In His Name, the Most High
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 One
The Voice of the Awaited One
This is the first of fifteen maqtals — dramatic recitations that accompany the Shahada sermon series.
ach maqtal is spoken in the voice of Imam al-Mahdi — may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, the Hidden Imam, the Awaited One, looking back across time at the witnesses of his household and his chain.
These maqtals are not sermons.
They are not lectures.
They are a different form — closer to a lamentation, closer to a prayer, closer to the voice of a man who was not there but who remembers everything.
The theological claim is the Shia claim: that the Proof of God on this earth sees what he did not stand in, remembers what he did not witness with his eyes, and carries within him the grief and the pride of every witness who came before him.
Tonight, on the first night of Muharram, the Imam does not begin at Karbala.
He begins where the chain of witnesses begins — in a field outside Eden, with the first blood the earth had ever known, and a question the Unseen has been asking this creation since that morning:
“Where is your brother?”
The accompanying sermon for this session — [1] Shahada (Witness) — Where Is Your Brother? — is available on Reflections.
The Maqtal — “Where Is Your Brother?”
I. The Voice from Behind the Veils
I speak to you from behind the veils of the occultation.
I speak to you on the first night of the month of my grandfather —
the month the earth holds its breath to wait for Ashura —
and I ask you to listen for one voice before you listen for the others.Not for Husayn tonight.
Not yet.For the first.
For the one our own rooms have almost forgotten.
For the one who has stood for six thousand years1 at the beginning of the chain
and has waited for a tongue that would say his name
without turning him into a children’s story.His name is Abel.
II. The First Brother
He was the first man born of a woman.
He was the first son of the first father.When the earth had known no grave,
when the ground had drunk no blood,
when no tongue had yet shaped the word murderer —
he was the one the test came to.Two brothers brought an offering.
One brought the best of his flock — the firstborn, the soft-limbed, the one he loved.
The other brought the leavings of his field — what he could spare.God accepted the one who gave what he loved.
God did not accept the one who gave what he could spare.And the one who had given less looked across the field
at the one who had given more,
and he said — in a sentence the earth had never heard until that day —
I will kill you.And my brother Abel —
the first to stand where Husayn would one day stand —
looked at him, and said what every witness since has said in his heart.I will not raise my hand against you.
If you stretch out your hand to take my life,
I will not stretch out my hand to take yours.
I fear God — the Lord of all that is.That sentence is the first testimony.
That sentence is the grain of the whole chain.
From that sentence — in a field outside Eden, on a day the sky was still young —
everything that my forefathers said after him is only a repetition.I will not raise my hand against you.
I fear God.Husayn said it at Karbala,
with his children dying behind him.
Abbas said it at the river,
with his hands already gone.
Zaynab said it in the court of Yazid,
with her brother’s head on a tray before her.
And Abel said it first, in a field,
to a brother whose heart was already leaving him.
III. The First Blood the Earth Had Ever Known
The earth had never drunk blood before that day.
Listen to this, for the scholars of my house have told it and it is true:
when the first drop fell —
when my brother Abel went down into the grass
and the grass did not know what to do with him —
the ground itself did not know.It did not have a word for what had come upon it.
It had no grave-shape.
It had no furrow for a man.And so the first killer stood with the body of the first witness,
and he did not know what to do either.He carried him.
He set him down.
He carried him again.Until God — in His mercy, even to him —
sent a crow.
And the crow scratched the earth in front of him
until a hollow opened in the ground.That was how the first grave was dug on this earth.
By a bird,
in front of a killer,
over the body of the one who would not raise his hand.And the ground did finally receive him.
But the ground has never stopped remembering.
IV. I Was Not There — But I Remember
I was not there.
I was not standing at the edge of that field.
I had not yet been sent into the line of the trustees.
I was not yet the concealed one, who waits.But I remember.
I remember what the earth tasted for the first time that day.
I remember the raven, and the hollow, and the brother who wept too late.
I remember the look on the face of my father Adam
when he came across the field and found one of his sons missing from the world.I remember what the mother of them both — your mother Eve, my grandmother —
said when no sound would come out,
when she opened her mouth to name the loss
and learned, the way every mother learns once,
that there is no name for it.And I remember what God said into that silence.
Not to the body in the grass.
To the one who had put him there.
Where is your brother?
Where is your brother?
The oldest question the Unseen has ever asked this earth.
And the question has never stopped.
He asked it of the man who drove a spear into Husayn.
He asked it of the door that struck my grandmother’s ribs.
He asked it of the boot that stood at the mouth of the cave at Srebrenica.
He asked it of the cockpit over Gaza.
He asked it of the missile that fell on a schoolroom in Minab on a Saturday morning,
when the teacher had just said, pray, girls —
and the second missile answered her instead of God.Where is your brother?
And every morning of every century, the answer comes back from every Cain of every age:
I do not know.
Am I my brother’s keeper?Yes.
You are.
You always were.
You always will be.That is the whole of the matter.
V. The First Candle of the Chain
My brothers. My sisters.
