every age.
The sword had its afternoon.
The blood has the fortieth day —
and every day after it, until I rise.

Never again shall Husayn be alone.
You have proven it, on every fortieth day, with your feet.

وَقُلْ جَاءَ الْحَقُّ وَزَهَقَ الْبَاطِلُ ۚ إِنَّ الْبَاطِلَ كَانَ زَهُوقًا

“And say: the truth has come, and falsehood has vanished away. Indeed, falsehood is ever bound to vanish.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Isra (the Chapter of the Night Journey) #17, Verse 81

إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

“Indeed, we belong to God, and indeed to Him we shall return.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 156

And from Him alone is all ability, and He has authority over all things.

Sources Cited

The historical narrative draws on:

• Luhūf ʿalā Qatlā al-Ṭufūf (Sighs for the Slain of Karbala) — Sayyed Ibn Tawus (1193–1266 CE / 589–664 AH), for the captivity, the courts, and the return.

• Nafas al-Mahmoum fī Muṣībat al-Husayn al-Maẓlūm — Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi (1877–1941 CE / 1294–1359 AH), the compiler of Mafatih al-Jinan.

• Chronicles of the Martyrdom of Imam Husayn — Ayatollah Muhammad Muhammadi Reyshahri (1945–2022 CE / 1364–1444 AH).

• Kitab al-Irshad — Shaykh al-Mufid (336–413 AH / 948–1022 CE).

• Bihar al-Anwar — Allamah Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi (1037–1110 AH); the sermons of Sayyedah Zaynab at Kufa and Damascus are preserved here (vol. 45) and in al-Tabarsi’s al-Ihtijaj.

• Bishārat al-Muṣṭafā — al-Tabari (6th c. AH), for the visitation of Jabir ibn Abdillah al-Ansari and Atiyya at the grave on the fortieth day.

• The devotional texts of the day: Ziyarat al-Nahiya al-Muqaddasah, Ziyarat al-Arbaeen (narrated from Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq through Safwan ibn Mihran al-Jammal; preserved in al-Tusi’s Tahdhib al-Ahkam, vol. 6, p. 113, and Miṣbāḥ al-Mutahajjid, and carried in Mafatih al-Jinan), Dua al-Nudbah, and Dua al-Ahd.

A Note On The Telling

• Sayyedah Zaynab’s “I saw nothing but beauty” (mā ra’aytu illā jamīlā) — her reply to Ibn Ziyad in the court at Kufa — is preserved in al-Luhuf, Bihar al-Anwar (vol. 45), and the standard maqtal tradition; it is the theological centre this refresh is built on. The wording of the exchange and of her Damascus sermon follows the maqtal tradition and is rendered in English (per the reconstructed-quotation protocol — no Arabic verbatim is claimed for the sermons; only the ziyarah Arabic is preserved verbatim).

• The martyrdom of Sayyedah Ruqayyah in the ruined prison of Shaam is carried in the later maqtal and husayniyya tradition (notably al-Darbandi and the popular maqātil), and is not found in the earliest sources; its historicity has been honourably discussed among our scholars. This maqtal renders it faithfully, as the lamentation has always held it, while — per the series method with the Ruqayyah and Darbandi material — not asserting as settled chronicle what the earliest record leaves open. What is not in doubt carries the weight of the scene: that children died on that road, and that the grief of the House of the Prophet in captivity is real.

• The caravan’s return to Karbala on the exact fortieth day is a tradition of the later sources and the lamentation; weighty classical voices (among them Shaykh al-Mufid and Shaykh al-Tusi) doubted the caravan could have crossed from Damascus to Karbala in precisely forty days. The scene keeps the open hand: the well-attested anchor of the fortieth day is Jabir’s visitation; the caravan’s return is rendered as the tradition remembers it (”and so, the tradition tells us, they came back“), honoured, never asserted as fixed chronicle. What is not in doubt — the return of the pilgrimage, the victory of the blood over the sword, and the witness of Sayyedah Zaynab — carries the theological weight of the day.

• Conventions. Sayyedah throughout; tabyeen folded into shahada (clarification named as the form the witness took, not erased); la’an in the locked mercy-forms (”may the mercy of God be made distant“); the living caravan carries a single combined closing seal (“May God rest the pure souls of all of them”) rather than per-name honorifics, to keep the roll from drifting into a chant when voiced; the living Wali al-Faqih, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei, “may God protect him”; “God” not “Allah” in the prose.

Refresh Changelog (2026/1448 Refresh)

What changed in this targeted refresh (the voice and scene-spine are unchanged):

1. Through-line turned from tabyeen to shahada. The maqtal’s spine is unchanged, but the lens is now witness: the opening frames the day on the ziyarah’s own nashhadu (”we bear witness”); the grades of martyrdom (witness in blood / witness in word) are named in the introduction; Sayyedah Zaynab’s “I saw nothing but beauty” is added as the theological centre of the Kufa-court scene; the old refrain “that is tabyeen” becomes “that is the witness — that is shahada,” with tabyeen explicitly folded in as the form the witness took, never erased.

2. Living Caravan built and dated to this year. The 1447 telling ended on the contemporary lament with no roll of the fallen; this refresh adds the series’ Closing Benediction and the Living Caravan — Imam Khomeini, Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi, Hajj Imad Mughniyeh, Hajj Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Hajj Qasem Soleimani, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (crossed over to the front he never left), and Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei (his lifelong refusal, the mithli lā yubāyiʿu mithlahu echo eleven days before, his martyrdom in Ramadan), under a single closing seal — and the prayer for the living Guardian, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei, “may God protect him.“

3. Register and close. The raw “vengeance” of the 1447 close is turned, per the series’ healed/covenant register, toward witness and the reckoning of God (”become his witnesses“; “become the answer you keep asking for“); the la’an is set in the locked mercy-distance form; the contemporary geography is carried but reframed as the fields where the witness is still borne.

4. Title. The Legacy of Clarification → The Legacy of Witness.

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ

وَعَلَى الْأَرْوَاحِ الَّتِي حَلَّتْ بِفِنَائِكَ

عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَّا جَمِيعًا سَلاَمُ اللَّهِ أَبَدًا مَا بَقِينَا وَبَقِيَ اللَّيْلُ وَالنَّهَارُ

وَلا جَعَلَهُ اللَّهُ آخِرَ الْعَهْدِ مِنَّا لِزِيَارَتِكُمْ

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَى الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَوْلَادِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَصْحَابِ الْحُسَيْنِ

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah (O Husayn),
and upon the souls who have gathered in your courtyard.

Upon you, from us all, is the peace of God—forever,
for as long as we remain and as long as night and day endure.

And may God never make this our last pledge to visit you.

Peace be upon al-Husayn,
and upon Ali, son of al-Husayn,
and upon the children of al-Husayn,
and upon the companions of al-Husayn.

— Adapted from Ziyarat Ashura

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ، وَعَلَى جَابِرِ بْنِ عَبْدِاللَّهِ الْأَنْصَارِيِّ، أَوَّلِ زَائِرٍ وَفَدَ إِلَى قَبْرِكَ، وَعَلَى كُلِّ مَنْ سَارَ عَلَى دَرْبِكَ إِلَيْكَ إِلَى يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ، وَرَحْمَةُ اللَّهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ.

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah — and upon Jabir, the son of Abdullah al-Ansari, the first visitor to arrive at your grave — and upon every soul who has walked your road toward you, until the Day of Resurrection; and the mercy of God, and His blessings.

A Maqtal for Night Fifteen

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of this series is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence upon the day his family was taken.

You have heard this voice for fifteen nights. You heard it break at the noon of the tenth, when the horses were sent across the body of his grandfather; you heard it climb back, night after night, steadier and lower, the voice of one who has learned to carry a grief without falling — and four nights ago, at the grave, when a blind old man's hand came down on the earth, you heard it come home. Tonight, for the first time in the whole series, it is whole from the very first word. Not because the grief is gone — it will never be gone. But because tonight is not a death. It is the homecoming the broken voice had been waiting for. He does not return to you tonight broken, and he does not return to you mourning. He returns to you the way a man comes home: whole, and quiet, and ready to keep a promise.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man; the nohe and creative direction are by Abdullah al-Mukhlis · the persistent flame upon the grey stone, and beside it tonight a single torn veil.

The accompanying sermon for this session — [15] Shahada (Witness) — The Covenant of Arbaeen— is available on Reflections313.

The Maqtal — “Until the Imam Rises”

I. The Solitary Flame

I was not there — but I remember.

Look at the stone. For fifteen nights there has been one thing on it that never changed — through every object I laid beside it, the bottle of earth, the letter, the cradle, the torn veil, the child’s bead, the pilgrim’s staff — one thing stood unmoved at the centre of all of them: a single candle. The beeswax taper on the grey slate. It has burned alone through every night of this series. It is the oldest thing here, and the quietest, and tonight it is the whole story.

But look closer, tonight, than you have looked before. Set around it now, small and humble, in their little cups, are a few unlit tealights. Plain things. The kind of light an ordinary person owns. They have been there all along, perhaps, and you only never noticed them — sitting dark beside the one flame, waiting. And tonight, as I tell you the last of the story, one by one, they are going to catch.

Because tonight is not a night of a death. We have had our fill of deaths, you and I, these fifteen nights; I have buried my whole family in front of you, and my voice has not been the same since the tenth. Tonight is a night of an arrival. Forty days ago the sky fell. Tonight the road that started with one blind man reaches its end — and the one flame, at the very last, begins to become many.

II. The Fortieth Day

It is the fortieth day. The twentieth of Safar. Forty days since the noon that broke the world.

Last night you walked with Jabir. Tonight he has arrived. The blind old companion of my grandfather the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, has reached the grave at last — he washed himself in the Euphrates as a man washes for the meeting of his life, he put on what little scent he had, and he laid his hand on the earth that holds Husayn, and he called the name, and he fell upon the grave weeping. He is the first. Of all the millions who will ever come, he is the first foot on the road, and behind his one blind step the whole river of pilgrims begins — the river that, in your own time, is the largest gathering of human beings anywhere on the face of the earth.

And hear me say the firm thing, the thing no one disputes, the thing you can stand on with your whole weight: that road has never closed. Every fortieth day since that one, the living have come back to this grave. Every single year, for thirteen centuries, they have come — and they are coming tonight, twenty million of them, while you sit where you are sitting; and you are one of them, on your carpet, in your room, with the same hand on the same earth across the same distance. The living and the dead stand together in the same place again. That is the reunion no one can take from you. It is not in a book you have to trust. It is happening, tonight, on the road and under your own hands.

III. The Caravan Comes Home

And the tradition our people have held and loved across the long centuries tells us something more — and I will tell it to you the way they have told it, because the love that built it was true.

They tell us that on this very fortieth day, the freed family of the Prophet — Sayyedah Zaynab, peace and blessings be upon her, and my grandfather Ali, the son of Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, and the children who had survived the fire and the chains — that coming back at last out of Sham, they turned their faces toward Karbala, and they came here, to this ground; and that Jabir, who had arrived, was here to meet them; and that the living of that broken household and the dead of it stood together, on the fortieth day, in the same place where the sky had fallen.

And here I must be honest with you, the way I have been honest with you on every night where the love of later generations reached past what the earliest pages preserved — the way I was honest about the little Ruqayyah, and about the things the chroniclers did not all record. Whether the caravan reached this exact ground on the very fortieth day of that first year, or whether the love of the generations after gathered the reunion onto this day because the heart needed the living and the dead to meet here — the histories differ, and I will not pretend to you that the record is more settled than it is. The earliest sources do not all carry it; it comes most fully through the later tellings; and faithful scholars have disagreed over it for centuries, with love on every side. So I do not hand it to you as a fact to defend. I hand it to you as a thing the love saw — and the love was not wrong about what matters, even where it cannot prove the day.

Because here is what cannot be taken: the surviving Imam, my grandfather, did come, in his life, to this grave. And over this earth he raised the words of a visitation — the ziyarat that the believer still recites on this day — read for the first time over the very ground it was made for. Whenever it happened, it happens still. That is the heart of it. The reunion is not only a thing that happened once. It is a thing that happens every fortieth day, forever — and it is happening now.

IV. The Covenant, Renewed

And here, on the last night, the telling has to stop being a telling.

Because you did not stand at Karbala. Neither did Jabir, in the way the companions did — he came forty days late, blind, with nothing left to give but a love that would not stay home. And neither did you. You were born thirteen centuries too late and a world away. But you have come to the fortieth day. You are here. And the covenant my grandfather renewed at this grave is the covenant I am asking you to renew now — with me — tonight.

So say it with me. Not as a story about people long dead. As a pledge, in your own mouth, on your own neck, tonight: I am with you — with you — not with your enemies. My help is made ready for you until God grants the leave. That is the covenant of every dawn, and the pledge of every Arbaeen, and the closing of the visitation, all become one sentence in your own mouth.

