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 — “Come and Look at Him”
I. A Man Carried Through a City
I was not there — but I remember.
I remember a city on a river, and a body being carried through it, and a man walking in front shouting so that people would come out of their houses.
He wanted a crowd.
That is the part I want you to hold.
He was not hiding anything — he was calling people out to look.
II. The Dates
They had my forefather Musa ibn Ja’far four years in prison before they were finished with him.
Four years.
Moved from jail to jail so nobody would learn where he was and gather at the wall.
He was fifty-four, and he had been the proof of God on this earth for thirty-five of them.And at the end they sent him dates.
A tray of them, from the caliph’s own hand, with a message attached that made refusing impossible — the Commander of the Faithful has eaten from these and kept the rest for you, and I ask you to eat them all, because I chose them for you myself.
One of them had been threaded through with a poisoned needle, over and over, until the man doing it was satisfied.
There was a dog in that palace that the caliph loved.
It broke its chain and came to my forefather, and he put the poisoned date on a stick and gave it to the animal — and it died in front of him, there on the floor.And then he ate the rest.
He was sent a tray with death in it and told to finish it.
He finished it.It took him three days.
III. Two Cries in One Street
And then they did the thing I cannot put down.
They did not bury him quietly.
They took his body out into Baghdad and put criers in front of it, and the criers called out:This is the leader of the Shia.
Come and know him.And when they reached the guard post they put four men on it, and the four of them called together:
Whoever wants to look at this wicked man, the son of a wicked man — come now.
That is what a body was for, to them.
Something to walk through a city so people would see what happens.
They were not disposing of him.
They were using him.And somebody heard it.
Not one of ours.
The caliph’s own uncle, in his own house by the water, who asked his servants what the noise in the street was and was told.And that old man sent his sons and his household out into the road, and they took the body off them by force — beat them for it, tore the black off their backs — and put new criers in front of the same body, in the same street, on the same afternoon.
And this is what the new criers said:
Whoever wants to look at the purest of the pure — at Musa ibn Ja’far — come now.
The same man.
The same street.
The same hour.Only the cry had changed.
They washed him and they shrouded him in cloth with the Book written on it. And the caliph’s uncle walked behind him to the grave with no shoes on his feet and no turban on his head and his shirt torn open at the front, the way a man walks behind his own son.
They put him in the burial ground of the Quraysh, on the west side of the city.
And the caliph wrote a letter afterwards, saying it was nothing to do with him.
I was not there — but I remember.
IV. Go and Stand There Now
Go and stand in that burial ground now.
It has a name now.
It is called Kadhimayn, after him and after his grandson who lies beside him, and there is not a soul in Baghdad who cannot tell you where it is.They carried him through a city to shame him, and it is the reason the city is proud of him.
They shouted come and look at this wicked man — and people have been coming ever since, through every empire that has held that river.
Nobody comes for the man who sent the dates.
You walked past him this week.
He is at Tus, under the same roof as my forefather al-Rida, and you could not find him if you tried.He had the treasury of the world and he could not buy one visitor.
V. What Are You Building?
There was a stone once that the builders looked at and threw aside.
Wrong shape.
Not worth the lifting.And it became the head of the corner — the one the whole wall is set by.
That is what none of them have ever understood.
You cannot tell, by looking at a thing, what it is going to hold up.They looked at a body in a street and called it wicked.
Men with better eyes came and called the same body pure.
It was the same body.They looked at a caliph in a golden tomb and a prisoner in a borrowed grave, and they were certain they knew which one would be remembered.
They were wrong.
So look at what you have thrown aside this week.
And look at what you have been lifting into place.Because one of them is going to hold up the wall, and it is not the one you think.
I was not there — but I remember.
And I am not gone.
May our Lord hasten my return.
Sources Cited
Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, volume one, the chapter on the death of Abu Ibrahim Musa ibn Ja’far
Al-Kafi, volume one, the Book of Proof
Psalms, chapter one hundred and eighteen, verse twenty-two
What are you building?
