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 Two
The Voice of the Awaited One
This is the second of fifteen maqtals in the Shahada series.
Last night, the Hidden Imam — may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return — came to us for Abel — the first witness, the first blood the earth had ever known.
Tonight he comes for the ones who came after Abel: the prophetic chain of grief that runs from the primordial covenant — when every soul said
“Yes, we bear witness”
— through the prophets who carried the covenant and wept for what was coming, to the bottle of red earth that Umm Salamah kept on her shelf until the day it turned to blood.
The accompanying sermon for this session — [2] Shahada (Witness) - The Oldest Covenant on Earth — is available on Reflections.
The Maqtal — “The Inherited Tear”
I. I Came Back
I came to you last night.
Did you think I would not come back?
I came for Abel.
For the first one.
For the throat the earth had never met before,
and the hollow the crow opened in the ground.Tonight I come for the ones who came after him.
There are many of them.
There have always been many of them.
And the chain from Abel to my forefather Husayn
is longer than your century knows,
and heavier than any of your histories have bothered to lift.Tonight I will lift only a little of it.
Enough for you to feel the weight.
Enough for you to understand — before we go any further —
that what you carry into this Muharram is not yours.
II. The First Yes
Before the body.
Before the cradle.
Before the first morning of the first world —
He gathered us.All of us.
You, the one listening in a dim room.
Me, the one behind the veils.
My aunt Zaynab. My forefather Husayn. My forefather Abel.
Your grandmother. Her grandmother. The child not yet conceived whose throat is already counted.Every soul that has lived in a body or will live in a body.
He gathered us,
and He asked one question.Am I not your Lord?
And every one of us —
every single one —
answered with the first word the soul ever spoke:Yes.
Yes — we bear witness.
That was the first testimony.
That was where the word was born —
not on earth,
before it.And every believer who has said the shahadah since,
in any mosque,
on any tongue,
at any hour —
is only remembering a promise they made
in a language older than any language.The witnesses are not a new thing.
The chain is not a new thing.The chain is the oldest thing on this earth.
III. The Head in the Basin
The first throat on this earth that was cut for saying yes, I bear witness —
after my brother Abel —
was my forefather John.You call him John the Baptist.
We call him Yahya — the living one —
a name his father Zechariah was given for him by God
when his father had long since given up asking.He told kings the truth.
He stood in their doorways and said the one sentence kings cannot tolerate from any tongue —
this is not lawful for you.And for that sentence — not for a crime, not for a theft, not for treason —
for one sentence of tabyeen,
for one clarification of the law of God at a royal door —
they took his head.They brought it in a basin to a king,
as a favour to a dancer, in the middle of a feast,
and they set the head of the friend of God on the floor of a palace.And the scholars of my house have told you, and it is true:
the blood of my forefather John did not cool.
In the basin where they placed it —
it boiled.It boiled for fourteen years1.
It would not rest.
It would not settle.And do you know what made it rest at last?
One thing.
One only.
The blood of my grandfather Husayn —
peace and blessings be upon him —
on the plain of Karbala.The moment that drop struck the earth,
the blood in the basin stopped.Because the chain that had opened at Abel
had come, at last,
to its fullness.The blood of every prophet that was ever unjustly spilled
had been waiting, in one basin after another,
for one of my forefathers to answer it.Husayn answered it.
IV. The Tree That Opened
And still I have not spoken of his father.
My forefather Zechariah — who waited so long for John that the world had already decided he would die childless —
fled, when his son was taken from him,
across a country that had no room for him any more.And he came upon a tree.
A tree that opened for him.
A tree that, for the length of one breath,
let a prophet of God step inside the living wood
and be hidden.But they had already chosen their masters.
And they found him.
They came with a saw.
And they set the teeth of the saw against the bark —
and the tree that had opened for him
could not stop what came next —
and they sawed through the tree,
and the prophet inside it,
and neither cried out,
because the tree would not betray what it had sheltered,
and the prophet would not give the saw the satisfaction of a sound.Two martyrs in one stroke.
The friend of God.
And the tree that had tried to be his door.
I was not there.
But I remember.