Hear what was given to you in that field, though no one has said it to you plainly in a long time.
My brother Abel is not the first victim.
He is the first witness.
He is the first candle of the chain of witnesses that runs through my house
— through Noah who grieved a son who would not come aboard,
through Abraham who laid his own son on the stone and was spared the cut,
through the prophet John, whose blood the narrations tell us boiled in a basin until Hussain’s blood boiled beside it fourteen centuries later,
through Zechariah and Jesus and every faithful tongue between them,
through my grandfather Muhammad — peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions —
through my forefather Ali in the mihrab of Kufa,
through my grandmother Fatima at the door of her own house,
through my forefather Hussain on the plain of Karbala —
and from him into every scholar, every soldier, every mother, every child who has ever stood where the world told them to kneel,
and said:I will not raise my hand against you.
I fear God.That sentence is one sentence.
It was said by one throat,
which the chain has handed from Abel to this hour.And the candle my brother lit in that field
has never gone out.It is this one.
VI. The Benediction, the Distance, and the Return
Peace be upon you, O Abel —
son of Adam, brother of Cain,
first to stand where my forefather Hussain would stand,
first to say with the tongue of the earth I fear God —
peace be upon you, and peace upon the hollow the crow opened for you,
and peace upon every brother and every sister who has, since that day,
refused the hand their brother raised against them.Peace be upon the seventy-two who were your heirs at Karbala.
Peace be upon my grandmother Fatima, whose door was the next to fall.
Peace be upon my forefather Ali, who was struck in the mihrab, still fasting.
Peace be upon my aunt Zaynab, who stood above the body of my forefather Hussain.
Peace be upon the scholars of our own age whom our own age tried to silence —
Motahhari at the classroom door,
Beheshti with his seventy-two,
the brother and sister Sadr in Najaf,
and in this year — in the month the ink is still wet on —
Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the servant of the dispossessed,
who said with his last breath what my forefather Hussain said with his first refusal:
someone like me does not give allegiance to someone like him.Peace be upon the commanders of the caravan —
Soleimani, Mughniyeh, al-Muhandis, Nasrallah —
who took the sentence of Abel and carried it into their own fields.Peace be upon the daughters of the Good Tree — the children of Minab,
the children of Gaza, the children whose names the world did not learn.And may the distance of God — the long, quiet, eternal distance —
fall upon every hand that has struck, from the first hand to the last,
from Cain in the field
to the cockpit over the schoolroom —
for the line of the one who raises his hand is one line,
and the line of the one who does not raise it is one line,
and the distance between them is God’s.I was not there.
But I remember.
And I remain behind the veils —
until the permission is given,
and the hearts are ready,
and the three hundred and thirteen have gathered.Until then — do not wait for me in stillness.
Wait for me with your hand lowered.
Wait for me with the candle lit.
Wait for me with the old question still on your tongue —
the one the Unseen has been asking this earth since that first morning —
and make sure, when it is asked of you,
that you have an answer.Where is your brother?
About this Maqtal
This maqtal is the first of fifteen in the Shahada series, accompanying the sermon sessions for the Truth Promoters Muharram and Arbaeen 2026/1448 Programs and published on Reflections.
The maqtals of this series are spoken in the voice of Imam al-Mahdi — may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return — the Hidden Imam, the Proof of God on His earth — looking back across time at the witnesses who preceded him.
This is a theological and literary device rooted in the Shia understanding that the Imam of the Age carries within him the memory of every prophet, every Imam, and every righteous soul in the chain.
He was not there — but he remembers.
The language is English throughout.
No Arabic appears in the spoken text of the maqtal.
This is a deliberate choice: the maqtals of this series are written in the register English has spent a thousand years learning for grief — Northern European, elegiac, plain — because the truth does not belong to one language, and because the audience includes Muslims, new Muslims, and those drawn to Islam who do not yet carry the Arabic vocabulary.
The Arabic belongs to the sermon, to the written record, and to the supplications.
The maqtal speaks in the tongue the room already knows.
Sources
The maqtal draws upon the following primary sources:
Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah 5:27–32 — the story of the two sons of Adam. The Qur’anic account is the foundation of the entire maqtal: Abel’s words, the crow, the first grave, and the question God asks of Cain.
Allamah Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, Volume 10, Pages 118–148 — the extended commentary on the sons of Adam, including the theological significance of Abel’s refusal to kill, his status as a man of knowledge and piety, and the mechanism of sin-transfer from victim to killer.
Ayatollah Murtada Motahhari, The Martyr, Collected Works, Volume 17 — the candle metaphor (“The martyrs are the candles of society”) which is the series-wide spine image, and the five kinds of death which distinguish the victim from the witness.
The Ziyarat of Ashura — the opening greeting and the closing benediction structure are adapted from the ziyarat tradition, rendered in English.
The six thousand years mentioned here is metaphorical; it is not the Islamic belief that the world is six thousand years old. This terminology used here is for dramatic and metaphorical effect.
