It is the third in our series, following Where Is Your Brother and Am I Not Your Lord? The first began the chain at the first grave ever dug. The second went further back still, to the covenant every soul gave before it had a body to give it with. This one arrives at the moment the chain reaches a particular man, in a particular room, on a particular night — and asks what he did with it.

Each of the verses encapsulates the lessons of Session 3 of the Shahada (Witness) Series — Five Kinds of Death — and of the maqtal recited that same night, narrated in the voice of the Imam of our Age.

The relevant sermon and maqtal links are provided alongside each verse.

Reflections

[3] Shahada (Witness) - Five Kinds of Death

In His Name, the Most High…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · A Thinker

Twelve words.

Twelve words in a lamplit room.

Four ways to die — and one way to live.

Count them.

One: the clock. The term runs out. The race was always run.

Nothing taken. Nothing given.

(Not the one.)

Two: the fever, or the fall, before the life was done.

Grief — and not a word of message.

(Not the one.)

Three: the dark, the lifted arm, a life that no one won.

Taken. Never given.

(Not the one.)

Four: the hand turned inward on a trust that wasn’t its own.

Dress it in a cause — it’s still not one.

(Not the one.)

Five.

Do not think of them as dead.

Five doesn’t take. Five gives.

Not a life lost — a life laid down:

knowing, and awake, and with the eyes wide open.

Five is the one.

Five is the one.

Four ways to die — and one way to live.

Four of them take. Only one of them gives.

It never starts with a sword. It starts with a sentence:

someone like me

does not give his hand

to someone like him.

Twelve words. Twelve words.

A king died in the north. His son sat down to write.

One page down to the governor: deliver it tonight.

Go to the grandson’s door. I want his hand in mine —

and if he will not give it, send his head back down the line.

Walid read it by the lamp and felt the night go cold:

not an evil man — a small man, holding what he could not hold.

He put the letter down. He sent for him that night.

And the grandson came, with young men at the door, and swords kept out of sight.

Marwan leaned in from the shadow: kill him where he stands.

You will never get another night like this one in your hands.

Then Husayn began to speak, and he did not raise his voice —

he named the man’s three crimes, and then he named his own choice:

He drinks what God forbade him. He takes what God made whole.

He breaks in open daylight what was given him to hold.

And he wants my hand for that — in my grandfather’s town,

in my mother’s own house — and he wants me to bow down.

The small man would not do it: not that blood. Not on me.

So they walked back through the same streets, past the same lamps, quietly.

The city had not changed a stone. The night looked like the last.

But the world had turned right over — and the world had not been asked.

The house was full. The house was silent. He told them what he’d said.

He told them they’d be gone from there before the sun came red.

Zaynab did not argue.

Abbas did not argue.

Ali did not argue.

The little ones did not argue.

Nobody argued. Not one.

Then he went out to the grave. He stood there in the dark.

Grandfather — this was your city. This was my mother’s house.

My father prayed in every corner of these streets.

Tonight they want my hand for a man

you would not have greeted in the road.

I won’t. I go tomorrow. Pray for me.

And he wept — not the weeping of a man afraid;

the weeping of a grandson saying goodbye

to a grandfather whose city he would never see again.

The candle is not the victim of the burning —

the candle is the reason it was made.

The victim is destroyed. The witness is fulfilled.

We owe him everything. He owes us nothing. Nothing at all.

And the man who wrote it down was shot down in the street

for saying that a word has got to mean the thing it means.

They blew the candle out.

The light went further than the candle could have gone.

And the sentence got said again — another tongue, another age,

in a room that thought that it would stand forever.

One sentence. One refusal.

Fourteen hundred years between two mouths that said the same.

He didn’t lose his life. He spent it.

He walked out with no army — he was not going there to fight.

He was going to bear witness.

And the road he opened that night has never stopped beginning.

The letter still gets written.

The pen still gets dipped.

The rider’s on the road tonight,

and your name is on the envelope.

So don’t wait for the knocking.

Don’t wait to be asked.

Know it now. Know it now.

Know it before the knock.

Someone like me

does not give his hand

to someone like him.

Twelve words.

Say them before you need them.

Lyrics & Concept:

100% original, written by our human team, based on the sermons and maqatil indicated alongside each of the verses.

Music & Vocals:

Composed and generated using Suno AI.

Visuals & Animation:

Lego-style cinematic scenes generated and meticulously montaged using AI visualisation tools by our team.