Do you feel what just happened? The weeping you came here to do tonight — it is not the end of anything. It is a seal. It is wax poured warm over a covenant freshly renewed, and pressed, and set. The tears are not grief spending itself. The tears are the signature.

V. You Have Been Bowing to God, on This Earth

And let me tell you one thing about the ground itself, before I let you go.

The earth that Umm Salamah kept in a bottle on the night I tell you I was born already grieving; the earth that received the body of my grandfather when there was no one left to dig the grave; the small clay tablet you press your forehead against five times a day, every day, the mohr in your pocket — it is all one earth. It is this ground.

Now hear me carefully, because this is the very heart of it, and it must never be mistaken: you do not bow to this grave. You have never bowed to this grave. A believer bows to God — to God alone — and to nothing and no one beside Him. That is the whole of our religion; it is the there is no god but God you have said on every one of these nights, the refusal of every lord but the one Lord. When you go down in prayer, you are not turning toward Karbala; you turn, as every Muslim turns, toward the House of God. But you bring your forehead down to the bare earth — the humblest, plainest thing there is — because the One you worship is best met with your face in the dust; and of all the dust in all the world, you lay your forehead on this dust. Not because the earth is worshipped — God forbid a thousand times — but because there is no earth anywhere that drank what this earth drank: the blood of the man who would not bow to anyone but God.

So understand what you have been doing your whole life. Five times a day, your prostration has gone up to God — and it has come down on Karbala. And in the very shape of it you were following my grandfather: for he too, at the very end — the last sajdah, the one we wept over on the tenth night — with the swords already above him, put his forehead to this ground and bowed to God, and only ever to God. The covenant was never far away. It was under your face the whole time. And the One you were bowing to was above it the whole time.

VI. Where Is Your Brother?

So I will not end tonight at a graveside. I have ended so many of these nights at a graveside; tonight I end on the road — because the road is where you are, and the road is where I am waiting for you.

I am at the end of it. Behind the veils, on the far side of my long absence, I stand at the end of the road every one of these pilgrims is walking, and I am watching for the dust of your coming. And I will tell you the truth about myself, on this last night, plainly: I am yet to rise. The grief is not over for me either; the waiting is not over; I am the one who has not yet been allowed to come. But look at the stone.

The one flame is many now. The candle that burned alone for fifteen nights has kindled a handful more — small, ordinary, humble lights, leaning their flames together, pushing what little brightness they have out into the dark around them, trying, the way the small and the faithful always try, to light up the whole world with what they were given. And that — that — is the only proof there has ever been that the light you received across these fifteen nights was truly received. Not what you felt. Not what you wept. The light you give.

So renew the covenant at dawn. And rise — rise for God, in the crowd and alone, on the road and in your own home. And walk. And do not walk alone. And when you come to the turn in the road where a brother of yours has fallen, do not pass him by — the way the first man, on the first morning of the world, passed his brother by and looked away.

Because the question is the same tonight as it was over that first body. It is the oldest question, and it is the only one that finally matters, and tonight, on the road every pilgrim walks, I ask it of you one last time — not as an accusation now, but as a homecoming:

Where is your brother?

And tonight — at last, after fifteen nights — you can answer. He is here. He is beside me on the road. His hand is in mine, his hand is in my pocket, and I did not pass him by, and I did not leave him in the field. We have come, together, to Husayn.

Renew the covenant, my beloved. Rise. Walk. And keep the light burning where I left you — until I rise, and find you exactly there: standing.

Sources Cited

This maqtal carries the fortieth-day return to the grave of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him — the first Arbaeen ziyarah of Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari, and the tradition of the reunion of the freed household at Karbala — and turns, at its close, into the renewal of the covenant by the living.

• Jabir’s arrival at the grave on the fortieth day — washing in the Euphrates, perfuming, his blind hand led to the grave, his calling out and weeping — is preserved in the Shia tradition principally through Imad al-Din al-Tabari, Bishārat al-Mustafa, narrated from Atiyya al-Awfi, and carried in the later ziyarah and maqtal literature and in Mafatih al-Jinan in connection with the Ziyarat of Arbaeen. Carried fully in the fourteenth night’s maqtal; recalled here. [VERIFY at the verbatim pass.]

• THE FORTIETH-DAY REUNION OF THE CAPTIVES AT KARBALA — a transparent note, carried openly per the series’ method (the same method we used for the Ruqayyah narration on the thirteenth night and the al-Darbandi material on the eighth). That the freed family of the Prophet, returning from Sham, reached Karbala on the very fortieth day of the year 61 and met Jabir there is debated among the historians and the scholars. The principal channel for it is Sayyid Ibn Tawus (al-Luhuf and al-Iqbal al-Aʿmaal); it was defended at book length by Sayyid Muhammad Ali Qadi Tabataba’i (Tahqiq dar bāra-yi awwalīn arbaʿīn-i Sayyid al-Shuhadāʾ). But it was not accepted by Muhaddith al-Nuri (Luʾluʾ wa Marjan) nor by Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi — the author of our own Nafas al-Mahmum and Mafatih al-Jinan — chiefly on chronological and geographic grounds: the distance from Damascus to Karbala against the days available makes a fortieth-day arrival, in the year 61, very difficult. The maqtal above therefore leans its weight on what no one disputes — that Jabir came; that the Arbaeen visitation is a sign of the believer (Imam Hasan al-Askari, via al-Tusi’s Tahdhib); and that the living have returned to this grave every fortieth day since — while carrying the caravan-reunion as the tradition our community has lovingly held, with one open acknowledgment in the Imam’s own voice and never a word of harshness toward those who hold it. We honour the love that built the tradition, and we charitably note why it formed: the forty-day motif of completion that runs through the faith (the forty nights of Musa; the forty days of purification from which wisdom is said to flow), and the deep human need for the living and the dead to be reunited where the loss occurred. [VERIFY: pin the exact Ibn Tawus / Qadi Tabataba’i / Nuri / Qummi citations at the verbatim pass.]

• The renewal-of-covenant pledge the congregation speaks in Section IV — “I am with you, with you, not with your enemies; my help is made ready for you until God grants leave” — is rendered in English in the maqtal body (per series convention, no Arabic in the maqtal body); the Arabic verbatim is carried in the sermon preamble, from Ziyarat al-Arbaʿeen (Mafatih al-Jinan; al-Tusi, Tahdhib al-Ahkam, narrated by Safwan al-Jammal from Imam al-Sadiq).

• The mohr / turbah line (Section V) closes the Maqtal 2 → Maqtal 10 earth-arc of the series in a single spoken line (Umm Salamah’s bottle of Karbala earth, Maqtal 2; the burial earth, Maqtal 10; the believer’s mohr) — narrated, not depicted; the motif object stays the candle and the tealights.

Notes on the telling, in keeping with the series’ method:

• The tabyeen is voiced by the Imam himself. Because the maqtal’s speaker is the Awaited Imam, who is family to the child, the honest framing of the thin record is placed in his mouth (Section I) — not as a scholar’s caveat from outside, but as a family member’s truthfulness from within. The honesty is meant to deepen the tenderness, not diminish it. We honour those who hold the tradition; we are never harsh toward them; we trust God with what the record cannot reach.

• Restraint over detail. The death scene (Section IV) is deliberately under-told. The series does not dwell on the cruelty; it dwells on the child.

• No Arabic appears in the body of this maqtal, per the series convention; the Arabic of the sermons and of the salaam and Qur’anic verses belongs to the sermon and the supplication.

• The maqtal voice is the first-person voice of the Awaited Imam, may God hasten his return, the figures’ own words are quoted as theirs.

On the 14th of Ramadan, 67 AH (April 687 CE), the grand palace of Kufa was surrounded by a sea of hostile banners. Inside, a small band of loyalists stood shoulder to shoulder with a man who had shaken the foundations of the Islamic world. He was bleeding, outnumbered, and aware that the end was near. Yet, his voice did not tremble.

This was Mukhtar ibn Abi Ubayd al-Thaqafi. And the words he spoke in those final hours were not the desperate pleas of a defeated man, but the crystallised testament of a martyr who had fulfilled his divine promise.

To understand the weight of Mukhtar’s final speech, we must first understand the man, his life, and the monumental mission he carried on his shoulders.

The Man Forged in the Shadow of the Ahl al-Bayt

Mukhtar was born in Ta’if around 622 CE, the son of Abu Ubayd al-Thaqafi, a renowned commander who was himself martyred fighting for justice at the Battle of the Bridge. From a young age, Mukhtar was raised in the luminous shadow of the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-Bayt). He was a devoted companion of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (AS), absorbing the Imam’s teachings on justice, governance, and unwavering resistance to tyranny.

His commitment was tested early. When Imam Husayn (AS) sent his cousin, Muslim ibn Aqil, to Kufa to gauge support, Mukhtar was among the first to pledge his allegiance. When the tyrannical governor Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad cracked down on the Imam’s supporters, Mukhtar was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. Even from behind bars, he attempted to send a warning to Imam Husayn (AS) about the shifting loyalties in Kufa, a warning that tragically arrived too late.

The Great Uprising: “Ya Latharat al-Husayn”

After the tragedy of Karbala in 61 AH, a suffocating silence fell over much of the Muslim world. Rulers consolidated power, and many who had invited Imam Husayn to Kufa washed their hands of his blood.

But not Mukhtar.

In 685 CE, after years of strategic preparation, Mukhtar launched a historic uprising in Kufa under a singular, thunderous slogan: “Ya Latharat al-Husayn” (O, Avengers of Husayn). His mission was not to build a dynastic empire or amass personal wealth. His mission was a divine tribunal. He sought to bring the perpetrators of the Karbala massacre to justice.

Against all odds, Mukhtar seized control of Kufa. In a campaign that sent shockwaves through the Umayyad and Zubayrid camps, he systematically hunted down the architects of Karbala. Umar ibn Sa’ad, Shimr ibn Dhil-Jawshan, Khuli ibn Yazid, and others who had raised their swords against the Prophet’s grandson were tracked down, tried, and executed. Mukhtar sent their heads to Medina, fulfilling a grim but necessary promise to the grieving family of the Prophet (S). For a brief, shining period, the banner of justice flew over Kufa.

The Final Stand: The Siege of the Palace

Mukhtar’s success made him the primary target of the regional powers. Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr, the ruler of Basra and brother of the caliph claimant Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, marched on Kufa with a massive, well-equipped army.

Betrayed by some of his own commanders who defected to the enemy, Mukhtar was forced to retreat into the Qasr al-Imara (the Governor’s Palace) with a few thousand loyal companions. For days, they withstood relentless assaults. When it became clear that the palace would fall, Mus’ab offered Mukhtar safe passage if he would surrender alone.

Mukhtar refused. He declared that he would not abandon the men who had stood by him in the name of the Ahl al-Bayt. He chose martyrdom over a life of compromised exile.

The Last Speech: A Warning Against Hypocrisy

As the walls were breached and the final battle commenced, Mukhtar gathered his steadfast companions. Historical accounts, echoed and immortalised in the cultural memory of the Ummah, record that his final address was a masterclass in clarity, courage, and spiritual insight.

He looked at his men and summarised his life’s work with profound simplicity:

He then turned their attention to the nature of the enemy they were about to face. He warned them that the greatest danger was not the swords of the army outside, but the insidious hypocrisy (Tazwir) of the ruling class. He described this hypocrisy as a two-faced coin: one side dressed in the garments of piety, religion, and political legitimacy to fool the common people; the other side bearing the image of Iblis (Satan), visible only to the people of knowledge and insight.

His final, chilling warning to his companions was a call to unbreakable resolve:

With those words, he drew his sword. Mukhtar fought fiercely until he was struck down, achieving the highest rank of martyrdom (Shahadah). He died as he lived: unyielding, principled, and entirely devoted to the family of the Prophet.

An Enduring Tribute

Today, centuries later, the empires that sought to crush Mukhtar al-Thaqafi have turned to dust. The names of those who betrayed Imam Husayn (AS) are cursed in the annals of history. But the name of Mukhtar is etched in light.

He teaches us that it is never too late to stand for justice. He teaches us that one man’s unwavering commitment to the truth can dismantle the machinery of oppression. And most importantly, his final speech remains a timeless warning: never be deceived by the hypocritical alliances of the powerful, for those who compromise with falsehood will ultimately be destroyed by it.

We honour Mukhtar ibn Abi Ubayd al-Thaqafi not merely as a historical figure, but as a timeless symbol of resistance. His blood watered the seeds of justice, and his final words continue to echo through the corridors of time, urging every generation to choose the difficult path of truth over the comfortable path of complicity.

Peace be upon the Avenger of Husayn, and upon all those who walk in his footsteps.

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ

وَعَلَى الْأَرْوَاحِ الَّتِي حَلَّتْ بِفِنَائِكَ

عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَّا جَمِيعًا سَلاَمُ اللَّهِ أَبَدًا مَا بَقِينَا وَبَقِيَ اللَّيْلُ وَالنَّهَارُ

وَلا جَعَلَهُ اللَّهُ آخِرَ الْعَهْدِ مِنَّا لِزِيَارَتِكُمْ

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَى الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَوْلَادِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَصْحَابِ الْحُسَيْنِ

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah (O Husayn),
and upon the souls who have gathered in your courtyard.

