Maqtal - Architecture of Guidance - The House Beside The Grave - The Blood That Would Not Settle

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. A Man Asked About a Grave

There was a man who came to my forefather Jafar the son of Muhammad with a question about a grave.

Not an unusual question.
People asked him about graves constantly — whether to go, how often, what it was worth, whether the stories they had heard were true.

He asked about the grave of my forefather Husayn.

And my forefather answered him with four things.
Visit him, and do not neglect him.
He is the master of the martyrs.
He is the master of the youth of the people of paradise.

And then the fourth thing, which is why I am here tonight.

And he is the likeness of John the son of Zechariah — John the Baptist.

II. The One He Was Likened To

You were told about him an hour ago.
The boy whose name nobody had ever carried.
The one God announced to an old man in a prayer-chamber by telling him that no one had been called this before.

God gave him the Book as a child and told him to take it with strength, and gave him tenderness out of His own presence in the same breath, and said of him — and I want you to hold this, because everything that follows turns on it — that he was not a tyrant, disobedient.

That is not a small thing to have said about you.

It means that in a world arranged by tyrants, there was a man who was not one.

III. What a King Wanted

There was a king in his days.

I am not going to tell you the whole of what that king wanted, because the accounts of it do not agree with one another and I will not build on a stone I cannot stand on.
You will have heard a version of it.
Leave it aside.

Here is what is not in dispute.

A man who was not a tyrant stood where a tyrant could reach him.
And a request was made — the kind of request a court makes when it is pleased with someone and wants to show it — and the request was for his head.

And the king granted it.

They brought him at night.
They brought a basin of gold.
And they killed the prophet of God into it, the way you would kill an animal you intended to eat, and then they took the basin out and poured it onto the ground.

IV. The Blood That Would Not Settle

And the ground would not take it.

The blood came up.
It rose, and it kept rising.

So they brought earth and threw it over the blood, and the blood came up through the earth.
And they threw more, and it came up through that.

They did not stop because they were merciful.
They stopped because it did not work.

And it was still there generations later.
Still rising.
Long enough that a conqueror came through that country, and saw it, and asked what it was, and had to hunt through the whole city before he found one old man whose father had told him the story his grandfather had told him.

That is the blood of John the son of Zechariah.
John the Baptist.

And the conqueror said: then I will kill over it until it settles.

Seventy thousand.

That is the number the report gives.
Seventy thousand, and then the ground was quiet.

Think about what that means.
The earth of that place had been asked to absorb one man, and it refused, and it went on refusing across generations and would not be argued with — and it took the blood of seventy thousand to buy the silence of one.

V. And Then There Was Another

Now you know why my forefather Jafar the son of Muhammad said what he said.

Because there was a second man that the sky would not be quiet about.

They killed him on a plain by a river.
They cut him as John was cut, by a tyrant’s word, because a court wanted it.
And the men who did it believed that this was the end of the matter.

The sky has wept for two men.
Only two.
Forty mornings each, rising red and setting red, and in all the centuries between and since it has not done it for anybody else.

And the Messenger of God said there is a station in the Fire that no one has ever deserved except two men — the one who killed John the son of Zechariah, John the Baptist, and the one who killed Husayn son of Ali.

One station.
Two occupants.
Nobody else in the history of the world qualified.

They thought they were ending something.

Both times, they were beginning it.

You have spent tonight learning that men in other houses asked our question long before we did — why do you go to a grave, and what are you doing when you get there.

Here is the answer my family gives.

You go because some blood does not settle.
Because the ground itself refused to close over it.
Because the sky changed colour and stayed that colour for forty mornings, twice in the history of the world, and both times it was over a man who would not be what the room around him had agreed to be.

They are still there.
They are still speaking.

And every one of you who has ever stood at a grave and said peace be upon you was answering something.

I was not there — but I remember.

And I am not gone.

May our Lord hasten my return.

Pray ardently for my return.

Sources Cited

• Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the chapter on the weeping of the heavens and the earth
  — visit him and do not neglect him, for he is the master of the martyrs and the master of the youth of the people of paradise and the likeness of Yahya ibn Zakariyya, and for the two of them the sky and the earth wept

• Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the same chapter
  — the sky wept for these two alone, forty mornings, rising red and setting red

• Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the same chapter
  — the Messenger of God on the station in the Fire deserved by no one except the killer of al-Husayn and the killer of Yahya ibn Zakariyya (John the Baptist)

• Bihar al-Anwar, volume 14, report 20
  — the golden basin, the blood that rose through the earth, Bukhtnasr - Nebuchadnezzar, and the seventy thousand

• Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Saint Mary) #19, verses 12 and 14
  — take the Book with strength · and he was not a tyrant, disobedientWhat are you building?