A note on the visuals:

Out of respect, this animation never depicts the faces of the Prophet Muhammad (S) or the Ahl al-Bayt (AS). Imam Husayn (AS) appears throughout with his face not shown; Lady Zaynab (SA), Hazrat Abbas (AS), Ali al-Akbar (AS) and the children of the household are shown only from behind. All scenes of martyrdom are kept symbolic rather than graphic.

Where our first track, Where Is Your Brother, began the chain at the first grave ever dug, this one goes back further still — to before the field, before the body, to the covenant every soul gave before it had a tongue to give it with.

Each of the verses encapsulates the lessons of Session 2 of the Shahada (Witness) Series — The Oldest Covenant on Earth — and of the maqtal recited that same night, The Inherited Tear.

The relevant sermon and maqtal links are provided alongside each verse.

Lyrics for the Song (Anthem/Nasheed)

Intro

Before the body, and before the breath,
before the first of mornings ever came,
He gathered every soul that would be born,
and every one of them said the same.

Session 2 — The Oldest Covenant on Earth. The sermon opens by going not to another field, but to before the field — to before the body. Every soul, before it was given a body, was gathered before its Lord and asked one question; and the answer it gave, in a language older than any language, is the oldest shahada in all of existence.

Verse 1

He drew us out before we had a name
and made each soul a witness of its own;
He asked no point of doctrine and no law —
He asked us if He was our Lord alone.
And every soul that ever was, and every soul unborn,
the faithful and the faithless both, said yes — and we were sworn.
He wrote it in the chest of us; He set it in the clay;
and the pull you feel toward what is true is older than your day.

Session 2 — Surah al-A’raf (7:172). The night’s opening recitation: “Am I not your Lord?” — and the answer, “Yes, indeed, we bear witness.” The sermon draws out that this primordial testimony is the foundation of humanity’s relationship with its Creator, and the origin of the responsibility to bear witness to the truth.

“Yes — indeed, we bear witness” — that was all,
and it was said before we had a chest
to say it with. So every ashhadu
is not a new word: it’s the oldest, pressed
back through a body that forgot the sound.

Chorus

Session 2. The question of this Muharram is not whether you are a witness. You already are one — by the testimony you gave before you were born. The question is whether you remember it, and whether you honour what you said.

“Am I not your Lord?” — before the body, before the name;
and every soul that ever was said yes, and said the same.
The tear you weep for Husayn was in a prophet’s eye before:
you are not producing grief. You are its heir. Weep more.

Maqtal 2 — The Inherited Tear. The maqtal of the second night reflected on the grief carried across generations of prophets and witnesses before it ever reached Karbala. The chorus of this track takes its name and its claim directly from it.

Verse 2

Then Noah called across the water: come —
the mountain will not hold you. Board with me.
He chose the mountain. And the waves closed in.
A prophet’s blood is not a guarantee.
Then Abraham was told to lift the knife,
and God reached down and stayed it on the stone —
not because the offering had been refused,
but because it was deferred. And not his own.

Session 2 — the chain of prophetic witnesses. Noah’s son chose the mountain. The lesson the sermon draws is unsparing: proximity to a prophet saves no one. The covenant is answered individually, or it is not answered at all. And Ibrahim’s raised knife was stayed not because the sacrifice was refused, but because it was deferred — to another son, on another ground.

Chorus

“Am I not your Lord?” — before the body, before the name;
and every soul that ever was said yes, and said the same.
The tear you weep for Husayn was in a prophet’s eye before:
you are not producing grief. You are its heir. Weep more.

Verse 3

Maqtal 2 — The Inherited Tear.

They brought the head of John in on a plate,
a favour to a dancer, at a feast;
and the blood inside the basin would not still
until a reckoning was sent. And then it ceased.
His father ran; a tree split at the grain
and took a prophet in and closed the bark.
They brought a saw and cut through both of them,
and neither made a sound inside the dark.
But the blood they spilled at Karbala has not
been settled by an army or a sword:
it boils in the veins of history tonight,
and will not rest until He gives the word.

Session 2 — Yahya ibn Zakariyya (a.s.). The sermon establishes the bond the Imam himself drew: Imam Husayn saw his own martyrdom in the mirror of John’s. At every stop on the road to Karbala he thought of the prophet beheaded for refusing to endorse the unlawful — and knew he was walking the same road, toward the same sword. The secret of the resemblance, as the scholars put it, is that both were the sacrifice of a ruler’s tyranny and appetite. But where John’s blood was stilled by a reckoning, Karbala’s has not been settled by any army since.

Bridge

On Uhud’s hill they cut a man apart
and took the liver living from his heart;
the mouth that chewed it could not get it down,
and passed along the taste, and passed the crown.
Her son was Muawiyah; his, Yazid —
but do not say it travelled in the seed:
his own wife wept and named it where he stood.
The covenant is carried. It is not blood.

