by Reza Aslan
For ten days the Syrian forces have besieged Husayn at Karbala. At first, they tried to storm the camp in a stampede of cavalry. But having anticipated the assault, Husayn had pitched his tents near a chain of hills, protecting his rear. He then dug a semicircular trench around three sides of his camp, filled the trench with wood, and ignited it. Gathering his men in the center of this crescent of fire, Husayn ordered them to kneel in a tight formation with their lances pointing out, so that when the enemy horses neared, they would be forced by the flames to squeeze into the entrance of the trap.
This simple strategy allowed Husayn’s tiny force to repel the thirty thousand soldiers of the Caliph for six long days. But on the seventh day, the Syrian army changed tactics. Rather than trying to storm the camp again, they shifted their lines to blockade the banks of the Euphrates, cutting off Husayn’s supply of water.
Now the time for fighting is over. Sitting high atop their armored horses, the Caliph’s soldiers make no move toward Husayn. Their swords are sheathed, their bows slung over their shoulders.
It has been three days since the canals stopped flowing into Husayn’s camp; those few who haven’t already lost their lives in battle are now slowly, painfully dying of thirst. The ground is littered with bodies, including those of Husayn’s eighteen-year-old son, Ali Akbar, and his fourteen-year-old nephew, Qasim—the son of his elder brother, Hasan. Of the seventy-two companions who were to march with Husayn from Medina to Kufa in order to raise an army against Yazid, only the women and a few children remain, along with one other man: Husayn’s sole surviving son, Ali, though he lies near death inside the women’s tent. All the others are buried where they fell, their bodies wrapped in shrouds, their heads pointing toward Mecca. The wind stirs their shallow graves, carrying the stench of rot across the flat plain.
Alone, exhausted, and seriously wounded, Husayn collapses at the entrance to his tent: An arrowhead is lodged deep in his arm, his cheek pierced by a dart. He is parched and dizzy from loss of blood. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he lowers his head and tries to ignore the wails of the women in the adjoining tent: they have just buried his infant son, who was struck in the neck by an arrow after Husayn carried him up a hill to beg the Syrian troops for water. Their anguish penetrates him deeper than any arrow could, but it also stiffens his resolve. There is now nothing left to do but finish the task for which he had set out from Medina. He must gather what strength he has left to lift himself off the ground. He must stand up and fight against the injustice and tyranny of the Caliph, even if it means sacrificing his life—especially if it means sacrificing his life.
Rising to his feet, he lifts his bloody hands to heaven and prays: “We are for God, and to God shall we return.”
A Quran in one hand and a sword in the other, Husayn mounts his steed and tugs the horse’s head to face the barricade of soldiers standing only a few hundred meters in front of him. With a swift kick to the horse’s ribs, he launches himself ferociously at the enemy, swinging his sword left and right, all the while shouting, “Do you see how Fatima’s son fights? Do you see how Ali’s son fights? Do you see how the Banu Hashim fight despite three days of hunger and thirst?”
One by one, the Syrian riders perish by his sword, until their general, Shimr, orders the soldiers to regroup and surround Husayn from all sides. A swift blow from a lance knocks him off his horse. On the ground, he covers his head, writhing in pain as the horses trample his body. Husayn’s sister, Zainab, rushes from the tent to come to his aid. But Husayn calls out to her to stay where she is. “Go back to the tent, sister,” he shouts. “I am already undone.”
Finally, Shimr orders the Syrian cavalry to pull back. As his soldiers round up the survivors from the camp, the general dismounts his horse and stands over Husayn’s racked and broken body. “Make your confession,” Shimr says. “It is time to cut your throat.”
Husayn rolls over onto his back to face his executioner. “Forgive, O merciful Lord, the sins of my grandfather’s people,” he cries, “and grant me, bountifully, the key of the treasure of intercession …”
Before the Prophet’s grandson can finish his prayer, Shimr lifts his sword in the air and swings the blade down in one swift motion, cleanly severing Husayn’s head from his body. He raises the head on a lance to bring back to Damascus, where he will present it on a golden tray as a gift to the Umayyad Caliph.