V. The Redness That Did Not Leave My Grandfather’s Face
And then — my grandfather came.
Peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family, and upon his righteous companions.
And when he came —
when he climbed a hill called Uhud, on a day the wind had already turned bad,
and when he came back down —he found his uncle.
He found my great-grand-uncle Hamza.
The one they had called the Lion of God.
The one who had carried the banner when no one else would carry it.He found him in the dust.
His nose — cut.
His ears — cut.
His body hacked, and his chest opened,
and his liver taken out from inside him,
and placed in the mouth of a woman
who chewed it,
and spat it out again,
because even her hatred could not finish what her hatred had begun.The name of the woman was Hind.
The name of her son was Muawiyyah.
The name of his son was Yazid.
Do you see the line?
Do you see, my brothers and sisters,
that the house that cut the liver out of Hamza
is the house that cut the head off of Hussain?The same house.
The same hatred.
Three generations between them —
and in the house of God, three generations is not very far.My grandfather stood over his uncle.
He wept.
The narrations say his face turned red with the weeping,
and the redness did not leave his face
for the rest of the day.And in the books I have read from behind these veils —
the books the scholars of my house carried down one narrow generation at a time —
it is said that the redness did not fully leave his face
until the day his grandson was placed in his arms.The grandson he would name Hussain.
VI. The Bottle
When my forefather Hussain was still a child —
a small, soft thing,
who climbed onto my grandfather’s back during prayer
and would not be shifted until he was ready —Gabriel came.
Not with a command. Not with a verse.
With a handful of dust.
A handful of red earth,
from a plain no one had yet named.He placed it in the palm of my grandfather the Prophet,
peace and blessings be upon him,
and he said one sentence.This is where your grandson will be killed.
My grandfather wept.
Not loudly.
Not as a man who has been surprised.
As a man who has received,
at last,
the piece of news he had been preparing for
since he was a boy.He took the dust.
He wrapped it in a cloth.
He gave it to his wife — to Umm Salamah, may God be pleased with her —
and he said to her:Keep this.
On the day you see this dust turn to blood —
you will know that my grandson has been killed.She kept it.
She kept it through three wars.
She kept it through the death of her husband, the Messenger of God.
She kept it through the migration of an entire community
and the rise of every enemy of the house.And on a Saturday afternoon,
in the month of Muharram,
in the sixty-first year after the flight of the Messenger of God,
she opened the bottle —and the dust had turned to blood.
She screamed.
Her neighbours came running.
And she held the bottle out to them, and she said the sentence
the women of my house have always said
when the day finally comes:They have killed him.
They have killed Hussain.I was not there.
But I remember.
VII. The Inherited Tear
My brothers. My sisters.
Hear what I have come to tell you tonight.
There is not one tear that has ever been shed for Hussain
that was not first shed by a prophet
before my grandfather was named.Not one.
Every tear you have ever wept in a majlis.
Every breaking of voice in a nawha.
Every time a mother in this room has had to explain to a child
why we wear black this month —
every one of those tears is an inheritance.It was borrowed.
From the eye of Adam, who first knew what it was to lose a son.
From the eye of Noah, who watched a son refuse the only ark God had made.
From the eye of Abraham, who carried his own son to the stone.
From the eye of Zechariah, inside the tree.
From the eye of the mother of John, when they brought her son’s head back to her house.
From the eye of Jesus, peace and blessings be upon him, who spoke of the one who would come after him.
From the eye of my grandfather, peace and blessings be upon him,
when Gabriel placed the red dust in his open palm.The tear is not yours first.
It was given to you.
By the chain.
So when you weep tonight —
and some of you will weep tonight,
and some of you will not yet be able to —
know that you are not producing grief.You are receiving it.
You are being paid,
by the unseen,
what was deposited in the line of your fathers
before the first word was ever spoken on this earth.Do not waste that payment.
Do not mix it with the tears of your week.
Do not spend it on the small disappointments of your life.
The inherited tear is for one face only.
You know whose.