Session 2 — the covenant is not inherited. The sharpest turn in the night. The chain of witness is not a bloodline and neither is its opposite: the covenant is carried by choice, answered soul by soul, exactly as it was first asked. Yazid’s own wife wept and named the crime in the room where he stood — the proof that no one is condemned by their household, and no one is saved by it.

Verse 4

And Gabriel came down: no law, no verse,
no judgement, and no order to obey —
a handful of red earth, and one flat sentence:
this is the ground where he will fall one day.
He wept, and wrapped the dust, and gave it to his wife:
keep this — and on the day it turns, you’ll understand.
She kept it through the wars. She kept it through his death.
One Muharram afternoon she looked. It was blood in her hand.
And she screamed — and said the sentence that the women of that house
have said in every century since: they have killed Husayn.

Session 2 — the turbah and Umm Salamah. The narration the sermon rests on: the Prophet (S) gave the earth to Umm Salamah with the instruction to place it in a glass bottle and keep her eyes upon it — “when it turns into fresh blood, Husayn has been killed.” She kept it through the years, through his death, through the decades of waiting. On the tenth of Muharram, 61 AH, after the time of the noon prayer — the very hour the narrations tell us the Imam fell — she looked, and it was fresh blood, and she cried out, because she knew.

Ayatollah Jawadi-Amoli draws out what it means that the soil itself responded: the earth of Karbala attained its sanctity from the very day Jibra’il brought it to the Prophet, and the boiling of blood from that earth in the hands of Umm Salamah shows that the whole of creation — even the dust — is aware of the martyrdom of the Friend of God, and mourns it.

Chorus

“Am I not your Lord?” — before the body, before the name;
and every soul that ever was said yes, and said the same.
The tear you weep for Husayn was in a prophet’s eye before:
you are not producing grief. You are its heir. Weep more.

Maqtal 2 — The Inherited Tear.

Outro

So whose tear is that, then — the one that is in your eye?
It was Adam’s over Abel; it was Noah’s on the flood;
it was Zechariah’s in the tree, and the mother of John’s;
it was in the Prophet’s palm, in a fistful of red mud.
You did not make this grief tonight. It was given. It came
down through the generations to your eye, and it is yours to keep.
Don’t spend it on your week. The tear is for one name.
And the oldest question in creation is asked of you. Tonight:
Am I not your Lord?
(and every soul said yes)
Am I not your Lord?
(so where do you stand now?)
Keep the bottle on the shelf.
(and sleep with the taper lit)

Maqtal 2 — The Inherited Tear, and the close of Session 2. The maqtal begins with Habil — the first innocent victim and the first witness to truth — and carries the grief forward through every prophet until it arrives at Karbala, not as an isolated event but as the culmination of a long history of sacrifice, fidelity and devotion to God. The outro hands that inheritance to the listener, and puts the oldest question in creation back to them. The candle at the end is the one lit in Where Is Your Brother; the bottle beside it is Umm Salamah’s.

Production Credits & Transparency

We believe in blending original, human creativity with the latest digital tools to bring these historical stories to life in new ways.

• Lyrics & Concept: 100% original, written by our human team, based on the sermons and maqatil indicated alongside each of the verses.

• Music & Vocals: Composed and generated using Suno AI.

• Visuals & Animation: Lego-style cinematic scenes generated and meticulously montaged using AI visualisation tools by our team.

A note on the visuals: Out of respect, this animation never depicts the faces of the Prophet Muhammad (S), the Ahl al-Bayt (AS), or the angel Jibra’il (AS). Their presence is carried entirely through light, symbol and shadow — a shaft of light, the alam, a riderless horse, a pair of hands. The scenes of martyrdom throughout are kept symbolic rather than graphic.

This is the opening track of the series. Each of its verses encapsulates the lessons of Session 1 of the Shahada (Witness) Series — Where Is Your Brother? — and of the maqtal recited that same night.

The relevant sermon and maqtal links are provided alongside each verse.

Lyrics for the Song (Anthem/Nasheed)

INTRO

Before the ground had ever held a grave,
before a single tongue had learned the word,
two brothers brought their offering to God,
and only one was heard.

Session 1 — Where Is Your Brother? The sermon opens by refusing to begin at Karbala. To recover the word shahada, it goes back instead to the very first person who earned it — a man our own majalis have quietly let slip out of the rotation. If we cannot see Habil for what he was, the sermon argues, we will not see Imam Husayn for what he was either.

