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 Blood That Would Not Settle”
I. This One I Do Not Have to Remember
Every week I have said the same thing to you.
I was not there — but I remember.
Not tonight.
Tonight I was in the house.
I was in the room at the back of it.
And when they carried my father out into the yard, I came out after him, and I was ten years old, and I had no shoes on.
II. Ten Men, Night and Day
Understand what they did to him while he was still alive.
When word went out that my father was ill, the caliph came himself and looked at him.
He set his own physicians on him and told them not to leave.And then he sent for the Chief Justice of the empire, brought him into his own court, and ordered him to pick ten men from among his associates.
Ten witnesses.
Chosen by a judge.
Sent to our house.And ordered to stay in it, night and day, until my father died.
Not soldiers.
Not a guard on the gate.
Witnesses — men whose whole job was to be believed afterwards.They were there so that the state could say, later, that it had watched.
My father spent the last days of his life dying in a room full of men appointed to observe him.
He was twenty-eight years old.
And I was in the house, and they did not know it, and that was the point of me.
III. One Voice, and Then a Face
He died on a morning in the month of Rabi al-Awwal, in the two hundred and sixtieth year.
And the city — the caliph’s own city, built by his family, full of his soldiers — became, in the words of the man who wrote it down, one single clamour.
The son of al-Rida is dead.
The markets shut — all of them.
The Hashimites rode out, the Abbasids among them, and the caliph’s brother was ordered to lead the prayer over my father’s body.And when the bier was set down, he did something I want you to hold on to.
He bent down and uncovered my father’s face.
And he turned it towards the commanders and the judges and the jurists of the empire, and said: this is al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Rida.
He died a natural death, on his bed.A state does not certify a death that nobody doubts.
They uncovered my father’s face in front of the whole apparatus of an empire so that men could say afterwards that they had seen it.
Nobody believed them then, and nobody has believed them since.
IV. Thirty-Nine Men, Sitting, Waiting
Now the part written down by a man from the house of al-Abbas — not one of ours, a descendant of the family that had us watched.
He says he was at our house that day.
The bier was brought out and set down.
There were thirty-nine of them, sitting, waiting.Waiting for what?
For somebody to come out.
Because a son prays over his father — and the whole question in that yard, the question the empire had posted ten men to settle, was whether there was a son at all.And then I came out.
He describes me.
A boy of about ten.
Barefoot.
A cloak pulled up over my head.And he writes that when I came out, they all stood up.
Out of awe of him — he says — without knowing who he was.
Thirty-nine men, not one of whom could have named me, stood up.
I went forward.
They fell in behind me in ranks.
I prayed over my father.And then I walked.
And the man writes the last line the way you would write it if you did not understand what you had seen, which is why I believe him:
and he entered a room other than the one he had come out of.
V. And They Still Could Not Agree
That is all any of you were ever given.
And now hear what my father’s own community did with it.
You spent tonight on two parties — the ones who made us more than we are, and the ones who cut us down below what we were.
You watched my father correct their messenger three times in one afternoon.When my father died, those same people looked at what had happened in that yard.
And the book says it plainly, and it is our book and not theirs: a group of them went back on the statement of the son.
They had been told.
Some of them had been in that yard.
And when the moment came to stand on it, a group of them put it down.Both parties failed him on the same afternoon, in the same house — and then again at his grave, where the only thing asked of them was to say that the boy who prayed had been real.
I was real.
I am still real.
And the empire that posted ten men in my father’s house and uncovered his face in front of its judges is now a chapter in a book that children are made to read at school.
I walked out of a room, and into another room, and I have not come back out of it yet.
I was there — and I remember.
And I am not gone.
May our Lord hasten my return.
Pray ardently for my return.
Sources Cited
Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, report 226 — Ahmad ibn Abdullah al-Hashimi, of the descendants of al-Abbas: the bier, the thirty-nine men, the barefoot boy, the prayer, and the other room.
Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba — the final illness: the caliph’s visit, the physicians, the Chief Justice and the ten appointed men; Samarra as one clamour; the caliph’s brother uncovering the face before the commanders, scribes, judges and jurists.
al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 1 — a group of them went back on the statement of the son.
Shaykh al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba, the chapter on the evidence of the birth of the Master of the Age, report 216 — Kamil ibn Ibrahim, and the two parties who sent him.