After Ali’s assassination in 661, the remnants of the Shi‘atu Ali in Kufa selected his eldest son, Hasan, to succeed him as Caliph. But Kufa was a fractured and isolated city, and Ali’s supporters were scattered and few in number. With Mu‘awiyah having already declared himself Caliph in Jerusalem and the hegemony of Damascus stretching ever further over the Muslim lands, there was no way for Hasan’s allies to compete with the Syrian army for control of the Muslim community.
Yet few as they may have been, the Shi‘atu Ali were still an influential faction, particularly among the Iranians of the former Sasanian Empire, who saw in the ahl al-bayt an alternative to the ethnic Arab domination of the Umayyads, as well as among the populations of Mecca and Medina, where the memory of the Prophet was still fresh in the minds of those who, regardless of their political affiliation, could not help recognizing the grooves and shadows of Muhammad’s features etched into the faces of his grandsons Hasan and Husayn. So when Hasan offered to come to terms with Mu‘awiyah, proposing what amounted to a temporary cease-fire, Mu‘awiyah was quick to accept.
Avoiding what would have been yet another civil war between the factions of the Banu Hashim and those of the Banu Umayya, the two men signed a treaty that handed the mantle of leadership to Mu‘awiyah with the understanding that after his death the Caliphate would, at the very least, be decided by the consensus of the Muslim community, if not explicitly returned to Muhammad’s family. The agreement benefited both men. It gave Hasan the opportunity to regroup the Shi‘atu Ali without fear of annihilation at the hands of the Syrian army, and it offered Mu‘awiyah the legitimacy he had been seeking since he first began pursuing the Caliphate.
With the capital of the Muslim community now firmly established in Damascus, Mu‘awiyah launched a series of reforms meant to strengthen and centralize his authority as Caliph. He used the overwhelming might of his standing Syrian army to unite the troops scattered in garrison towns throughout the Muslim lands. He then forcibly resettled in distant villages those nomadic tribesmen who had never before considered themselves to be a part of the Ummah, thereby extending the grasp of his empire. He maintained his link to even the most remote Muslim provinces by reassigning his kinsmen—many of whom had been removed from their posts by Ali—as amirs, though he kept a tight leash on them to avoid the corruption and disorder that was so prevalent during his cousin Uthman’s rule. Mu‘awiyah’s amirs secured their positions by diligently collecting taxes to send to Damascus, which the Caliph used to build a magnificent capital the likes of which had never before been imagined by any Arab tribe.
Although Mu‘awiyah adopted Uthman’s religiously oriented title, Khalifat Allah, and poured money into the institutions of the religious scholars and Quran reciters, he also set Umayyad precedent by not directly meddling in the theological and legal controversies of the Ulama. However, like his ancient ancestor, Qusayy, Mu‘awiyah recognized the role of the Ka‘ba in bestowing religious legitimacy to political rule. He therefore purchased from the Banu Hashim the right to care for the Meccan sanctuary and provide shelter and water to the pilgrims.
By centralizing his authority in Damascus and securing his position as Caliph with a mobile and highly disciplined army (not to mention a powerful naval fleet, which he used to conquer territories as distant as Sicily), Mu‘awiyah managed to pull together the disparate regions of the Arab domain under his rule, ushering in a period of enormous expansion throughout the Muslim lands. But although he took great pains to style himself in both manner and conduct as an all-powerful tribal Shaykh, rather than as a Muslim king, there can be no question that Mu‘awiyah�
��s centralized and absolutist rule was deliberately meant to imitate the dynastic empires of the Byzantines and Sasanians. Hence, having completed the transformation of the Caliphate into a monarchy, Mu‘awiyah did what any other king would do: he appointed his son, Yazid, to succeed him.
Considering his nearly wholesale slaughter of the Prophet’s family at Karbala, it is not surprising that the traditions have been unkind to Yazid. Mu‘awiyah’s heir has been portrayed as a debauched, licentious drunkard more interested in playing with his pet monkey than in running the affairs of state. Although this may not be a fair depiction of the new Caliph, the fact is that Yazid’s reputation was sealed from the moment he succeeded his father. For his succession marked the definitive end of the united community of God and the unambiguous commencement of the first Muslim—and distinctly Arab—empire.