VIII. The Benediction, the Distance, and the Return
Peace be upon you, O John the Baptist —
peace and blessings be upon you —
the first beheaded prophet after my brother Abel,
whose blood boiled in the basin
and would not rest
until my grandfather’s blood fell on the plain of Karbala.Peace be upon you, O Zechariah — peace and blessings be upon you —
who stepped inside a tree
and learned that no tree can hide the friend of God
from the hand of those who have already chosen their masters.Peace be upon you, O my grandfather Muhammad —
peace and blessings be upon you, and upon your family, and upon your righteous companions —
who wept over Hamza,
who received the red dust,
who held his grandson knowing what the earth already knew.Peace be upon you, O Hamza, the Lion of God —
peace and blessings be upon you —
in whose liver the chain of the enemy first showed its teeth.Peace be upon you, O Umm Salamah —
who kept the bottle —
and peace upon every mother, in every century,
who has kept a bottle like yours
and waited forty years for the dust to change.Peace be upon the seventy-two of Karbala, the heirs of every chain I have named tonight.
Peace be upon the scholar-martyrs whom our own age tried to silence —
Motahhari at the classroom door,
Beheshti and his seventy, who inherited the number of Karbala the way a son inherits a name,
the brother and sister Sadr in Najaf,
and in this very year —
Sayyed Ali Khamenei, who carried the red dust in his breast
through forty-six years of service
and returned it, fasting,
to the Lord who had given it to him.Peace be upon the commanders of the caravan — Soleimani, Mughniyeh, Muhandis, Nasrallah — peace and blessings be upon them all.
Peace be upon the children of Minab, whose tears are new
but whose inheritance is ancient.Peace be upon the children of Gaza, whose blood has joined the basin that has been boiling since Abel.
And may the distance of God —
the long, eternal, unappealable distance —
be upon every hand that has ever cut a prophet,
from the first cut to the last:the hand that raised itself against Abel in the field,
the hand that cut the head from my forefather John,
the hand that set the saw against the tree of my forefather Zechariah,
the hand that reached into the chest of Hamza and took his liver
— and the hand of the woman who chewed it —
and the hand of her son, and her son’s son,
who completed, three generations later,
what she had begun at the foot of Uhud.And every hand, in our own time,
that has placed itself between a child and its next breath,
that has dropped a bomb on a schoolroom at the hour of prayer,
that has sold the blood of the innocent
at the tables where the empires meet.The line of the hand that cuts is one line.
The line of the throat that bears witness is one line.
And the distance between them is God’s,
and it is long, and it is final.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 at last.Until then —
sleep with the taper still lit.
Keep the bottle on the shelf.The inherited tear is yours tonight.
Do not waste it.
Where is your brother?
About this Maqtal
This maqtal is the second 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.
Tonight the Imam does not speak of one witness but of many — the chain that runs from the primordial covenant of Surah al-A’raf 7:172, through the blood of John, the tree of Zechariah, the mutilation of Hamza, and the red earth Gabriel brought to the Prophet, to the bottle Umm Salamah kept until the dust turned to blood.
Sources
The maqtal draws upon the following primary sources:
Qur’an, Surah al-A’raf 7:172 — the primordial covenant: “Am I not your Lord? Yes — we bear witness.”
Qur’an, Surah Maryam 19:12–15 — John the Baptist, granted wisdom while yet a child, and peace upon him the day he was born, the day he dies, and the day he is raised again to life.
Bihar al-Anwar (Allamah Majlisi) — narrations on the boiling blood of John the Baptist; the red earth brought by Gabriel; Umm Salamah’s bottle.
Kamil al-Ziyarat (Ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi) — Husayn remembering Yahya on the road to Karbala.
Qisas al-Anbiya (Qutb al-Din al-Rawandi) — the martyrdom of Zechariah in the tree.
Al-Irshad (Shaykh al-Mufid) — the mutilation of Hamza at Uhud and the Prophet’s grief.
Al-Amali (Shaykh al-Saduq) — the instruction to Umm Salamah regarding the glass bottle.
The Ziyarat of Ashura — the opening greeting and the closing benediction structure.
As indicated in the sermon, the narrative of how long John’s blood boiled in the basin is explained in the write-up - the use of the word fourteen here is for dramatic effect, and by way of poetic license.
