Husayn ibn Ali

Husayn ibn Ali (626-680) was the younger son of Ali and Fatimah, and thus a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who is remembered to have cherished him deeply. In the reckoning of Twelver Shia Islam he is the third Imam, following his father Ali and his elder brother Hasan, and one of the Ahl al-Bayt, the People of the House.

His significance turns on a refusal. After the death of the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya in 680, the caliphate passed to his son Yazid, whose legitimacy and conduct Husayn would not endorse. Pressed to give the oath of allegiance, Husayn declined, and in response to appeals from the people of Kufa in Iraq, who invited him to lead them, he set out from Mecca toward Iraq with his family and a small band of followers.

The promised support did not materialize. Kufa was brought under Umayyad control before he arrived, and Husayn found himself, with fewer than a hundred fighting men and their families, intercepted on the plain of Karbala by a large Umayyad force. What followed there became the central sacred drama of Shia Islam.

On the tenth day of the month of Muharram in the year 680, the day called Ashura, Husayn and his companions, encamped at Karbala and cut off from the waters of the Euphrates, were surrounded and killed by the army of Yazid's governor. Husayn himself fell, and the men of his party with him; the women and children, including his surviving son Ali Zayn al-Abidin, were taken captive and brought to the caliph.

The bare fact of the killing is not in serious historical doubt; it is among the better-attested events of the early caliphate. What the tradition has made of it is a passion narrative of extraordinary power, the thirst of the besieged, the deaths of Husayn's companions and kin one by one, the killing of his infant son, and his own end, retold each year in minute and grieving detail.

For Shia Muslims Karbala is not merely a historical tragedy but the defining act of witness: the willing sacrifice of the Prophet's grandson against overwhelming and unjust power, a standing measure of the cost of refusing tyranny. Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala expresses how the event is held as a perpetual present. The site of the battle, where Husayn is buried, is among the holiest places of Shia Islam and a destination of vast pilgrimage.

The martyrdom of Husayn is commemorated annually through the first ten days of Muharram, culminating on Ashura. The observances, the recitation of the passion in gatherings called majalis, the lamentation and weeping, the processions, the passion plays known in Iran as ta'ziyeh, and in some communities acts of ritual mourning upon the body, constitute one of the most emotionally intense devotional cycles in any religion, and they are living practice for the world's Shia today.

The Arba'in pilgrimage, forty days after Ashura, draws many millions on foot to Husayn's shrine at Karbala, among the largest annual gatherings of humanity anywhere.

The meaning of Karbala has also travelled beyond the Shia community and beyond Islam. Husayn's stand became, for many, a universal emblem of principled resistance to injustice: figures as distant as Mahatma Gandhi invoked his example, and the theme of a righteous few against an unjust power has resonated widely. Within Islam the day is marked by Sunnis too, though differently, as a day of fasting associated in Sunni tradition with the deliverance of Moses, so that Ashura carries distinct meanings across the branches. For Shia Islam, however, it is above all the day of Husayn.