Upon you, from us all, is the peace of God—forever,
for as long as we remain and as long as night and day endure.

And may God never make this our last pledge to visit you.

Peace be upon al-Husayn,
and upon Ali, son of al-Husayn,
and upon the children of al-Husayn,
and upon the companions of al-Husayn.

— Adapted from Ziyarat Ashura

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ، وَعَلَى جَابِرِ بْنِ عَبْدِاللَّهِ الْأَنْصَارِيِّ، أَوَّلِ زَائِرٍ وَفَدَ إِلَى قَبْرِكَ، وَعَلَى كُلِّ مَنْ سَارَ عَلَى دَرْبِكَ إِلَيْكَ إِلَى يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ، وَرَحْمَةُ اللَّهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ.

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah — and upon Jabir, the son of Abdullah al-Ansari, the first visitor to arrive at your grave — and upon every soul who has walked your road toward you, until the Day of Resurrection; and the mercy of God, and His blessings.

A Maqtal for Night Fourteen

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of this series is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence upon the day his family was taken.

His voice broke at the noon of the tenth, and you have heard it climb back, night by night, since the sister rose to speak: steadier, lower, the voice of a man who has carried a long grief and learned to carry it without falling — but never, in all these nights, whole. Tonight it comes home. Not because the grief is over; it will never be over. But because tonight, for the first time since the trampling, the Awaited One follows a man who is walking the right way — toward the grave, not away from it — and somewhere on that road, at the moment a blind old man's hand finally touches the earth that holds his grandfather, the voice that has been broken for four nights stands up. You will hear it happen. It is not announced. It simply rises.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man; the nohe and creative direction are by Abdullah al-Mukhlis · the persistent flame upon the grey stone, and beside it tonight a single torn veil.

The accompanying sermon for this session — [14] Shahada (Witness) — The Living Witness— is available on Reflections313.

The Maqtal — “He Walked Toward Husayn”

I. The Lamp and the Staff

I was not there — but I remember.

There is something new beside the candle tonight. After all these nights of still things — a bottle of earth, a letter, a torn veil, a child’s broken bead — tonight there is a thing made for moving. A staff. A pilgrim’s staff, worn smooth at the grip by a hand that leaned its whole weight on it for years. Look at how it sits. Every other object we have laid on this stone has rested there. This one leans. It points. It is already halfway down a road.

Because tonight is not a night of a death. We have had our fill of deaths, you and I, these fourteen nights; I have buried my whole family in front of you, one by one, and my voice has not been the same since the tenth. Tonight is a night of a journey. Tonight I am going to tell you about a man who was not at Karbala — who arrived too late by forty days, who could not have lifted a hand to help even if he had been young enough, because he was old, and he was blind — and who, when the worst was already over and there was nothing in the world left to save, did the one thing that a witness can still do after the witnessing is finished. He got up, and he walked toward Husayn.

His name was Jabir. Jabir, the son of Abdullah al-Ansari. And I knew him — or rather, my grandfather the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, knew him, and loved him, and Jabir loved my grandfather Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, from the day Husayn was born. So let me tell you who he was, before I tell you what he did. Because who he was is the whole reason that what he did matters to you, tonight, sitting where you are sitting.

II. The Man Who Carried a Love for Ninety Years

Jabir was an old man by the time of Karbala. He had been a boy when the Prophet was alive — a young companion among the great companions — and he had outlived almost all of them. He had seen the beginning, and now he was living in the bitter aftermath, an old man in a world that had murdered the family of the Prophet it claimed to follow.

And across all of that — across the whole long arc of his life — Jabir had done one thing without ever once stopping. He had loved the House of Muhammad, out loud, when loving them out loud was dangerous. You understand what that cost. There were decades in which to say I love Ali, I love Husayn, the truth is with them was to mark yourself, to lose your safety, to be watched. And Jabir said it anyway, year after year, into every wind. He never lifted a sword for them — he was not a man of the battlefield, and by the end he could not have found the battlefield with his own eyes. But there is a kind of witness that does not need a sword, and we spent the whole of last night learning its name. The scholar at his desk. The mother in her childbed. The honest man on his road. The grades of witness. Jabir was all of them in one body — a living witness, who never struck a blow and never stopped bearing testimony, across ninety years, until the seeing went out of his eyes and the love only burned brighter for the dark.

And then they killed Husayn. And I want you to feel what that news did to a blind old man hundreds of miles away who had loved that child since the hour of his birth — a man who could not ride out, could not fight, could not even see to make his way to the grave. The most helpless witness imaginable. Old. Blind. Late. Everything that the world says makes a man useless to a cause.

And here is what Jabir understood, that the world does not: that there is no such thing as being useless to Husayn. That even the latest, the oldest, the blindest, the most helpless lover of the truth still has one thing he can do. He can turn his face toward it, and walk.

III. The Road of the Fortieth Day

So on the fortieth day — the twentieth of the month of Safar, forty days after the noon that broke the world — Jabir set out for Karbala.

He did not go alone. God, who is gentle even in the worst of it, gave the blind old man a companion — a younger man named Atiyya, Atiyya al-Awfi, who walked beside him to be his eyes, to hold his arm over the rough ground, to keep him from falling. Picture it. Not an army. Not a procession. Two men. One old and blind and burning; one young and steadying. The first two feet on the road.

The first. Understand what I am telling you. That road — the road from the cities of Iraq to the grave of my grandfather — is now, in your own time, the most-walked road on the face of the earth. Twenty million feet walk it, every single year, on these very days; a river of human beings, of every colour and every tongue, flowing toward a single grave. You have seen the pictures; some of you have walked it; some of you ache to. And all of it — the whole twenty-million-footed river — began with one blind old man and the friend who held his arm, picking their careful way across the desert toward a son of the Prophet who was already in the ground. Jabir opened that road. Every pilgrim who has ever walked it since is walking in the footprints of a man who could not even see where he was placing his feet.

And every step he took was a sentence. Do you understand? He could not give a sermon at the court like the sister did. He could not raise a sword like the companions. His witness was the walking itself — each painful step of an old man’s feet across the sand was a word in a testimony that said, with the whole weight of a body that had nothing else left to give: I am still his. The empire killed him and I am still his, and I am coming to him, and there is nothing you can do to stop an old man from walking toward the one he loves. Forty days the world had had to forget Karbala. And here came Jabir, on the fortieth day, refusing.

IV. The Hand Upon the Earth

And then they reached it.

Atiyya tells us — for it is Atiyya who carried this back to us, the young man who walked beside him — that when they came near to the grave, Jabir asked to be brought to the water of the Euphrates first. The blind old man washed himself in the river as a man washes for the most important meeting of his life. He put on clean things. He took what little perfume he had and he wore it — an old man, perfuming himself, the way you ready yourself to come before someone you have loved your whole life and are about to meet at last. And then he asked Atiyya: take me to him. And Atiyya took his hand, and led him, step by careful step, across the ground where forty days before the whole sky had fallen — and he placed the hand of Jabir upon the grave of Husayn.

And the old man’s hand came down on the earth.

And everything he had carried for ninety years — every silent year of a dangerous love, every step of that long blind road, every grief of an old man who had outlived the whole bright morning of his faith — all of it arrived, at once, in the palm of a hand pressed against cold ground. He cried out. He called the name. Husayn. He called it the way you call into a house you already know is empty — Husayn, Husayn— and the strength went out of his old legs and he fell, fainting, onto the grave of the one he had come to find. A beloved, come at the very last to the beloved. Late, and blind, and undefeated.

— and hear my voice now, my beloved; hear what is happening to it. For fourteen nights I have spoken to you from under a weight. Since the noon of the tenth I have not been able to lift it. But I am standing beside Jabir at this grave, and his hand is on the earth that holds my grandfather, and an old blind man who could do nothing — nothing but love, and nothing but walk — has just laid a whole faithful life down upon that earth as the purest witness I have shown you in all these nights; and something in me, that has been bowed since the trampling, stands up. Because this is the answer. This is the thing the broken voice was waiting four nights to be told. They did not win. They trampled the body, and forty days later a blind man walked across a desert to kiss the ground, and twenty million walk it now, and they will walk it when every throne that ever stood is dust. The grave they dug to end him became the road that has no end.

And then — this is the part I most need you to carry out of this room — Atiyya, the young man, looked at the old man weeping on the grave, and a question rose in him, an honest question, the very question the whole of last night was built on. He asked it. Jabir — how? How can you grieve like this, how can you be counted with them, when you were not even here? You did not fight. You were not on the field. You were forty days and a hundred miles away. How does the one who was absent share in the witness of the ones who were present?

And Jabir, blind, with his hand still on the earth, lifted his head and told him what my grandfather the Messenger of God had taught him with his own mouth, long before — that whoever loves a people will be gathered with them on the Day of Standing; and whoever loves the deeds of a people, shares in their deeds. Whoever loves a thing is raised among those who did it. And Jabir said — I have my heart set, by the One who sent Muhammad with the truth, upon what the House of Muhammad set their hearts upon; my love is for them, and my road is toward them, and so their portion is my portion, though I never raised a hand.

Do you hear it? Do you hear what the first pilgrim said at the first grave? You do not have to have been there. You have to have loved it enough to walk toward it. That is the whole of last night, spoken by a blind man on the fortieth day. The witness is the willingness, and the willingness is proven by the walking. Jabir was not at Karbala. Jabir is of Karbala forever — because he loved it, and he walked toward it, and God counts the one who walks toward Husayn among the ones who stood beside him.

V. And You Are on His Road

And that, my beloved — that is why I brought you here tonight, to a journey instead of a death.

Because you were not at Karbala either. Not one of you. You were born thirteen centuries too late and a whole world away; you have wept for my family on these fourteen nights from a room they have never seen, in a language they never spoke, under the flag of one of the very empires we named tonight. And a voice in you — the same honest voice that spoke in Atiyya — has perhaps wondered, quietly, in the dark: what is my grief even worth? I was not there. I can do nothing. I am late, and far, and small.

You are Jabir. That is my answer. You are the old blind man on the road, and your weeping is not nothing, and your love is not too late, and your distance does not disqualify you. Every one of you who turns your face toward Husayn tonight — whether you walk the actual road to his grave on the fortieth day, or whether your whole pilgrimage is to cross your own living-room to the place where you pray, or whether the only road open to you is the unwatched refusal in your own chest to bow to a throne you were ordered to bow to — every one of you is walking the road Jabir opened. You are his caravan. The river that began with two men still has not reached its end, and you are in it.

And you do not walk it alone, and you do not walk it empty-handed, because the road is crowded now with the ones we named tonight — the whole chain of our own lifetime walking just ahead of you toward the same grave: the boy from Zahedan who mailed his death to Karbala; the commander who asked for the thirst of Husayn and the severed hands of al-Abbas; the man who gave up his own name; the one you watched leave on the glass of your hand; the journalist in the tent who died bearing witness; the guardian struck in his own house, whose last word was the verse of the covenant kept; the children, the broadcast children, the smallest pilgrims of all. They are all on Jabir’s road. They all walked toward Husayn. And so do you.

VI. Where Is Your Brother?

So I will not end tonight at a graveside, the way I have ended so many of these nights. Tonight I end on the road — because the road is where you are, and the road is where I am waiting for you.

I am at the end of it. Behind the veils, on the far side of my long absence, I am at the end of the road every one of these pilgrims is walking, and I am watching for the dust of your coming. The blind man reached the grave. You are still walking. And the only thing I ask of you — I, the Awaited One, may our Lord hasten my return — is that you do not stop, and that you do not walk it alone, and that when you reach the turn in the road where a brother of yours has fallen, you do not pass him by. Pray ardently for my return, my beloved; and walk; and look, as you walk, for the one beside the road.

Because the question is the same tonight as it was over the first body, on the first morning of the world — the question God asked of the first man who let his brother be killed and looked away. It is the oldest question, and it is the only one that finally matters, and tonight it is asked of you on the very road Jabir opened:

Where is your brother?

Sources Cited

This maqtal carries the account of Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari’s pilgrimage to the grave of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, on the fortieth day after Ashura — the first Arbaeen ziyarah — narrated by his companion Atiyya al-Awfi.

• Jabir and Atiyya’s arrival at the grave — the washing in the Euphrates, the perfuming, Atiyya leading the blind Jabir by the hand to the grave, Jabir’s calling out and fainting upon the earth — is preserved in the Shia tradition principally through Imad al-Din al-Tabari, Bishārat al-Mustafa li-Shīʿat al-Murtada, narrated from Atiyya al-Awfi; the account is carried in the later ziyarah and maqtalcompilations and in Mafatih al-Jinan in connection with the Ziyarat of Arbaeen. [VERIFY at the verbatim pass: confirm the exact wording of Jabir’s address at the graveside and the Bishārat al-Mustafa reference; the body above renders the substance in English (no Arabic in the maqtal body, per series convention), not a verbatim translation.]