This is why Kufa was in revolt. A garrison town teeming with freed slaves and non-Arab (mostly Iranian) Muslim soldiers, Kufa, which had served as the capital of Ali’s brief and turbulent Caliphate, had become the locus of anti-Umayyad sentiment. That sentiment was perfectly embodied by the heterogeneous coalition of the Shi‘atu Ali, who had little else in common save their hatred of the Banu Umayya and their belief that only the family of the Prophet could restore Islam to its original ideals of justice, piety, and egalitarianism.
As mentioned, the Shi‘atu Ali first looked to Hasan, the eldest son of Ali and Fatima, to represent them as their new leader. But when Hasan died in 669—poisoned, his companions contended—their aspirations fell upon Ali’s second son, Husayn. Unlike his older brother, who had a great distaste for politics and its machinations, Husayn was a natural leader who elicited fierce loyalty from his followers. After Hasan’s death, the Shi‘atu Ali pressured Husayn to rise up immediately against Mu‘awiyah, pledging him their lives if necessary. But Husayn refused to violate his brother’s treaty with the Caliph.
For eleven years, he bided his time in Medina, teaching, preaching, and preserving the legacy of his family while waiting for the Caliph to die. For eleven years he suffered the humiliation of having to sit through public cursings of his father, Ali, something Mu‘awiyah had made obligatory from every pulpit in the Empire. Finally, in 680, Mu‘awiyah passed away, and soon afterward, a message arrived from the Kufans begging Husayn to come to their city and take charge of their rebellion against the tyrant’s son.
Although he had been awaiting this message for years, Husayn hesitated, knowing all too well the fickle and discordant nature of the Kufans and being unwilling to put his fate into their hands. He also recognized the futility of raising an army of Iraqi malcontents against the massive Syrian forces of the Caliph. At the same time, he could not ignore his duty as the Prophet’s grandson to stand up against what he considered to be the oppression of his community at the hands of an illegitimate ruler.
Husayn’s decision was made for him when Yazid, recognizing the threat he posed to his authority, summoned Husayn to appear before his amir, Walid, in Medina to pledge his allegiance to Damascus. However, when Husayn appeared before Walid and his aide, Marwan—the same Marwan who had so disastrously advised Uthman and who would eventually seize the Umayyad Caliphate for himself a few years later—he managed to put off his pledge by claiming that, as the representative of Muhammad’s clan, he could better serve the Caliph if his allegiance were given in public. Walid agreed and let him go. But Marwan was not fooled.
“If Husayn is allowed to leave, you shall never recapture him,” he told Walid. “Either ask him to swear allegiance now or have him killed.”
Before Walid could act upon Marwan’s advice, Husayn hastily gathered the members of his family and, along with a handful of supporters, headed off to Kufa. He never made it.
Having uncovered Husayn’s plans to raise an army against him, Yazid sent his troops to Kufa to arrest and execute the leaders of the rebellion and to make sure the population of the city understood that any attempt to rally support for Husayn would be swiftly and mercilessly crushed. The threat worked. Long before Husayn and his followers were intercepted at Karbala, just a few kilometers south of Kufa, the insurrection had been quelled. Just as Husayn had predicted, the Kufans abandoned him to his fate. And yet, even after he had received news of the revolt’s collapse, after he had been abandoned by those whom he came to lead, Husayn continued to march toward Kufa and certain death.
The events at Karbala sent shock waves through the Muslim lands. After the massacre, Yazid’s troops made a point of parading the survivors, including Husayn’s only remaining son, Ali—so ailing he had to be strapped to a camel—through the streets of Kufa as a cautionary message to Husayn’s supporters. When Husayn’s severed head was displayed to the crowd, the Kufans wailed and beat their breasts, cursing themselves for betraying the family of the Prophet. But even those factions who had strenuously opposed the leadership claims of the Banu Hashim were aghast at this demonstration of Caliphal might. This was, after all, the family of the Messenger of God, people said; how could they have been starved and massacred like animals?
