Essay by Lesley Hazleton

This really happened. In your Christian year six hundred and eighty. On the tenth of the month of Muharram.

Ashura we call it—the 10th. And it happened in the place that we would call Karbala—the place of suffering and sorrow—50 miles south of where the city of Baghdad would soon be built.

You would say that it happened a long time ago; you would call it ancient history. But for us, it is not history. For us, it happened this very morning. Every day is Ashura, we say, and every land is Karbala. Because on this day, and in this bleak and terrible place, the Imam Hussein, the Prince of Martyrs, was foully murdered.

Save us from tyranny, the Iraqis had begged him. Letter after letter, carried across the seven hundred miles from the valley of the Euphrates to the mountains of Arabia and the holy city of Medina. Rescue us from oppression, from the usurper caliph Yazid.

(—Yazid, a curse on the name—)

Claim your rightful place, Hussein, as the true heir of the Prophet Muhammad, the Messenger of God—his flesh and blood through Fatima, his daughter, your mother. Avenge the blood of your father Ali, Muhammad's true khalifa—his successor, his Caliph—who was cheated out of his title not once but three times, then struck down by an assassin. Unseat the corrupt pretender in Damascus. Bring power back where it belongs, to Iraq. We will rise up under your banner. We will reclaim the true soul of Islam.

For months they came, these letters, from the followers of Ali—Shiat Ali, the Shia—to his son Hussein. And among them, messages from Hussein's cousin, Muslim. I have 70,000 men ready to fight under your leadership, he wrote. Come. Come now. The time is right.

The Imam Hussein obeyed the call. The call to duty as the true Caliph. With his family and just 72 armed men, he set out from Medina. Not knowing that at that very moment, 700 miles away, his cousin Muslim had been betrayed by the Iraqis, had been given up to Yazid's men, tortured, dragged to the camel market, and crucified... Not knowing, when he set out, that he was journeying toward his death.

You know, nobody disputes what happened. It was a terrible thing, yes. A regrettable affair. A tragedy. Truly, a tragedy. The favorite grandson of the Prophet himself, peace be upon him? It should never have happened. Would never have happened if he had only accepted reality. His father Ali was long dead, and with him, those two civil wars—two in just the five years Ali was Caliph. Muslims killing Muslims? The chaos, the anarchy of it? No, enough, I tell you. Enough. And so when Ali was killed, we welcomed Yazid's father, Mu'awiya, and pledged allegiance to him, and when he died, to his son Yazid.

This is the way the world works. One must be, as you like to say, pragmatic. We welcomed Mu'awiya because we needed a strong leader. A man who could put a stop to civil war. A man who could hold together this vast empire we had created, from North Africa all the way east into Pakistan. Wealth and power undreamed of. Only a statesman, a man experienced in the ways of persuasion, of manipulation—yes, bribery if you wish to call it that—I'm sorry but this is how things are done—only such a man could control the great nation of Islam. A man who understood not the heavens, but the earth.

Hussein? A revered scholar, a man to be honored as the grandson of the Prophet. But his spiritual successor? No. Impossible. Did not Muhammad himself say that the power of revelation ended with him? That Islam would live in the community, not in any one person? He left us with everything we need—the holy book of revelation, the Qur'an, and the sunna, his example. We Sunnis, we who follow the sunna, are Islam. It is heresy to think otherwise.

And what did Hussein know of the world, there in the rarefied air of Medina? What was he thinking when he left for Iraq? He was not a warrior. Not a statesman. Not a young man—in his 50s already. Why not be content to live out his days in peace? Why not leave the business of politics and power to those who could handle it?

My friends, do I need to tell you that faith and politics do not mix well?

It was in his blood, his noble blood. The true spirit of Islam. The Imam Hussein had been graced with the true meaning of the revelation. He had received it as a young boy in the lap of his grandfather the Prophet. There was no man purer than he. There could be no Caliph but him.

The Umayyad pretenders, M'awiya and Yazid, had corrupted Islam. Corrupted its heart and its mind and its soul. Power replaced faith. Ostentation killed humility. Where the Messenger of God lived in poverty, the Umayyads lorded it over the world from their green marble palace in Damascus. They lazed and lolled in luxury, among fountains and pools, drinking wine and watching dancing women while their soldiers beat the rest of us into submission.