• The Prophet’s teaching that Jabir relates to Atiyya — “whoever loves a people will be gathered with them, and whoever loves the deeds of a people shares in their deeds” — is a teaching preserved across the tradition (cf. the well-known “al-marʾu maʿa man aḥabba” — “a person is with the one he loves” — and the “man aḥabba ʿamala qawmin ushrika fī ʿamalihim” family of narrations). Rendered here in English as Jabir’s report of what he heard from the Messenger of God. [VERIFY: pin the precise narration and its source at the verbatim pass.]

• A transparent note on the historicity (carried openly, per the series’ method): this maqtal deliberately carries only Jabir’s own walk and arrival on the fortieth day. It does not depict the return of the captives’ caravan to Karbala on that same day — the question of whether the freed family of the Prophet reached Karbala on the very fortieth day, and met Jabir there, is debated among the historians and the scholars; some of the earliest sources do not record it, and the famous “reunion at the grave” comes chiefly through later tellings. The deeper, honest treatment of that question belongs to the fifteenth night — the night of Arbaeen itself — where it will be handled as openly as we handled the Ruqayyah narration on the thirteenth night and the al-Darbandi material on the eighth: honour the love, render the tradition faithfully, never pretend the record is more settled than it is, and never be harsh toward those who hold it. Tonight we needed only the thing that every source holds and that no one disputes: that a blind old companion of the Prophet walked to the grave of Husayn on the fortieth day, and was the first.

Notes on the telling, in keeping with the series’ method:

• The tabyeen is voiced by the Imam himself. Because the maqtal’s speaker is the Awaited Imam, who is family to the child, the honest framing of the thin record is placed in his mouth (Section I) — not as a scholar’s caveat from outside, but as a family member’s truthfulness from within. The honesty is meant to deepen the tenderness, not diminish it. We honour those who hold the tradition; we are never harsh toward them; we trust God with what the record cannot reach.

• Restraint over detail. The death scene (Section IV) is deliberately under-told. The series does not dwell on the cruelty; it dwells on the child.

• No Arabic appears in the body of this maqtal, per the series convention; the Arabic of the sermons and of the salaam and Qur’anic verses belongs to the sermon and the supplication.

• The maqtal voice is the first-person voice of the Awaited Imam, may God hasten his return, the figures’ own words are quoted as theirs.

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ

وَعَلَى الْأَرْوَاحِ الَّتِي حَلَّتْ بِفِنَائِكَ

عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَّا جَمِيعًا سَلاَمُ اللَّهِ أَبَدًا مَا بَقِينَا وَبَقِيَ اللَّيْلُ وَالنَّهَارُ

وَلا جَعَلَهُ اللَّهُ آخِرَ الْعَهْدِ مِنَّا لِزِيَارَتِكُمْ

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَى الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَوْلَادِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَصْحَابِ الْحُسَيْنِ

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah (O Husayn),
and upon the souls who have gathered in your courtyard.

Upon you, from us all, is the peace of God—forever,
for as long as we remain and as long as night and day endure.

And may God never make this our last pledge to visit you.

Peace be upon al-Husayn,
and upon Ali, son of al-Husayn,
and upon the children of al-Husayn,
and upon the companions of al-Husayn.

— Adapted from Ziyarat Ashura

A Maqtal for Night Thirteen

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of this series is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence upon the day his family was taken.

His voice broke at the noon of the tenth, and you have heard it climb back, night by night, since the sister rose to speak. It is steadier now — level, low, the voice of a man who has carried a grief a long way and learned to carry it without falling. It is not yet whole; it will not be whole until the nights ahead are walked, until a blind old man reaches a grave he has loved for a lifetime. But tonight it does not need to be whole. Tonight it needs only to be gentle. Because tonight he speaks of the smallest of them — and to her. To the little one of the house.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man; the nohe and creative direction are by Abdullah al-Mukhlis · the persistent flame upon the grey stone, and beside it tonight a single torn veil.

The accompanying sermon for this session — [13] Shahada (Witness) — A Child in the Dungeon— is available on Reflections313.

The Maqtal — “A Child in the Dungeon”

I. The Bead on the Stone

I was not there — but I remember.

There is a very small thing beside the candle tonight. You have to look for it. A bead, the kind that comes loose from a child’s bracelet and rolls into a corner and is found, days later, by a mother who then cannot breathe. A little bangle, thin enough for a wrist that has not yet grown. It is the smallest thing we have ever laid upon this stone — and that is right, because tonight is for the smallest of us.

I am going to tell you about a little girl. And before I do, I have to be honest with you about her, the way I have made myself be honest about the hard things on every night — because honesty is the only gift worth giving to the dead.

The books that carried her could not agree on her. They could not agree on her name — some called her one thing, some another, and the name you know her by now, Ruqayyah, settled onto her only late, after long centuries of love had already wrapped her in it. They could not agree on her age — three, some said; four, said others. And the oldest tellings of how she died are themselves late tellings; the earliest histories, the ones who counted the men and the swords, did not pause over a little girl who died of grief in a ruin, and so her story comes to us mostly through the books of mourning, through the centuries of weeping that could not bear to let her go. I will not stand here and pretend the record is whole. It is not. There are scholars who have loved her and still said, honestly, and God knows best. And they were right to say it.

But hear me, my beloved. I do not need a chronicler to remember the children of my own house. I do not learn my family from a manuscript. There was a little one. The captivity was real — that, every book holds. The cold of Sham was real. The children of that broken caravan, crying in the dark for fathers who would never come — that was real, whatever the historians did or did not write down. And God, who counted every one of them when the empire could not be bothered to, kept her. He kept the one whose very name the record almost lost. A whole city has wept for her for thirteen hundred years. A shrine stands over a small grave in Damascus to this hour, and the people who go there to weep are not fools, and the love that brought them is not a lie. The third night of every Muharram, somewhere in the world, belongs to her.

So I will tell you of her the way my family has always told of her — tenderly, and truly, and without pretending to know what cannot be known. Look at the little bead on the stone while I speak. And come down with me into the dark.

II. The Road and the Ruin

They took the children to Sham.

You know the road by now; we have walked it together these last two nights. From Karbala, in chains, on foot — the widows and the orphans of the House of Muhammad, driven like a herd across the desert, with the heads of their fathers on the points of spears going on ahead of them. From Karbala to Kufa. From Kufa, the long weeks to Damascus. And in that caravan, my beloved — among the women bound and the boy in irons — were the children. The little ones. The ones too small to understand what an empire is, or why their world had ended, or where their fathers had gone.

Think of what a child is on a journey like that. A child does not understand politics. A child understands that her father used to lift her up, and now he does not. A child understands hunger, and cold, and the faces of frightened grown-ups, and the strange new fact that the people around her flinch when they used to smile. The grown women of the House carried the meaning of Karbala — they carried the theology of it, the sermons that would shatter two courts. The children carried only the loss. And the loss, in a child, has no walls around it. It is the whole of her.

And at the end of that road was Sham — and a ruin. A broken place, the chronicles of mourning tell us, with no proper roof and no warmth and no comfort; a place to keep prisoners who did not matter. They put the family of the Prophet of God in a ruin. And the little one I am telling you of was somewhere in that cold, among the others, missing her father with the bottomless, wordless missing that only a small child can do.

She kept asking for him. That is the thing the tradition has held onto across all the centuries, the thing too true to let go of: she kept asking where her father was. And for a while, they told her what you tell a child to keep her heart alive a little longer. He is travelling. He will come. Soon. They held the truth back from her the way you hold a blade back from a small hand. They let her keep her father a few more nights, in the only place he was still alive — in a little girl’s certainty that he was coming back.

III. The Little One Who Asked for Her Father

I was not there — but I remember.

And I remember a night in that ruin when she woke crying.

She had seen him. In the place where the dead are kind to us, in a dream, she had seen her father — and she woke calling for him, the way a child wakes from a dream so vivid that the waking world seems like the lie. Where is my father? I saw him. Where is he? Take me to him. And there is no sound in all the telling of Karbala — not the clash of the swords, not the cry at the river — there is no sound harder to bear than that one. A small girl in the dark, awake and certain, asking the women of a ruined house to bring her the one man they could not bring her.

What do you do, my beloved? What does a household of captive women do, in the cold, with the children’s heads of their own dead a few rooms away on the points of spears, when the smallest one wakes and asks for her father and will not be soothed? They had held it back as long as a heart could hold it. They had given her every gentle lie that love invents. And now the lies had run out, the way they always run out, and the child was awake and asking, and there was nothing left between her and the truth.

And the tyrant — for the tyrant was near, in his hall, and the sound of a crying child reached him — the tyrant gave an order.

IV. What They Brought to the Cell

I will tell this part the way it should be told. Gently. I will not give the empire the satisfaction of dwelling on its cruelty; I will dwell, instead, on her.

They brought her father to her.

They brought to that cold ruin the thing the soldiers had carried on a spear from Karbala to Kufa to Sham. They set it down before a little girl who had asked, and asked, and would not stop asking, to see her father. And they uncovered it.

I am not going to describe it to you. You are her family tonight, as I am, and we do not describe such a thing about our own. I will tell you only what the heart of the telling has always been: that a small child was given, at last, the father she had been promised — and that what was given to her was not the father who lifted her up, but only what the swords had left of him.

And the chronicles of mourning say she gathered it to herself. That a little girl took her father’s head into her small arms, the way she must have been held by him a hundred times, and she spoke to him — the way a child speaks, with all the unanswerable questions a child has: who will raise the orphans now; who will be there for us; why did you let them do this; I wish I had died before this; I wish I had not seen your face like this — and that, holding him, asking him, she trembled, and her small heart, which had been breaking all along the road from Karbala, simply could not hold the last of it. And she was gone. There, in the cold, holding her father, a child of three or four went to where the grief could not follow her.

She did not have to grow up in that ruin. God did not make her carry it for years, the way He made her cousin carry it, the way He made the sister carry it. He let the little one lay her grief down early, in her father’s arms — the only place she had ever wanted to lay anything down. That is not the empire’s mercy. The empire had none. That is His.

V. The Grade That Was Hers

Now lift your eyes from the dark for a moment, my beloved, and hear what your teacher told you tonight, before he sent you down here to me. Because everything he taught you was for this.

He taught you that the witness is not only the one who falls on a field with a sword in his hand. He taught you that the word itself widens — that it reaches out from the battlefield to gather in everyone wronged, everyone struck down unjustly, until it can hold a woman of this House in her own doorway, and a baby of six months at the edge of a dry river, and — yes — a little girl who died of grief in a ruin in Sham. She did not choose. She could not choose; she was three years old. And the One who does not need our choosing chose her. The grade is God’s to give. And He gave it to her.

Hear me say it plainly, so it lands where the doubt sits: she is a shaheedah. A witness. Of the House of the witnesses, the smallest of them, and not the least. She testified to nothing with a sword and to everything with her broken heart. And do you see, now, why I told you at the start to be honest about how thinly the record kept her? Because that is the whole proof. The world barely wrote her down. The historians who counted the soldiers did not count her. Her very name came to her late, through the love of strangers across the centuries. And none of that — none of it — touched her station by so much as a hair. The witness is not measured by how loudly the record kept it. God keeps the witness the record forgot. She is the proof of it. She is the smallest proof and the surest.

And she is not alone, my beloved. She has cousins. She has the infant at the river, Ali al-Asghar, six months old, who could not choose either. She has — and let me say this gently, because it is happening still — she has the six-month child who never breathed the air, carried by a teacher into a prayer hall in a town in the south on a morning earlier this very year, when the bombs came down on a school full of little ones at their lessons. A hundred and sixty-eight of them. She has the children of Gaza, and of Lebanon, and of every place where a roof became a grave. None of them chose. Every one of them was wronged. And every one of them God has gathered into the same House that holds the little one of Sham — the House of the wronged who are not defeated, the witnesses the world called victims and Heaven calls alive.

She is not a victim, my beloved. She was wronged — God knows she was wronged — but she was not overcome. The empire that broke her heart is dust and a curse in the mouths of the living. And she is in the courtyard of God, in the arms of the father they could not finally keep from her, and her name is on the lips of a hundred million people who were not even born when she died. Tell me which of them won.

VI. Where Is Your Brother?

I was not there — but I remember. And I remember that the line they tried to end in that cold ruin did not end. It ran on — through the boy in irons who lived, through the Imams of guidance, down all the centuries, into the room where you are sitting, into you. You are holding it now.

And so I ask you the question I ask at the close of every night — the question the first blood asked from the first field, the question God asked the first murderer when the first witness lay in the dust. Only tonight I ask it softly, because tonight it is asked over a very small grave.

Where is your brother?

