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
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 Chair”
I. The Doorframe
I was there when they carried it out.
You would not have seen me. That is the arrangement.
But I was standing in that street in Karkh, in the month of Safar, in the year four hundred and forty-nine — close enough to hear the wood scrape on the doorframe as they turned it sideways to get it through.
A chair.
Two men carrying a chair out of a house, and neither of them looking at it.
They were looking at each other, the way men do when they are not sure they should be doing what they are doing, and are going to do it anyway.
II. A Place Where the Handing Happens
I want to tell you what a chair is.
My grandfather sat to teach. My father sat to teach. When a man sits, and others sit lower, and it is quiet — something is being handed over.
That is all a chair is. A place where the handing happens.
They had given him that seat in the capital of the Muslim world. They had said: sit here, and let them come to you.
And they came. From Nishapur. From Qazwin. From Merv. From places whose names the men carrying the chair could not have found on any road they knew.
Forty years of it. A man sitting down, and a room going quiet.
And then two men, turning it sideways to get it through a doorframe.
III. Three Pieces of White Cloth
They burned the notebooks first, because paper takes.
Then the chair — and wood that old does not burn quickly, so there was time. There was time for people to come out of their houses. There was time for a crowd.
That was the point of it. It was never about the wood.
And then they went back into the house and found the last thing, and I saw the man’s face when he came out holding it, and he was pleased.
Three white banners.
Old cloth. Poles worn smooth in the middle where hands had held them.
Those were carried on the road to my grandfather’s grave. Every year. By people who could not afford the journey and made it anyway, and who sang badly, and who came back sunburnt and happy and full of it.
He carried them out into the street and put them in the fire, and he was pleased.
IV. The Men Asleep with Paper
Now let me tell you what I could see that he could not.
While he stood there, warm and satisfied, a man was asleep in Aleppo who had a licence in his bag.
A man in Tripoli was awake and could not sleep, and was thinking about a legal problem, and had a licence in his bag.
At Rayy. At Qom. At Kashan. Men asleep with paper in their houses, each one a small permission, each one saying: this was given to me by him, and I may give it to you.
Not one of them knew about the fire. Not one of them would hear of it for weeks.
And every single one of them was already out of the city.
The man in the street had done his arithmetic and got it exactly wrong. He had looked at a chair and thought: this is where it sits.
It was never where it sat.
It was where it left from.
V. They Came for a House Before That One
I said fire needs a place. That is its whole weakness.
And now let me tell you how I know that.
Not from Karkh. Karkh is late. Karkh is a chair and some notebooks and a man in hiding, and I grieve it — and it is not the first time somebody tried this on my family.
They came for a house before that one.
They came for a door, 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 did not live long after.
And on a plain by a river, in the afternoon, when the men of my house were already lying out on the sand — they set fire to the tents.
Understand what a tent is. It is a place. It is the last place. It is the thin thing between a family and the open — and there were children inside it, and they burned it with the children running out of it.
They left the bodies where they fell for three days.
They took the heads of the men of my house through the streets of two cities on the points of spears, and people came out to watch.
And long after, at a graveyard in Medina, they came with tools and levelled what was left. The graves of my fathers, flattened — because a grave is a place, and a place can be levelled.
So do not tell me about fire.
I have watched them burn everything my family ever stood in.
VI. The Chains That Carried the Testimony
And now I will tell you what they could not do. And it is the same thing I have been telling you all night.
When those tents came down, the thing inside them walked out.
It walked out on the feet of the women.
They put my grandmother’s household in chains and marched them from that plain to Kufa, and from Kufa to Damascus. And at every stop they made a spectacle of them.
And at every stop she opened her mouth.
Zaynab, peace and blessings be upon her.
In a marketplace. In a court. In front of the man who had done it, in his own hall, with his own soldiers standing there.
She stood up, and she told them what had happened.
They had killed every man who could carry it. They had burned every tent it had ever been kept in. And they had put the last carrier of it in chains and walked her hundreds of miles through hostile cities —
and by doing that, they delivered it to every city on the road.
Do you see it?
They thought they were parading a defeat.
They were couriering a testimony.
Every town that came out to gawp at those chains got told, out loud, in the street, exactly what had been done at Karbala — by a witness they could not silence and could not un-see.
The tents were the building. Zaynab was the licence.
And that is why, six centuries later, when they carried a chair out of a house in Karkh and set it alight in front of a crowd — I already knew how it ended.
VII. Already Halfway to Najaf
He went south, the man whose house it was. In fear. With his family.
And he built a house beside my grandfather’s grave, and sat down again, and they came again. And he never went back to Baghdad, and he is buried in that house, and the house is a mosque, and it is standing tonight.
I have watched a great deal burn.
Libraries. Domes. Cities I would have to name for you and you would flinch.
And I will tell you what I have noticed, in all of it, across all these years of watching and not being seen.
Nobody has ever burned a licence.
You cannot. There is nothing to raid. It is in a bag on a road, and then it is in a room in another city, and then it is in a hand that is writing it out again for somebody else.
Fire needs a place. That is its whole weakness.
And they built you a religion with no place in it.
So — you.
You who came tonight, and heard about a chair, and felt something.
I am not asking what you feel. I have never once been short of people who feel things.
What are you building?
Because there is a fire coming for it. There always is. Not necessarily yours, and perhaps not in your lifetime — but it comes, and it comes for whatever is standing in one place with your name on it.
So build the other thing.
Build the kind of thing that walks out of the door in forty directions before anybody arrives with a torch.
Teach one person properly. Not tell them — teach them, until they could teach it without you.
That is a copy that walks. That is a yard of road.
And when they burn what you built — and they will — you will not be standing in the street watching it, warm and satisfied and wrong.
You will be somewhere else.
Already halfway to Najaf.
Sources Cited
The chair, the notebooks, and the three white banners, Safar 449 — Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam fi Tarikh al-Muluk wa’l-Umam, Volume 16, Page 16, under its own chapter heading.
He went into hiding, in fear for his life — Ibn al-Najjar, quoted by Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Lisan al-Mizan, Volume 5, Page 135. The same report gives the burning of his books several times over, in the presence of the people.
The students at Aleppo, Tripoli, Rayy, Qom and Kashan — the geography is secure; the timing is not. Several of the named men followed him to Najaf after the fire, and the Tripoli judgeship plainly postdates it. The maqtal says only that they were dispersed, which is true whichever way the timing falls.
He was buried in his own house by his own will, and the house was made a mosque— established in the sermon, Point Three.
The tents fired on the afternoon of Ashura; the bodies left three days; the heads carried to Kufa and to Damascus; Sayyedah Zaynab’s addresses in the market of Kufa and in the court at Damascus — the standard maqtal tradition, as carried in al-Luhuf and the classical maqatil.
The door of the daughter of the Messenger of God — narrated in the maqtal register and deliberately without elaboration or naming, per the standing rule. The maqtal states that they came, and that she did not live long after. It makes no further claim.
The levelling of the graves at Baqi’ — referred to without a date, deliberately. Session Seventy-Five carries this material properly.1
“Nobody has ever burned a licence” — the Imam’s own summation, and the thesis of the sermon it follows. Not a report.
Correction — 2 September 2026. The note on Baqi' above gives Session Seventy-Five. It is Session Seventy-Six. The substance of the note is unaffected.
