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 Man with the Chisel”
I. A List of Streets
I want to tell you about a man whose name nobody wrote down.
Not the minister who signed it. Not the officer who carried it. The one at the end of it, who did the actual work.
He was given a list of streets, and a tool.
And in the morning, in the year four hundred and forty-eight, he walked into a lane in Karkh and started at the first house.
II. What Was Written Over the Door
Over the door of that house there was a sentence.
Just a line of letters, cut into the stone above the frame, the way a family does when it wants the street to know who lives there.
It said:
Muhammad and Ali are the best of humankind.
Understand what that is.
That is not a slogan.
That is a household telling the road what it loves.
Somebody had paid for those letters. Somebody had stood in the lane while they were cut, and looked up, and been pleased with how they came out.
And children had grown up walking under them without ever once reading them, the way you do not read the door of your own house.
III. He Does Not Look Up
He set the chisel against the first letter, and he struck it.
And then again.
And the stone came away in flakes, and the letters went, one at a time, and it took a while — because whoever cut them had cut them deep. They had been meant to last.
Then he moved to the next door.
And the next.
I watched him go down that whole lane, and I want to tell you the thing I have never been able to put down.
He did not look up.
Not once. Not at the windows. Not at the people standing in their own doorways watching him take the names off their house.
He was not cruel. That is the part you will find hardest.
He was working.
He had a list, and the light goes early in Safar, and he wanted to finish.
IV. There Was a Door Before This One
And I stood in that lane and I could not breathe, and it was not because of the dust.
It was because I have seen a door before.
They came for a door once, long before Karkh. 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 was my grandmother.
And she did not live long after.
Now look again at what that man was chiselling off the stone.
Two names.
The name of the Messenger of God, and the name of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — her father, and her husband.
Four hundred years apart. The same two names. Somebody coming to a door to take them away.
And on a plain by a river, between those two doors, they set fire to the tents with the children still inside them, and left the bodies three days, and carried the heads of the men of my house through the streets of two cities on the points of spears.
So do not tell me a chisel is a small thing.
I have watched them come to my family’s doors for four hundred years, and they always, always start by removing the names.
V. He Goes Home
And at the end of the afternoon he finished the last house on the list.
He put the chisel in his bag.
And he walked home — past his own door.
I do not know whether he had anything written over it. I know he had a family behind it, and that they were glad to see him, and that he ate something and slept.
That is what I want you to sit with tonight. Not the fire. The ordinariness.
Every catastrophe that has ever happened to my house was carried out, in the end, by somebody who was just doing his job and wanted to get home.
VI. What Are You Building?
So — you.
You have a threshold. Everybody does. Something you have let the street see, or something you have kept carefully inside where it is safe.
What is written over yours?
And here is the question I actually want to ask, because it is harder than the first one:
Whose door are you standing at, with a list, doing your job?
Because the man in that lane did not think he was in this story. He thought he was at work.
What are you building?
Build something with the names still on it.
Build it where the street can read it.
And when they come with the chisel — and they will, they always do — let them find that the letters were only ever a copy.
That the real thing was cut into the people inside the house, and no tool has ever been made that reaches that.
Sources Cited
The black banners, the altered call to prayer, and the inscriptions
محمد وعلي خير البشرtorn off the doors of the houses and the heads of the lanes, in the year 448 — Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam fi Tarikh al-Muluk wa’l-Umam, Volume 16, Page 8 (Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Ata). The chisel, the lane and the doors are all in the chronicle. The workman is not: he is the necessary implication of the sentence, and he is presented as such — the maqtal invents no fact about him beyond the fact that somebody had to do it.The order came from the caliph’s own chief minister — same passage. Named in the write-up (footnote 2), not from the minbar.
The door, and the daughter of the Messenger of God — narrated in the maqtal register, deliberately without elaboration, per the standing rule. The maqtal states that they came, and that she did not live long after. It makes no further claim and names nobody.
The tents fired on the afternoon of Ashura; the bodies left three days; the heads carried to Kufa and to Damascus — the standard maqtal tradition, as carried in al-Luhuf and the classical maqatil.
“Four hundred years apart” — from the events of 11 AH to the events of 448 AH is four hundred and thirty-seven years. “Four hundred years” is used as the round figure and is safe; do not sharpen it to a precise number in delivery.