Where is the little one of the house? She is here. She is in the bead on the stone. She is in the third night of every Muharram. She is in every child you have watched, this year, pulled from the rubble of a school — for she is their elder sister, and they have run to her, and she has gathered them the way her aunt once gathered her. And she is asking you, through me, the only thing she ever asked anyone: will you not come to my father? Will you not stand where I could not stand, and hold the line I was too small to hold, and bear the witness that was taken from me before I could grow up to give it?

To me, the Awaited One, may our Lord hasten my return — pray ardently for my return, my beloved. For I am coming for her. I am coming for the little one of the house, and for the infant at the river, and for the hundred and sixty-eight, and for every child whom an empire called a number and God called a witness. And I am coming, too, for the grown who fell not on any field of battle, but upon the road of their service — those you have learned, in your own days, to call the Martyrs of Service, who set out to carry water and life to My people and were carried home to Me along the way; the little one of the house gathers the small and the great alike, and she waits with them all. And when I rise, every wronged child of every ruin will be gathered to their fathers at last, and the long account of the oppressors will be opened and read aloud, and not one bead, not one bangle, not one small forgotten name will be missing from the reckoning.

Keep the little bead in your eye as the candle burns down. And when you go from here tonight, go gently — the way you would walk past a child who has finally, after a long and terrible road, fallen asleep.

Sources Cited

The narrative of a young daughter of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, dying in the captivity of Sham — most familiarly known today as Sayyedah Ruqayyah — is preserved chiefly in the later mourning tradition, and its historicity is openly debated among our own scholars. This maqtal renders it in that spirit: honouring the love that carried it, telling it tenderly, and being transparent about the record. The honest chronology, cross-read principally from the survey of the sources:

• The early record is silent. The foundational historians and maqtal-authors — Abu Mikhnaf (via al-Tabari), and the Twelver authorities Shaykh al-Mufid (al-Irshad) and al-Tabarsi (Iʿlam al-Wara) — name the daughters of Imam Husayn as Fatima and Sukayna, and do not record a young daughter dying of grief in the court or ruin of Sham. A direct reading of al-Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 45 (the captivity/Sham volume) confirms the secure frame — the captivity, the court of Yazid, the heads upon the spears — but does not contain the death-in-Sham narrative of a young daughter.

• The narration enters late. The earliest telling of a child of Imam Husayn dying in Sham appears in Kamil Bahaʾi of ʿImad al-Din al-Tabari (d. c. 700 AH), drawn from an older lost source — and there she is unnamed, four years old, dying in the palace of Yazid.

• It grows in the telling. Husayn Waʿiz Kashifi elaborates it in Rawdat al-Shuhada (d. 910 AH) — the same work this series has flagged before, for the Qasim wedding-embellishment of the sixth night; Fakhr al-Din al-Turayhi (al-Muntakhab, d. 1085 AH) is the first to give the age as three and to add the extended speech to the severed head, a source our scholars have widely criticised. The name “Ruqayyah” for this child is fixed firmly only in the late thirteenth/nineteenth and early fourteenth/twentieth centuries.

• The shrine in the al-ʿAmara district of Damascus is venerated from at least the tenth/sixteenth century; Sayyid Muhsin al-Amin (Aʿyan al-Shiʿa) records it, and adds, in the spirit we have kept tonight: “and God knows best.”

Notes on the telling, in keeping with the series’ method:

• The tabyeen is voiced by the Imam himself. Because the maqtal’s speaker is the Awaited Imam, who is family to the child, the honest framing of the thin record is placed in his mouth (Section I) — not as a scholar’s caveat from outside, but as a family member’s truthfulness from within. The honesty is meant to deepen the tenderness, not diminish it. We honour those who hold the tradition; we are never harsh toward them; we trust God with what the record cannot reach.

• Restraint over detail. The death scene (Section IV) is deliberately under-told. The series does not dwell on the cruelty; it dwells on the child.

• No Arabic appears in the body of this maqtal, per the series convention; the Arabic of the sermons and of the salaam and Qur’anic verses belongs to the sermon and the supplication.

• The maqtal voice is the first-person voice of the Awaited Imam, may God hasten his return, the figures’ own words are quoted as theirs.

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ

وَعَلَى الْأَرْوَاحِ الَّتِي حَلَّتْ بِفِنَائِكَ

عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَّا جَمِيعًا سَلاَمُ اللَّهِ أَبَدًا مَا بَقِينَا وَبَقِيَ اللَّيْلُ وَالنَّهَارُ

وَلا جَعَلَهُ اللَّهُ آخِرَ الْعَهْدِ مِنَّا لِزِيَارَتِكُمْ

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَى الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَوْلَادِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَصْحَابِ الْحُسَيْنِ

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah (O Husayn),
and upon the souls who have gathered in your courtyard.

Upon you, from us all, is the peace of God—forever,
for as long as we remain and as long as night and day endure.

And may God never make this our last pledge to visit you.

Peace be upon al-Husayn,
and upon Ali, son of al-Husayn,
and upon the children of al-Husayn,
and upon the companions of al-Husayn.

— Adapted from Ziyarat Ashura

A Maqtal for Night Twelve

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of this series is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence upon the day his family was taken.

His voice carried us through ten nights of Muharram, and broke at the noon of the tenth. Last night, at the sound of his aunt's words, it began to find its feet. Tonight it is steadier still — quiet, level, the voice of a held line — though it is not yet whole. Tonight he tells us of his grandfather: Ali, the son of Husayn, Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him — the one the swords were not permitted to reach, who carried the testimony out of the field on a bed of chains, and who, when he could no longer raise a sword, raised his hands.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man; the nohe and creative direction are by Abdullah al-Mukhlis · the persistent flame upon the grey stone, and beside it tonight a single torn veil.

The accompanying sermon for this session — [12] Shahada (Witness) — The Prayer for the Frontiers — is available on Reflections313.

The Maqtal — “The Prayer for the Frontiers”

I. The Bead on the Stone

I was not there — but I remember.

There is a small thing beside the candle tonight. A string of prayer-beads, resting on the grey stone. You have watched many things lie beside that flame across these nights — a torn veil, an empty cradle, a standard with no hand to carry it.

Tonight it is only this: a quiet chain of beads, the kind a man turns in his fingers in the dark when there is nothing else left in his hands. Look at it while I speak. Because tonight is the night of the one whose only weapon, in the end, was the thing you do with beads like these. Tonight is the night of the prayer.

My voice is steadier now.

You have heard it climb back, night by night, since it broke at the trampling. It is not yet whole — it will not be whole until the nights ahead are walked. But it can carry this. And it must, because the one I tell you of tonight is the reason any of us survived to carry anything at all. He is my grandfather. Ali, the son of Husayn. The one they could not kill, because God would not let them — because the line had to live, and he was the one chosen to carry it.

Hold the beads in your eye. I will tell you how a man holds a frontier with nothing but his hands turned upward.

II. The One Who Was Kept

He was burning with fever on the day of the tenth.

That is how he lived. My grandfather lay in the tents of the women, too ill to lift a sword, too weak to stand among the men of the morning — and so, when the swords had finished their work on every other man of the House, they came to the tents for him too. They came for the last man. And the chronicles tell what happened: that the order was given to kill the sick young man on his sickbed, and that my aunt Zaynab threw herself across his body and said he is not killed except that you kill me first — and even the hardest of them faltered, and the order was withdrawn.

Understand what that means, my beloved. He did not survive because he was spared. He survived because God placed an illness in his body that kept him from the field, and placed his aunt’s body between him and the blade, and kept him — kept him alive, on purpose, against the whole intention of the empire — so that the thing the swords were sent to end would not end. They cut down every man who could fight. They did not understand that the one they almost overlooked, the fevered boy in the tent, was the one who would carry the whole of it forward. The empire counts swords. It does not know how to count a line.

He was the remnant. The one who was left. And we have spoken, you and I, of the grief of the one who is left — it is heavier than the grief of the one who falls. My grandfather woke into that grief: the one surviving man, in a field of his slaughtered family, with the women of the Prophet’s house weeping around him and the enemy already binding their hands.

III. The Chains and the Road

They put iron on him.

This is the thing I make myself say plainly, the way I have made myself say the hard things on every night. They took the great-grandson of the Messenger of God — sick, barely able to stand — and they fixed an iron collar upon his neck and chains upon his hands, and they drove him out of Karbala on foot and in fetters, at the head of a caravan of widows and orphans, with the heads of his father and his uncles and his brothers raised on the points of spears above them.

From Karbala to Kufa. From Kufa, the long road to Sham. Weeks of it. The desert by day, the iron on his skin, the children of the House crying for water and for the dead, and at the front of the column the severed heads of everyone he had loved. And through the whole of it, my grandfather — chained, ill, grieving past what a body should survive — carried himself as what he was: the Proof of God upon the earth, walking in irons through the cities of the people who had killed his father.

The chains were meant to say one thing: this is what is left of the House of Muhammad — a sick boy in a collar, a line about to end. And the chains said, to anyone with eyes, the opposite. Because the line was not in the sword. The line was in him, and no iron forged could chain what he carried. They bound his neck. They could not reach the thing they were actually trying to kill.

IV. The Court

You stood with me last night in the throne room of Damascus. I will not walk you through it again — my aunt’s standing there, and his, belong to the night that has just passed, and I will not take from her what was hers. I will tell you only the one thing that belongs to tonight.

When the tyrant set a hired tongue upon his pulpit to slander my family, my grandfather — chained, in that hall, sick almost to death — asked to climb the same pulpit. And he did not plead, and he did not beg. He simply told the room who he was, link by link, until the whole court understood whose sons they had paraded in chains. And when the tyrant, frightened of his own hall, called for the prayer to silence him, and the caller said I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, my grandfather turned and asked him before them all: this Muhammad — is he your grandfather, or mine?

There was no answer. There has never been an answer.

And I want you to see, tonight, what his weapon was in that hall. He had no army. He had no freedom. He had a collar on his neck. His weapon was the open word — the testimony said plainly, in the room where it was least welcome. He did to the empire with a sentence what no sword in that court could have done. And then they sent him home. They thought they were releasing a broken man to live out his days in silence. They had no idea what they were releasing him to do.

V. The Prayer Was the Weapon of the Occupied

Here is the heart of it, my beloved. Listen, because this is the night’s whole secret.

They let my grandfather go home to Medina. And they watched him. Every door of the open road was closed to him. He could not teach from a pulpit — the pulpit belonged to the men who had killed his father, and a teaching circle that looked like a gathering would have ended in his death and the death of the line. He could not raise an army; the men were in the ground at Karbala. He could not raise his voice in the open; the spies of Sham sat in the mosque of his grandfather and listened.

So when he could no longer raise a sword — he raised his hands.

And when he could no longer teach in the open — he taught in the one language a tyranny cannot ban without revealing itself for what it is. He taught his servants how to pray. He sat in the long nights of his grief, and he wept until they called him the one who weeps, and out of that weeping he poured the whole of the religion into supplication. The fear of God, the love of Him, the ethics of the believer, the rights that one soul owes another, the manners of the heart, the architecture of a just order — all of it, smuggled past the censor inside the one thing the censor could not touch: a man talking to his Lord. He hid a curriculum inside a book of prayers. And the book has come down to us, hand to hand, across all the centuries between, and we call it the Sahifa — the scripture of the household, the psalms of the family of Muhammad.

And in that book is the prayer this night is named for. The Prayer for the Frontiers.

Think of what it is, my beloved. A man under occupation, forbidden to hold any line in the open, sat down and held a line in a prayer. He prayed for the guardians of every frontier — and he taught, inside the prayer, what a frontier truly is, and how it is held: that the wall is never the fortress, that the fortress is the care of God; that the line is first held inside the heart, before any sword is drawn; that the whole purpose of the line is to keep safe the place where a forehead may still go down to God alone; and that the reward of the frontier belongs even to the one who never fought it — to the one who only gave a little, or only guarded an honour, or only prayed. He wrote a whole doctrine of how to stand at a seam and not be moved — and he wrote it as a man whom the empire believed it had already finished.

That is what the chained man did with his hands turned upward. He did not survive the killing of his family and fall silent. He took the testimony that the swords had tried to end, and he hid it where no sword could reach — in the prayers of the believers — and he set it loose into every century that would ever come after. The empire that killed his father is dust and a byword. The prayer he wrote is on the lips of the People of the Frontiers in our own days. That is the weapon of the occupied. When they take everything else, the prayer remains. And the prayer is enough.

VI. The Long Vigil

I was not there — but I remember.

And I remember that the line my grandfather held on a bed of chains has never once been let fall. It ran from him to his son, and down the Imams of guidance, one entrusting it to the next — until it reached me, here, behind the veils of my long absence. And because I am kept from you, it did not stop; it ran on, through the scholars who guarded his prayers under every passing tyrant, to the reciter, into the room where you are sitting — into you. You are holding it now. The same prayer. The same line.