Almost immediately, rebellion erupted throughout the Empire. The remaining Kharijite factions denounced Yazid as a heretic and set up their own separate régimes, one in Iran and one in the Arabian Peninsula. In Kufa, a brief yet bloody uprising to avenge the massacre at Karbala was instigated in the name of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah (the son of Ali but not of Fatima). In Mecca, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr—the son of the man who had, along with Talha, fought with Aisha against Ali at the Battle of the Camel—raised an army and declared himself Amir al-Mu’manin (Commander of the Faithful). The Ansar promptly followed Ibn al-Zubayr’s example by declaring their independence from Damascus and selecting their own leader to represent them in Medina.
Yazid responded to these rebellions by turning his army loose. At his command the Syrian forces surrounded Mecca and Medina with massive catapults from which they indiscriminately launched fireballs at the inhabitants. In Mecca, the fires quickly spread to the Ka‘ba, burning the sanctuary to the ground. When the flames finally subsided, both sacred cities lay in ruins. Medina immediately surrendered and pledged allegiance to Yazid. But it took another decade for the Umayyads, under the Caliphate of Abd al-Malik, to defeat the forces of Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca once and for all and restore the absolute sovereignty of Damascus.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Umayyad Caliphs, there was a subtler and far more significant revolution taking place in the Empire: a revolution not for political control but for control of the very essence of the Muslim faith. Four years after the events at Karbala, in 684 C.E., a small group of individuals from Kufa who called themselves the tawwabun, or Penitents, gathered at the site of the massacre—their faces blackened, their clothes torn—to mourn the death of Husayn and his family. This was an informal and unceremonious gathering meant not only as homage to Husayn but as an act of atonement for their failure to aid him against the Umayyad forces. The Penitents had assembled at Karbala to display their guilt publicly, and their communal act of mourning was a means of absolving themselves of their sins.
Although the notion of lamentation as atonement for sin was a common practice in most Mesopotamian religions, including Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Manichaeism, it was an unprecedented phenomenon in Islam. Indeed, the collective lamentations of the Penitents at Karbala were the first documented rituals of what would eventually become a wholly new religious tradition. Put simply, the memory of Karbala was slowly transforming the Shi‘atu Ali from a political faction with the aim of restoring the leadership of the community to the family of the Prophet, into an utterly distinct religious sect in Islam: Shi‘ism, a religion founded on the ideal of the righteous believer who, following in the footsteps of the martyrs at Karbala, willingly sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice against oppression.
WHAT SETS THE actions of the Penitents at Karbala apart in the history of religions is that they offer a glimpse into the ways in which ritual, rather than myth, can fa
shion a faith. This is a crucial point to bear in mind when discussing the development of Shi‘ism. As Heinz Halm has noted, the Shi‘ah are a community born not “by the profession of belief in dogma” but rather “through the process of performing the rituals” that sprang up around the Karbala myth. Only after these rituals had become formalized hundreds of years later did Shi‘ite theologians reexamine and reinterpret them in order to lay the theological foundation for what was already a new religious movement.
Karbala became Shi‘ism’s Garden of Eden, with humanity’s original sin being not disobedience to God, but unfaithfulness to God’s moral principles. Just as the early Christians coped with Jesus’ demoralizing death by reinterpreting the Crucifixion as a conscious and eternal decision of self-sacrifice, so also did the Shi‘ah claim Husayn’s martyrdom to have been both a conscious and an eternal decision. The Shi‘ah claim that long before Husayn was born, the events of Karbala had been miraculously revealed to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Ali, and Fatima. The Shi‘ah noted that Husayn knew he could not defeat the Caliph, yet he deliberately chose to continue to Kufa in order to sacrifice himself for his principles and for all generations to come. Realizing that mere force of arms could not restore the vision of a united community under the rule of Muhammad’s kin, Husayn had planned “a complete revolution in the consciousness of the Muslim community,” to quote Husain Jafri. In fact, as the eminent Shi‘ite theologian Shah Abdul Aziz has argued, Husayn’s self-sacrifice was in reality the logical end to the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his firstborn son, Ismail—the sacrifice was not revoked but postponed until Karbala, when Husayn willingly fulfilled it. The Shi‘ah thus regard Husayn’s martyrdom as having completed the religion that Abraham initiated and Muhammad revealed to the Arabs.