In His Name, the Most High
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’.