And in your own age, the same frontier still stands, and the same kind of people still hold it — almost none of them with a sword. The scholar at his desk in the dark, keeping the weak from being overrun by lies. The doctor who will not leave the wounded. The mother who will not let her children drift. The ones who tied themselves to God and stood at the seam between the oppressor and the oppressed, and were taken for it — the reciter of my grandfather’s prayer who became one of the People of the Frontiers; the man who told his daughter that he had bound himself to God and to nothing else, and then went and held the line until it cost him his life. I will name them in full on the nights to come. Tonight, my grandfather stands at the head of all of them — the first of the line-holders who held a frontier with a prayer.

To me, the Awaited One, may our Lord hasten my return — pray ardently for my return, my beloved, for I am the one for whose dawn my grandfather held the line in the dark. And when I rise, the last frontier between the oppressor and the oppressed will close, and the earth will be handed to those who held its lines for nothing but the love of God.

And so I ask you the question I have asked at the close of every night — the question the first blood asked from the first field. Only tonight I ask it of the chained man in the tent, the one they almost overlooked, the one they thought they had finished.

Where is your brother?

He held the line that I am coming to complete. He is in every prayer you say from his book. He is in this room. He is in you — and he is waiting for you to turn your own hands upward, and hold the frontier that is yours.

Sources Cited

The narrative spine of this maqtal — the survival of the ill Imam at Karbala, the captivity and the iron, the court at Damascus, and the long Medinan vigil out of which the Sahifa came — rests on the classical maqtal and history tradition, cross-read, principally:

• Sayyid Ibn Tawus, al-Luhuf ʿalā Qatlā al-Tufūf — the captivity and the driving of the caravan from Karbala; the heads upon the spears; the court of the tyrant.

• Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, Nafas al-Mahmūm — the illness of Imam Zayn al-Abidin at Karbala; the order to kill him and Sayyedah Zaynab’s shielding of his body; the iron collar and chains of the journey.

• al-Majlisi, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 45 — the aftermath, the captivity, the court of Yazid, and the return to Medina (page citations to be set at the verification pass).

• Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon him, al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya — the supplications as the Imam’s mode of teaching under occupation; Supplication 27, Du’a Ahl al-Thughur (the Prayer for the Frontiers), the prayer this maqtal is named for.

• al-Tabarsi, al-Iḥtijāj — the sermon of Imam Zayn al-Abidin in the court of Yazid (“is he your grandfather, or mine?”), kept deliberately light here, the fuller telling having been given on the Eleventh Night.

Notes on the telling, in keeping with the series’ method:

• The Damascus court is kept brief by design. The full telling of the sermons of Kufa and Damascus — Sayyedah Zaynab’s and Imam Zayn al-Abidin’s both — was given in the maqtal of the Eleventh Night, The Witness After the Witness; tonight stays with the grandson and his particular weapon, the prayer.

• The shielding of the Imam — “he is not killed except that you kill me first” — is carried in the captivity tradition (al-Qummi, Nafas al-Mahmūm; Biḥār al-Anwār vol. 45) and is rendered here in English as the widely-transmitted sense of the moment.

• The thirty-four years of Imam Zayn al-Abidin’s imamate after Karbala, and the composition of the Sahifa under Umayyad surveillance, follow the standard biographical tradition; the Sahifa as “doctrine encrypted in supplication” is the reading the sermon develops.

• No Arabic appears in the body of this maqtal, per the series convention; the Arabic of the sermons and of the salaam and Qur’anic verses belongs to the sermon and the supplication.

• The maqtal voice is the first-person voice of the Awaited Imam, may God hasten his return, the figures’ own words are quoted as theirs.

Into the Heart of the Battle

The film opens by setting the scene of a nation under sudden attack by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. While political turmoil brewed in Tehran—exacerbated by the mismanagement and hesitations of then-President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr—Ayatollah Khamenei sought permission from Imam Khomeini to leave his political posts and head directly to the frontlines.

Arriving in Ahvaz under the cover of absolute darkness, Ayatollah Khamenei, alongside the legendary Dr. Mostafa Chamran, immediately began organising the resistance. Swapping his clerical robes for a simple military uniform, he worked to unite the fragmented defensive forces. The documentary highlights their instrumental role in establishing the Irregular Warfare Headquarters, which became a vital hub for mobilising everyday citizens, local tribes, and dedicated volunteers into a formidable defence force.

Faith and Tactical Ingenuity

The documentary is rich with historical anecdotes of tactical ingenuity and spiritual resilience. With Iraqi tanks advancing dangerously close to Ahvaz, Ayatollah Khamenei supported a brilliant asymmetrical strategy: releasing the waters of the Karkheh River to flood the plains, effectively bogging down the enemy’s armoured divisions in the mud and halting their advance.

Beyond tactics, the core of the film is the profound spirit of the volunteers. The narrative captures deeply moving personal accounts, such as Ayatollah Khamenei overhearing a volunteer calmly bidding a final farewell to his family in Turkish, fully prepared to embrace martyrdom. It was this unwavering faith—the realisation that these men were fighting for a divine cause rather than mere territory—that fuelled the resistance despite a severe lack of equipment and support from the formal chain of command.

Breaking the Siege of Susangerd

A central climax of the documentary revolves around the dire situation in Susangerd. With the city surrounded and its defenders—a small, starving contingent of Air Force personnel and IRGC volunteers—facing imminent massacre, Ayatollah Khamenei recognised that losing these brave souls would be a far greater tragedy than losing the territory itself. Bypassing Bani-Sadr’s delays, he relentlessly coordinated a joint operation between the regular army (Artesh), the IRGC, and Chamran’s irregulars, setting the stage for the historic breaking of the Susangerd siege.

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا أَبَا عَبْدِاللَّهِ

وَعَلَى الْأَرْوَاحِ الَّتِي حَلَّتْ بِفِنَائِكَ

عَلَيْكُمْ مِنَّا جَمِيعًا سَلاَمُ اللَّهِ أَبَدًا مَا بَقِينَا وَبَقِيَ اللَّيْلُ وَالنَّهَارُ

وَلا جَعَلَهُ اللَّهُ آخِرَ الْعَهْدِ مِنَّا لِزِيَارَتِكُمْ

اَلسَّلاَمُ عَلَى الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى عَلِيِّ بْنِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَوْلَادِ الْحُسَيْنِ

وَعَلَى أَصْحَابِ الْحُسَيْنِ

Peace be upon you, O Aba Abdillah (O Husayn),
and upon the souls who have gathered in your courtyard.

Upon you, from us all, is the peace of God—forever,
for as long as we remain and as long as night and day endure.

And may God never make this our last pledge to visit you.

Peace be upon al-Husayn,
and upon Ali, son of al-Husayn,
and upon the children of al-Husayn,
and upon the companions of al-Husayn.

— Adapted from Ziyarat Ashura

A Maqtal for Night Eleven

The Voice of the Awaited One

This maqtal is spoken, as every maqtal of this series is spoken, in the voice of the Awaited Imam — the Mahdi, the son of Hasan, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — looking back across the veils of his long absence upon the day his family was taken.

Ten nights his voice carried us — from the first blood of Abel, through the prophets, through Karbala’s companions and its young men, to the noon of the tenth when the horses were turned across the body of his forefather, and the voice broke. Tonight it speaks again — lower than it was, and slower, and not yet whole — because tonight he tells us of the one whose standing taught his own grief how to stand: his aunt, Sayyedah Zaynab, peace and blessings be upon her. Listen as the broken voice, at the sound of her words, begins to find its feet.

Voiced in the series’ Mahdi-Maqtal-Voice — an imagining of the Awaited Imam’s voice, rendered in clear English by the means of our age, belonging to no living man; the nohe and creative direction are by Abdullah al-Mukhlis · the persistent flame upon the grey stone, and beside it tonight a single torn veil.

The accompanying sermon for this session — [11] Shahada (Witness) — The Witness After the Witness — is available on Reflections313.

The Maqtal — “The Witness After the Witness”

I. The One Who Was Left

I was not there — but I remember.

I remember that when the swords had finished, and the dust began to settle on a field that held everyone I have ever called my own, there was a sound the chronicles almost forget to record.
It was not the sound of the killing.
The killing had a sound, and you have heard me carry it, and last of all it broke in my throat and I could not finish the line.
No.
This was the sound that came after.
It was the sound of the ones who were left.

My beloved — there is a grief that falls to the one who dies, and the tradition has wept over it for fourteen hundred years.
But there is another grief, and it is heavier, and it is given to the one who does not get to die.
To stand in the wreckage of everyone you loved, and to be told by your own heart: you must live.
You must carry this.
You are not finished.
That grief was my aunt’s.
And of all that I carry from that day, hers is the weight I have understood the least, and honoured the most.

They would pull the veils from the heads of the women before the sun went down.
Hold that.
The cloth that a daughter of the Prophet had never let a stranger’s eye fall upon — that would be taken.
Keep that torn cloth in your mind through everything I am about to tell you. It is the measure of what was done.
And it is the measure of what she rose above.

II. The Mound

She did not stay in the tents.

When the circle closed on my forefather, my aunt Zaynab came out — out to a small rise of ground where she could see the whole of it — and she watched.
She watched the thing that no human eye should be made to watch, and she did not look away.

And she cried out — not a small cry.
She cried for the order of creation itself to come undone rather than permit what it was permitting.
”Would that the sky had fallen upon the earth,” she cried,
”Would that the mountains had been crushed down upon the plain.”
My beloved, that is the cry that lives closest to where my own voice broke.
When I tell you that the voice you are hearing tonight is not yet whole — it is here, at this cry, that you can hear the crack in it most clearly.
I have carried her would that the sky had fallen for twelve centuries, and it has never once stopped meaning what it meant that afternoon.

And then — and this is my aunt, this is who she was — she did not only grieve.
She turned to the commander of the army that was killing her brother, and she called him by his name, and she said:
”Will Abu Abdillah be killed while you stand and watch him?”
The man wept into his beard.
And he did not stop his soldiers.
But mark it, my beloved: the first thing she did was not to weep in private.
The first thing she did was to name the guilty to his face.
From the very first second, hers was the voice of a witness.

III. The Body, and the Offering

Then she walked out onto the field.

I have tried, across all these centuries, to find words for that walk, and I have not found them.
She walked through the bodies of the people she had loved her whole life.
She walked to the place where my forefather lay — and I will not describe to you the state in which he lay; you stood with me at the tenth night, and you know.
And she knelt.
And she put her hands beneath that holy body, and she lifted it, a little, toward the sky.

And she did not say they have destroyed us.
My beloved — listen, because here is where my voice begins to come back to me — she lifted the worst thing that had ever happened to a human family up toward the heavens, and she named it an offering.
”O God,” she said, “accept from us this sacrifice.”

I was not there — but I remember the moment grief became an offering.
And I will tell you a secret of that hour: it was not my own strength that has carried my voice these twelve centuries.
It was hers.
When the trampling broke me, it was my aunt who had already shown me how a heart stands inside a thing that should shatter it.
She took the meaning of the day out of the enemy’s hands and put it into God’s hands.
The empire held the field.
My aunt held what the field meant.
And the moment she did that — the moment the offering left her lips — something in me that had broken at the noon of the tenth began, very slowly, to find its feet again.

IV. The Chains Became a Pulpit

They bound them.
They roped the women and the children of the House of the Prophet together, and they raised the heads of my family on the points of their spears, and they drove the caravan out toward Kufa as a parade.

Understand what they intended, my beloved.
They intended a victory march.
They were going to walk my family through the cities of the world in chains as the proof that the matter was finished, that the regime had won, that resistance was a corpse in a field behind them.

And my aunt took the parade they built to break her, and she turned it into the opening of a trial.
Every town became a court.
Every staring crowd became a jury that would have to answer, one day, for what its eyes had seen and its tongue had not denounced.
The chains they meant as her humiliation — she wore them up onto a pulpit.
I was not there — but I remember that the empire thought it was leading a procession of the defeated, and did not understand, until it was far too late, that it was escorting the prosecution into its own house.

V. Kufa — The City That Wept Too Late, and the Word That Healed

They brought them first to Kufa.
Kufa — and you, who walked the fourth night with me, you know what that name costs.
The city of the eighteen thousand letters.
The city that invited my family and then abandoned my ambassador to die alone on its rooftops.
Now the people of Kufa lined the road to watch my family driven past in chains — and they began to weep.

They wept.
After everything, they wept.

And my aunt raised her hand — and a whole city fell silent before a captive woman.
And she did not thank them for their tears.
She told them what their tears were worth.
”O people of Kufa, she said, O people of treachery and betrayal — do you weep now?
Then let your tears never dry.
You are like the woman who unravels her own thread after she has spun it. How will you ever wash away the murder of the son of the Seal of the Prophets?”

My beloved — she stood in chains in the city that had killed her brother, and she did not beg it for pity.
She handed it its indictment.

And then they brought her before the governor — before the one who had given the orders, in his hall, swollen with his victory. And he looked at the woman whose entire family he had just destroyed, and he tried to wound her with a question.

”How did you see, he asked her, what God did with your brother and your house?”