Under the Prophet we had all been equal—a golden age we tasted again for five brief years under Ali, and then... darkness. Now Ali's son, the Imam Hussein, was the only one who could bring back the light.

It isn't as though he wasn't warned. The first rider from Iraq met his caravan just a few days out of Medina. Your supporters have betrayed you, he said; your cousin is dead. Turn back and protect your women and children. And yet... Hussein kept going. More riders came, meeting him along the trail, all with the same message. All... ignored.

He surely couldn't have thought he had the slightest chance against the might of Yazid, that he was anything more than a gnat on the back of a camel. Only power can argue with power. It is a sad thing to say, I know, but that is the way of the world.

What then? Was Hussein deluded? So convinced of the rightness of his claim that he could no longer judge reality? So full of what we call nasb—nobility and honor—that he could not imagine anything but that might give way to right?

Aieee, such naiveté. Such foolishness. Such tragedy he would cause, with this high-minded blindness of his. I beg you, don't get me started. Too much purity, my friends, can be worse than too little.

Yes, he was warned. And with each warning, he responded the same way. “Man journeys in darkness,” he said, “and his destiny journeys toward him.”

Only this way was left to him. The way of sacrifice. The way of martyrdom. Only in death could he shock the people back into awareness, show them the depth of corruption that had overtaken Islam.

Yazid's army met him within sight of the Euphrates, where the desert first gives way to fields and date orchards. Pledge allegiance to the Caliph Yazid, they said, or turn back. But the Imam Hussein would do neither. Could do neither. He could only fulfill his destiny.

Surrounded by 4,000 of Yazid's cavalry and archers, he made camp at the place that would be known as Karbala. Four thousand trained soldiers against a mere 72 warriors... There could be no escape. The orders from Yazid—not one drop of water to reach Hussein's camp until he pledges allegiance. In the terrible, stifling heat, not one drop. Forgo your claim to be the Caliph, or die.

How can the tears not flow when we tell all that happened in those 10 days of thirst and deprivation? When we remember each and every martyr? I know, I see, you have no patience for all these names, so strange to your western ears. No time to listen to how each one died. Just two, then.

Abbas, Hussein's half-brother—Abbas, whose shrine would be the twin of Hussein's own shrine at Karbala. Driven by the parched cries of the children for water, he made his way through the enemy lines at night, and filled a goatskin at the river, only to be ambushed by the enemy. One man against many, he fought like the warrior he was. And when his sword arm was cut off, he fought on with the other arm... until that too was cut off. The arrow that pierced his heart also pierced the goatskin, and the precious water ran red with his blood into the sand... Ya, Abbas, we mourn for you.

Or mourn with us for Ali Asghar, Hussein's infant son, just three months old, so weak from dehydration that he could no longer even cry. The Imam Hussein himself, despairing, came out in front of the tents and held him up in his arms, held him high for all the enemy to see. His voice cracked and parched with thirst, he begged Yazid's men to have mercy on these children, to allow water at least for them. And in answer—an arrow, shot straight into the neck of the infant, even as he lay in Hussein's outstretched hands...

But these are mere stories, my friends. Wonder stories. You see that. You know how they are, these Shia—how they embroider, how they fabricate... The brave warrior fighting with one arm, the infant with the arrow in his neck—such details were added later, purely in order to create pathos. To appeal to the heart and silence the mind. To build this cult of martyrdom. Of death.

They worship the dead at these shrines of theirs. These gold-leafed minarets and domes, all over Iraq and Iran—what are they but pagan temples? Temples to Hussein and to Ali and to all their descendants down to the 12th generation—this 12th Imam of theirs, this so-called Mahdi, who they imagine disappeared into a cave in Samarra and will come back on the Day of Judgment with your savior, the prophet Jesus, behind him...

What can one do with people who believe such things? For whom the word of Allah alone is not enough?

On the last night—the Last Supper, you would call it, the eve of the 10th of Muharram, the eve of Ashura—the Imam Hussein urged his remaining warriors to leave him to his fate. You have families, he said. Go back to them. There is no shame in leaving now. No dishonor. Slip through the enemy lines under cover of darkness. Live, with my blessing, I beseech you. Yet to a man, they stayed.

