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 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.
Where is your brother?