And my aunt gave the answer that I could not reach on the tenth night.
The answer that, when I heard it, let my broken voice stand all the way up.
She looked at the man who had taken everything from her, and she said:

“I saw nothing but beauty.”

She did not mean she did not see the horror.
She had carried the horror in her own two hands.
She meant that through the horror she had seen the one thing he could never reach — the covenant kept, the offering accepted, the witness that would outlast him and his whole empire.

I was not there — but I remember the word my aunt gave the governor.
And I will tell you the truth of it, my beloved: it was not my own endurance that taught my voice how to go on after the trampling.
It was her word.
It was “I saw nothing but beauty.”
The strength you hear returning to this voice tonight — it is borrowed.
I borrowed it from my aunt.

VI. Damascus — The Court, and the Two Who Would Not Kneel

And then the long road to Damascus, into the very throne room of the empire.

He had the head of my forefather brought before him on a tray, and he took a cane in his hand, and — my beloved, I have carried this for twelve centuries and I will say it once and move on — he struck the teeth of that holy head with his cane, and he recited the poetry of his pagan grandfathers, and he said, before his whole court, that this was his revenge for the idolaters his family had lost two generations before.
He confessed it.
In his own hall, drunk on his own victory, he confessed that he had killed the family of the Prophet to avenge the enemies of the Prophet.

And my aunt rose.

A captive.
Unveiled — the cloth taken from her head.
Exhausted past what a body should survive.
Surrounded by the entire power of the world.
And she dismantled him where he sat.
”Do you imagine,” she said, “that because you have driven us as captives, we are despised before God and you are honoured? …
Plot all you wish — by God, you will never erase our remembrance, nor put out our light, nor wash this shame from yourself.”

And then she named what he was: “O son of the freed ones.”

The grandson of the pardoned, slaughtering the grandsons of the One who pardoned.
She raised no sword.
She raised his own genealogy, and it cut him to the floor of his own court.

And there was one more of us in that hall the empire had not counted — my grandfather, Ali, the son of Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, the one survivor among the men, sick almost to death, bound in his chains.
And when the tyrant set a hired tongue upon the pulpit to slander my great-grandfather Ali, my grandfather asked to climb that same pulpit — and what came out of him made the room weep.
He did not argue.
He simply told them who he was.

“I am the son of Mecca and Mina,” he said.
”I am the son of Zamzam and Safa … I am the son of the one slain at Karbala, thirsty; the son of the one whose head was raised upon a spear; the son of the one whose women were driven captive from Iraq to Sham.”

And when the tyrant, frightened of his own court, ordered the call to prayer to silence him — when the caller reached the words “I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God” — my grandfather turned to him and asked, before them all:

“This Muhammad — is he your grandfather, or mine?”

There was no answer.
There has never been an answer.
And men stood and walked out of that hall rather than pray behind him.

My beloved — the voice you hear is steadier now.
It is not whole; it will not be whole until I tell you, on another night, of the one who walked an old man’s road to my forefather’s grave.
But it is standing.
They had nothing — no army, no freedom, not even the veils on their heads — and with a clear voice and the truth they brought a dynasty to the ground.
That is what the witness after the witness did with nothing.

VII. The Door Toward the Fortieth Day

I was not there — but I remember.

And I remember that the road did not end in Damascus.
It turned, at last, back toward the grave — toward the fortieth day.
And what was carried on that road is what we will walk together, the nights ahead.
The prayer my grandfather left for the guardians of every frontier, when he could no longer raise a sword and so raised a supplication.
The smallest of the house, weeping in the dark of a ruin in Sham.
The old companion of my grandfather the Prophet, blind and bent, who would set out to walk to my forefather’s grave when his own feet could barely carry him — the first pilgrim, the first of the twenty million who walk every year still.
And the reunion, on the fortieth day, of the living and the dead in the same place again.

The chain that my aunt opened in the market of Kufa has not closed.
Not in twelve centuries.
It ran from her to my grandfather, from my grandfather to the scholars who guarded the words, from them to the reciter, from the reciter into the room where you are sitting — into you.
You are the witness after the witness now.
And in your own age the same line still stands and still falls: the ones who would not give their allegiance to the false lords of the hour, who carried the testimony in the open and never by the shadow, and who were taken, one after another, for it.
I will name them in full on the nights to come.
Tonight my aunt stands at the head of them all.

And so I ask you the question I have asked at the close of every night, the question the first blood asked from the first field — only tonight I ask it the way the empire, without knowing it, asked it of my aunt.
They thought they were asking:
”Where is the one you loved? Where is your brother? We have taken him; what do you have left?”

And she answered with the whole of her life.
”He is here.”
He is in every mouth that still says his name.
He is in this room.
He is in you.

“Where is your brother?”

He is here.
He has always been here.
And he is waiting for you to stand the way she stood.

Sources Cited

The narrative spine of this maqtal — the witnessing from the height, the going-out to the body, the captivity, and the sermons of Kufa and Damascus — rests on the classical maqtal and history tradition, principally:

• Sayyid Ibn Tawus, al-Luhuf ʿalā Qatlā al-Tufūf — Sayyedah Zaynab’s witnessing from the height (“would that the sky had fallen…”), her address to Umar ibn Sa’d, and her answer to Ibn Ziyad, “I saw nothing but beauty.”

• al-Mufid, Kitāb al-Irshād, vol. 2; Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi, Nafas al-Mahmūm — the going-out to the body and the captives’ departure; the mound (tappe) detail.

• al-Majlisi, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 45 — the aftermath, the captivity, and the courts (page citations to be set at the verification pass).

• al-Tabarsi, al-Iḥtijāj; Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfūr, Balāghāt al-Nisāʾ (3rd c. AH) — the sermon of Sayyedah Zaynab in Kufa and in the court of Yazid.

• al-Tabarsi, al-Iḥtijāj; Maʿālim al-Madrasatayn — the sermon of Imam Zayn al-Abidin in the court of Yazid (“I am the son of Mecca and Mina…” and the adhan confrontation).

Notes on the telling, in keeping with the series’ method:

• The qurban prayer (“O God, accept from us this sacrifice”) is rendered as the husayniyya tradition has carried it — true to her station, not traced to the earliest chains; presented as the tradition’s words, not as early-isnad verbatim.

• “Til-e-Zaynabiyyah,” the name of the height from which she watched, is a later devotional designation; the event of her watching from a height is in the early sources.

• No Arabic appears in the body of this maqtal, per the series convention; the Arabic of the sermons and of the salaam and Qur’anic verses belongs to the sermon and the supplication.

• The maqtal voice is the first-person voice of the Awaited Imam, may God hasten his return, the figures’ own words are quoted as theirs.

Grand Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli has paid tribute to 398 martyrs of the Iranian Army in a video message to a commemoration ceremony in the northern city of Amol, honouring the fallen while mourning a friendship of seventy years brought to an end by the martyrdom of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution.

Among the martyrs he singled out was Major General Sayyed Masoud Monfared Niyaki — a freethinking and widely respected figure of Amol’s noble Sadat lineage who, the Grand Ayatollah said, pursued a military career and ultimately attained the lofty station of martyrdom.

He recalled, too, an earlier generation of the city’s martyrs: the 1981 uprising in which the people of Amol defended their city against an enemy attack and offered forty of their own, an episode recorded in the political-divine testament of Imam Khomeini.

“The Iranian nation has never initiated aggression,” he said, “but it will give no quarter to any invader.”

‘A 70-year companionship is not a small thing’

The message’s most affecting passage came when the Grand Ayatollah, visibly choked with emotion, turned to the martyred Leader — not as a figure of state, but as the friend he had known longest.

“We express our gratitude to the Supreme Leader and pray for our own martyr,” he said. “This dear friend of ours — from the day I entered Qom seventy years ago, despite a slight age difference, we were friends until now. A 70-year companionship is not a small thing. For a person to lose a friend of seventy years, it is no small loss.”

The companions of Karbala

Placing the martyrs of Amol within a longer lineage, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli affirmed:

He recounted the sacrifice of Saeed ibn Abdullah Hanafi on the Day of Ashura as an enduring example of loyalty to Wilayah and the defence of truth, saying the secret of Ashura’s endurance lies in the sincerity and self-sacrifice of the Imam’s companions — a magnetic force that still draws millions to the Arbaeen pilgrimage.

The presence and sacrifice of ordinary people in defence of their country, he added, was itself a manifestation of divine support, citing the Quranic verse “It is He who supported you with His help and with the believers” (al-Anfal 8:62). The spontaneous mobilisation of men, women, the young and the old was, he said, that promise made visible.

How the martyrs fought

The Grand Ayatollah also spoke of the conduct required of those who take up arms. Citing a narration from Imam Sadiq (AS) that the Prophet Muhammad (S) never launched surprise night raids on his enemies, he said:

“We are students of a divine school unparalleled in time and space. The Holy Prophet, despite facing enemies intent on killing him, never launched a night raid. Islam is a religion of chivalry and nobility, instructing us to fight even disbelievers with integrity, never deviating from humane and divine principles.”

Imam Ali (AS), he noted, would delay battle as long as possible through dialogue and negotiation, preferring to begin later in the day so that the noon hour of divine mercy and the approach of night might limit the bloodshed — unless the enemy struck first and defence became imperative.

Gratitude, and a plea for calm

Thanking those who had held the ground, he said: “We appreciate each and every one of you — elders, brothers, sisters, daughters, and sons,” extending his gratitude also to the officials who had safeguarded the struggle.

He closed by urging security, calm, and unity. “God forbid we take a path that lacks divine approval. Never let a displeasing word leave your pure lips. If there is an opinion or a plan, it must be voiced in a friendly atmosphere. Let this country be administered with total calm and security, so that we may deliver this Islamic system to its true owner.”

His final words were a prayer for the martyrs — for Imam Khomeini, for the late president, and for all who have fallen — asking God to resurrect them with Imam Husayn (AS), and to bestow His special grace upon their mothers and their families.

Reference: ABNA24

In the heart of Iraq’s Hilla city, historically known as Babylon, stands a sacred shrine that draws thousands of pilgrims each month. They come with heavy hearts and desperate prayers, seeking blessings and healing for their sick loved ones. This is the final resting place of Sayyida Shareefa (Al-Alawiyya al-Shareefa), the young daughter of Imam Hassan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose brief but profound life continues to inspire faith and offer solace to believers more than thirteen centuries later.

A Life Marked by Suffering

Sayyida Shareefa’s life was one of extraordinary hardship from its very beginning. Born into the noble household of the Ahlul Bayt, she entered this world at a time of great turmoil. Historical accounts indicate she was merely a month old when her beloved father, Imam Hasan (a.s), was poisoned and martyred.

From infancy, Sayyida Shareefa suffered from chronic illness and remained severely underweight throughout her short life. The physical toll of her condition was so severe that she was often mistaken for being years younger than her actual age. Though she lived for eleven years, many who knew her estimated her age to be no more than seven at the time of her passing.

Her suffering intensified during the tragic events of Karbala. Despite her fragile health, she endured the scorching desert journey, the unbearable hunger and thirst, and the brutal battle that claimed so many of her family members. The aftermath brought further trials—the harsh conditions of captivity and enslavement compounded her already weakened state, ultimately leading to her untimely death at just eleven years old.

In accordance with tradition, her cousin Imam Zainulabidin (a.s) and her aunt, the noble Lady Zainab (s.a), laid her to rest with dignity and love.

A Sanctuary of Healing

Today, Sayyida Shareefa’s shrine in Hilla stands as a beacon of hope for the faithful. Pilgrims from across the region and beyond visit her resting place, drawn by her reputation as an intercessor who, by the blessings of Allah Almighty, grants healing to the sick.

The belief among the faithful is unwavering: Sayyida Shareefa never turns away a pilgrim who prays at her shrine for recovery. Parents bring their ill children, families pray for their ailing elders, and the desperate seek miraculous cures—all finding comfort in the spiritual presence of this young saint who herself knew so much suffering.

The Miracle of the Tobacco Merchant

The story of how Sayyida Shareefa’s shrine came to be built is one of divine intervention and fulfilled vows, passed down through generations.

In the 1940s, during either the late Ottoman period or British rule of the region (accounts vary), tobacco trade was heavily restricted or banned, with strict government control over its distribution. A tobacco merchant, fleeing from authorities who were pursuing him for illegal trade, found himself desperately seeking refuge.

Carrying sacks of what was presumably tobacco, he stumbled upon a modest structure in Hilla—a simple shed built with palm tree logs and a flat roof that marked the burial site of Sayyida Shareefa. In his desperation, he entered the humble shrine and made a vow: if Sayyida Shareefa interceded on his behalf and he escaped without harm, he would build a proper shrine with a dome over her grave.

The authorities soon caught up with him. When they demanded to know what he was carrying in his sacks, he replied, “Sesame seeds.” The officials, suspicious of his claim, opened the sacks to inspect the contents—and to their eyes, they found nothing but sesame seeds.

The merchant himself was bewildered. He had purchased tobacco, he was certain of it. Had he been deceived by the seller? He remained silent, not wanting to complicate his situation further.