On that final, terrible morning, the all-out assault began. One by one, the warriors were cut down, until Hussein alone was left to fight. Already wounded, he rode out from the tents on his white stallion. The archers fired, volley after volley. Arrows studded the horse's flanks and still he kept charging. Hussein fought valiantly until—that moment of ultimate evil—he was unseated, brought to the ground and surrounded. They crowded in on him, kicking, stabbing, cutting—cowards all, each one afraid to give the mortal blow.... Thirty-three knife and sword wounds on his body. Nobody knows which one killed him. Nobody dared claim that.

The survivors would tell how the Imam's horse bowed down and dipped his head in his master's blood, then went back to the women's tent, tears pouring from his eyes, and beat his forehead on the ground in mourning. How two doves flew down and dipped their wings in the sacred blood, then flew south, first to Medina and then to Mecca, so that when people there saw them, they knew what had happened, and the wailing of grief began. How Hussein's three-year-old daughter wandered out onto the battlefield in search of her father, crying out for him, surrounded by blood-soaked corpses....

You see what I am talking about? The horse, the little girl...? Legends. Mere legends. And of course the folk, the simple folk, the peasants of Iran and Iraq, of the Lebanon and of Azerbaijan, of Pakistan and the Bahrain, they eat it all up, every tearful moment of it. And they keep it alive. Every year, in the 10 days of Ashura.

These processions of theirs... The riderless horse with doves tethered to its empty saddle. The men flailing themselves with knife-tipped chains, drawing blood. The women slapping their cheeks in mourning. The elegies. The wailing. The sound of thousands of men's fists thumping in cadence against their chests. The endless cycle of passion plays...

And those posters, those portraits... Everywhere. Hussein, and Ali, and Abbas, with their dark eyes, tender and fierce at the same time, those images of suffering nobility—the images you in the West mistake for those of the prophet Jesus. They are idolators, these people. They are not true Muslims. They worship graven images.

How can you blame our young men when they are aroused by such things? When their blood boils and they attack these infidels? Do not misunderstand me: it's not that I approve of such attacks. But in the face of such provocation...

Mere legends? It is all there in their own records, written by Umayyad historians—Sunni historians. How Yazid's soldiers hacked the head of the Imam Hussein from his body. How they cut off the heads of all 72 of his warriors, and left the bodies there in the desert for hyenas and wolves to feed on. How they chained the women and the girls and Hussein's one surviving son, an adolescent boy so ill that he could barely move. How they mounted the heads on the tips of spears and paraded them through Iraq and all the way across the Syrian desert to Damascus, along with the captive family of the Prophet, his blood kin, in chains. The humiliation. The shame of it all...

That Islam had come to this. And the Messenger of God dead not 50 years.

It is a terrible thing to be in love this way with failure. They are fanatics, these Shia. Longing for an impossible perfection, for a golden age long gone by the time of Karbala. A golden age they imagine will come again with the resurrection of their 12th Imam, this Mahdi of theirs.

To idolize Hussein, a man entranced by the idea of inherited nobility? A man so convinced of his spiritual superiority that he endangered his own women and children? What can you do with a man who refuses to accept the force of history? What valor is in this? Tell me that. What nobility? What purity in civil war? It is treason, I tell you, treason against the whole nation of Islam. Hussein was offered the chance to withdraw with honor, to act in the interest of all Muslims, but no, he chose division. A curse on him, and on all his descendants. How could he have done this to us? To Islam?

This will haunt us for centuries, I tell you. For centuries.

I know what you think. You think we Shia are obsessed with death. A cult of martyrdom, you call it. But were they Shia, those men who drove planes into your great shining towers? No, they were Sunni. Are they Shia, those men who blow themselves up in the marketplace? No, they are Sunni. You do not understand, you see. You think it must be simple, because it is far away. In another language, another time, another place. But you are a young country. A large island far to the west. What do you know of time and place? How can you understand what is written on our hearts, that every day is Ashura, and every place is Karbala?

This is our cry of liberation. It is our call to rise up against injustice, and oppression, and corruption. The Mahdi has absented himself from the world, yes, but the day will come when he will rise from his concealment. He will return to lead us, and deliver us from evil. At Karbala, on Ashura...

Insh Allah—if God wills it, it will be so.