When the authorities, finding no contraband, released him and went about their business, the merchant opened his sacks once more. There, before his eyes, the sesame seeds had transformed back into tobacco.

In that moment, he understood. This was no coincidence—this was the intercession of Sayyida Shareefa, the young saint who had heard his desperate prayer and granted him miraculous deliverance.

True to his word, the tobacco merchant fulfilled his vow. He constructed the first known proper shrine over Sayyida Shareefa’s grave, complete with a dome, replacing the simple palm-log structure that had stood before.

A Legacy of Faith and Intercession

The story of Sayyida Shareefa reminds believers of several profound truths: that age is no measure of spiritual stature, that suffering can be a path to closeness with Allah, and that the Ahlul Bayt’s intercession continues to reach believers across the centuries.

Though she lived only eleven years, though her body was frail and her life marked by hardship, Sayyida Shareefa’s spiritual legacy towers large. Her shrine in Hilla stands not merely as a monument to a young girl who suffered, but as a living testament to the power of faith, the reality of divine intercession, and the enduring mercy of Allah Almighty.

For the pilgrims who walk through its doors each month—carrying their worries, their sick children, their desperate prayers—Sayyida Shareefa remains what she has always been: a compassionate intercessor who understands suffering, who never turns away a sincere supplicant, and through whom Allah grants healing and hope to those who seek it.

May Allah increase the status of Sayyida Shareefa and grant healing to all who seek it through her blessed shrine. Ameen.

Yesterday, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the world bid farewell to a singular figure known to many simply as “the Japanese.” In his life and presence reflected a lifetime dedicated to immense struggle and an unyielding, selfless commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Transcending Identity and Geography

He was a hero who saw past the rigid boundaries of identity, nationality, and geography. Recognising that the fight for justice is a universal, humanitarian duty, he embraced the Palestinian cause as his own. Through his historic actions—including his prominent role in the Lod Airport operation—he made profound and lasting sacrifices in support of a people yearning for liberation.

He embodied the truest model of a revolutionary human being: one who believed implicitly in human values, championing freedom and justice in the face of tyranny, injustice, and racism.

His lifelong dedication served as living proof that the quest for Palestinian liberation remains the vital compass for free people across the globe.

A Legacy of Solidarity

Through his extraordinary journey and personal sacrifices, Okamoto confirmed a powerful truth: no human being, regardless of their background or how far they live from the front lines, has an excuse to remain silent. He demonstrated that physical distance cannot sever our moral obligation to stand with the oppressed against occupation and to champion righteous causes.

We extend our deepest condolences to his family, his comrades, and all who loved him. May his legacy of relentless struggle remain a timeless model, inspiring the free people of the world to continually draw upon his spirit in the enduring fight for freedom, justice, and resistance against the forces of arrogance.

Exploring a vision of resilience, national strength, and devotion

The video “The Most Incredible Untold Stories About Ayatollah Khamenei” offers a profound look into the life, leadership philosophy, and personal interactions of Ayatollah Khamenei. Through a series of reflective moments, speeches, and anecdotal evidence, the footage captures a leader deeply connected to the struggles and aspirations of the Iranian people.

A Philosophy of Resilience

Central to the narrative is the concept of standing firm in the face of adversity. The Ayatollah emphasises that great individuals are defined by their ability to confront and overcome challenges—whether natural disasters or man-made crises—rather than being defeated by them. His leadership style is presented as one rooted in empathy, where he seeks to share in the sorrows of his people with the hope of eventually sharing in their joy.

The Importance of National Unity and Family

The footage highlights the leader’s view of society as an extended family. He notes that just as a parent manages a household with a combination of love, guidance, and sometimes correction, a leader must foster unity within a diverse society. He stresses the importance of seeing all citizens—regardless of their differences—as “our children” and “our people,” advocating for an inclusive approach to national governance.

Dedication to the Nation’s Future

The video portrays a leader who is deeply invested in the country’s trajectory. Referencing past struggles and the sacrifices made during the sacred defense, the content underscores a vision of Iran as a nation defined by its resistance and cultural depth. He expresses a firm belief in the capabilities of the younger generation and the Iranian people, predicting that their collective efforts will lead to a future that is “brighter and more brilliant than the past”.

A Call for Martyrdom and Persistence

The narrative also delves into the themes of martyrdom and steadfastness, honouring those who dedicated their lives to the service of the nation, such as Qasem Soleimani. The Ayatollah speaks with reverence for those who have sacrificed, framing their lives and deaths as milestones that reinforce the nation’s resolve. Throughout, the underlying message is one of endurance—an insistence that the path of resistance will ultimately secure Iran’s sovereignty and global standing.

When the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, “The example of a scholar in a community is like the example of a lamp in a dark house,” he was describing the very light that was extinguished in Tehran on the day of the martyrdom of Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Yet what the enemy could not extinguish was the light that had already passed into the hearts of the forty-three million who came to the funeral — and the uncounted millions more who mourned in silence across the world.

I am neither a Muslim nor a Shi’a, but I am a poet and a historian of civilisations. When the Islamic Culture and Relations Organisation of Iran invited me to attend the funeral of the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, I accepted with a heart already heavy with the reverence one learns in my own culture for those who sacrifice their lives for their people. What I witnessed in Tehran was not merely a state funeral. It was the laying bare of a nation’s soul.

At the Mosalla: A Soul That Lived Among Us

The Imam Khomeini Mosalla in Tehran was vast, yet it could not contain the grief of a nation. There, on the 3rd of July, I stood among dignitaries and foreign guests as the coffin of the martyred Leader was carried in. The silence was not emptiness — it was the solemnity of a people who understood that they had lost not a ruler, but a father.

I watched as the crowd surged forward in endless waves: elders who could barely walk, mothers cradling infants, young men with tears streaming unashamedly down their beards. The grief was not manufactured. It was as deep as the ancient roots of Persia itself. As a Chinese man, I have seen my own people weep for the great figures who guided our nation through its darkest winters. I recognised that same spirit in the faces of the Iranians. This was not the sorrow of subjects for a king. This was the grief of a flock for its shepherd.

Ayatollah Khamenei was, by every account I gathered, a rare man of multidimensional gifts: a statesman of piercing strategic vision, a religious scholar of exacting intellectual rigour, and a poet whose verses spoke directly to the Persian soul. His was not a leadership of titles and decrees. It was a leadership of presence, of wisdom, and of an unwavering commitment to the dignity of the oppressed.

The Poetry of Resistance: Where Two Civilisations Met

Of all the moments that seared themselves into my memory, none was more profound than an evening spent in the company of an Iranian cultural official. We sat on Persian carpets, drank tea, and he recited from the *Shahnameh* of Ferdowsi, then the verses of Saadi and Hafez. He did not recite them as a performance. He breathed them as naturally as the air itself.

I told him that in China, we recite the poetry of Li Bai, Du Fu, and Su Shi in the very same way — the poetry of the Tang and Song dynasties flows through our blood as the Persian poetry flows through theirs. We smiled at each other, and in that instant, two ancient civilisations found their most profound resonance.

It is the poetry of a civilisation that reveals its true soul. And what I discovered in Iran was a civilisation that nourishes itself through verse, coheres itself through faith, and confronts the barbarities of the modern world through an unshakeable dignity that no sanction can erode.

The Coffin of the Martyr: From Najaf to Karbala

The enemy that martyred the Leader intended to sow discord and division. But God, in His wisdom, turned their evil into a testimony of unity. I learned that the coffin of the martyred Leader was carried to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq — the spiritual heartlands of the Shi’a world. And there, the Iraqi people, a people who share a history of both brotherhood and conflict with Iran, lined the streets for hours. They did not ask for passports. They did not ask for nationalities. They asked only to touch the coffin, to weep for the martyr, and to reaffirm a bond that transcends the borders drawn by empires.

As a historian, I am aware of the wounds of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. Yet as I watched those scenes from Najaf, I understood that spiritual bonds forged in shared struggle and shared faith can heal what political grievances cannot. The enemy martyred one man, but in doing so, they revealed the unity of millions.

The Bazaar and the Tech Park: A Nation That Refuses to Bow

I walked through the traditional bazaars of Tehran and the modern technology parks on its outskirts. I haggled with the warm and shrewd merchants. I met young engineers who are building Iran’s future amid the suffocating grip of sanctions — their laboratories buzzing with the defiant energy of a people who refuse to be broken.

As a Chinese, I know what it means to build a civilisation under siege. I know what it means to be denied the tools of the world because the powerful fear your independence. When I looked into the eyes of those Iranian engineers, I saw the same fire that once burned in my own country. I extend my deepest respect to them. They are not merely scientists. They are soldiers of a different kind — guardians of a nation’s right to stand tall.

A Shepherd’s Final Lesson: To Live for God, to Die for the People

On the morning of my departure from Tehran, I looked back at the city from my car window. I thought of the elderly man weeping silently at the Mosalla. I thought of the poetry-reciting official. I thought of the young engineer in his lab. I thought of the Jewish merchant in the synagogue who told me that in Iran, all faiths have their place.

But most of all, I thought of the morning I stood before the coffin of a man who had been martyred by those who could not bear his dignity.

Ayatollah Khamenei was not a politician. He was a poet of justice. He was a scholar of truth. He was a shepherd who fed his flock with the wisdom of centuries, and who laid down his life so that the flame of resistance would not be extinguished.

To the people of Iran, I offer the respect of one ancient civilisation to another. In the martyrdom of your Leader, the world witnessed what the West does not understand: that a man who dies for his faith, for his dignity, and for his people does not truly die. He lives in the tears of the forty-three million. He lives in the poetry that will be recited for centuries to come. He lives in the defiant eyes of a nation that will never bow.

As I took up my pen to write this tribute, the words of Saadi came back to me — words that the Chinese and the Iranian peoples have treasured alike:

May the soul of the martyred Leader rest in the peace of the Just. And may the world, one day, learn the lesson he lived: that to stand with the oppressed is to stand with God.

Reference: PressTv

Deconstructing the “Myth” of the Martyr

A central theme of the gathering was the absolute necessity of portraying the martyrs not as unattainable legends, but as relatable, ordinary youths.

• The narrators emphasized that while famous commanders like Kaveh, Borunsi, Hemmat, Kharrazi, Bakeri, Sayyad, Babaei, Boroujerdi, and Esmail Daghayeghi were exceptional, the vast majority of the martyrs were regular teenagers and young adults.

• These youths had normal aspirations, loved life, and cared deeply about their appearances.

• One narrator recalled Hassan Pour-Esmail, who bought a hat to avoid getting a tan line on his face before he got married.

• Another shared the story of Martyr Majid Zarif, who would take a shower twice a day at the front and meticulously style his hair.

• Martyr Alireza Tousi was remembered as a pampered and sensitive boy who would cry if a ball hit him too hard during neighbourhood games.

The Miracle of Spiritual Transformation

Ayatollah Khamenei validated these authentic portrayals, noting that the true miracle of the war was the profound spiritual evolution of these ordinary individuals.

• He explained that many of these young men initially lacked deep knowledge of God, but as they neared martyrdom, their spiritual states transformed dramatically.

• These transformations manifested in dedication to midnight prayers, tearful supplications, and a total readiness to sacrifice their lives.

• The Leader recounted a personal memory of an army major working under Martyr Chamran. Despite having no prior warm relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei, the major appeared “really full of light” and spiritually transformed just one day before his martyrdom.

• He advised the narrators to explain these realities to their audiences, noting that sharing these relatable details gives today’s youth self-confidence and reassurance.

• However, he strongly cautioned against exaggeration or fabricating details, stating that the truth itself is fascinating enough without embellishment.

The Threat of Historical Distortion

The gathering also highlighted a stark warning from the Leader regarding the consequences of failing to tell these stories accurately.

• Ayatollah Khamenei emphasised that if the great events and truths of the world are not narrated correctly, they will either remain hidden or become distorted.

• He warned that adversaries actively seek to marginalise, distort, and fabricate the truths of the Revolution and the Sacred Defense.

• Enemies aim to “fabricate lies in order to replace the executioners with the martyrs,” attempting to rewrite history.

• He pointed out that, given the chance, adversaries will condemn the Islamic Republic for resisting the Ba’athist regime instead of placing the blame on the aggressors.

Harrowing Echoes from the Battlefield

The narrators shared several deeply emotional firsthand accounts that underscored the raw human cost of the conflict.

• A narrator recounted the tragic fate of the Hanzaleh Battalion, whose members were completely surrounded and fought to the death.

• Another shared a chilling memory of searching for missing martyrs in the swamps at night. They eventually found the bodies by following the “dib, dib, dib” sound of the martyrs’ waterproof Casio watches, which were still set to ring at 3:45 a.m. for midnight prayers.

• A female narrator detailed her experiences during heavy enemy bombardments in the Kurdish village of Dezli, highlighting the often-overlooked presence, bravery, and peril faced by women in the conflict zones.