Verse 1

One gave the best and softest of his flock;
one gave the leavings he could spare.
And the one who gave the less looked across the field
at the one whom God found fair.
“I will kill you” — the cruellest mouth the earth had ever heard;
and the other raised no hand at all, but raised a word:

Session 1 — Surah al-Ma’idah (5:27). “Recite to them the story of the two sons of Adam, in truth. When each of them offered a sacrifice, it was accepted from one of them and was not accepted from the other. He said: ‘I will surely kill you.’ He said: ‘God accepts only from the God-fearing.’”

The sermon notes that the Qur’an does not name the brothers — the tradition names them, but the Book calls them simply the two sons of Adam. The story is universal before it is particular. And the Book preserves no description of the killing at all: no method, no violence, no blood. What it preserves are Habil’s words.

Pre-Chorus

“I will not raise my hand against you,
though you stretch out yours for mine.
I fear my Lord, the Lord of all that is” —
the first witness of the line.

Session 1 — Surah al-Ma’idah (5:28), and Allamah Tabataba’i’s al-Mizan. Two sentences: a refusal, and the reason for the refusal. Together they form the first act of witness in human history. Habil is not passively dying — he knows exactly what is coming, and he answers not by fleeing, not by fighting, not by begging, but by testifying.

Allamah Tabataba’i observes that God quotes Habil’s words without rebuttal, without qualification, without caveat — and pairs this with Surah Fatir (35:28), “Only those endowed with knowledge truly fear God among His servants.” The logic is exact: if the Qur’an confirms that Habil feared God, and only the knowing truly fear God, then God has confirmed Habil as a man of knowledge. Not an innocent victim — a conscious, knowing witness whose testimony was rooted in understanding.

And the Allamah answers the objection directly: Habil refused to kill. He never refused to live. The verse does not say he was killed and knowingly failed to defend himself. He said only, I do not wish to kill you. The distinction is everything — a victim submits, but a witness refuses to become the mirror of his oppressor.

Chorus

And where is your brother? — the oldest question cried,
the first word the Unseen ever asked of those who lied.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” — and the answer’s always true:
yes, you are; you always were; and it’s asked tonight of you.

Session 1, and the Maqtal of the First Night. The question that gives the session its name — asked of the first blood the earth had ever known, and, as the sermon has it, a question the Unseen has been asking this creation ever since. The maqtal carries it forward in the voice of the Imam of our Age, who watches and who waits.

Verse 2

The grass had never drunk a man before;
the ground did not know what to do.
He carried, set him down, and carried him once more —
and the first killer never knew.
Till God sent down a crow to scratch the earth
and show him how to bury what he’d done:
the first grave dug by a bird, in a young earth’s sight,
over the one who would not raise his hand to fight.

Session 1 — Surah al-Ma’idah (5:30–31). “Then God sent a crow, scratching at the ground, to show him how to cover the body of his brother. He said: ‘Woe to me! Am I not even able to be like this crow?’ And he became of those who regret.”

Here the sermon locates the heart of its argument. The Qur’an tells us that Qabil regretted. The first witness changed the heart of his own killer.

When a person is merely killed, the killer walks away; the crime is absorbed into history and the world moves on. But when a person testifies — when they stand where they stand, say I fear God, and refuse to raise their hand — the killing becomes something the killer cannot digest. It sits in him. It works on him. This is the mechanism of true witness: it is not the dying that does the work, it is the testimony in the dying. Habil’s death did not save Habil — he was already accepted before the killing ever took place. Habil’s death changed Qabil.

Chorus

And where is your brother? — the oldest question cried,
the first word the Unseen ever asked of those who lied.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” — and the answer’s always true:
yes, you are; you always were; and it’s asked tonight of you.

Session 1, and the Maqtal of the First Night.

Bridge

And the question never stopped — it crossed the years,
it fell on every field, it found us here;
on every Cain who ever turned and lied
“I do not know” — while another brother died.
But the candle that he lit out in that field
has never once gone out, and never will:
from Noah’s grief to Abraham’s bared stone,
to Karbala — to here — you’re not alone.

Session 1 — Shaheed Motahhari’s candle. The metaphor that holds the entire series together, from The Martyr: “The martyrs are the candles of society. They burn themselves out and illuminate society. If they do not shed their light, no organisation can shine.”

The same mechanism that worked on Qabil was at work at Karbala. Yazid’s soldiers killed the Imam — but the killing did not end the matter; it began it. Every tear shed for Imam Husayn in every Muharram in every century is evidence that the witness is still doing its work. The candle is still burning. And the sermon’s closing section maps the road ahead — the chain running from Habil through Nuh, Ibrahim, Zakariyya and Yahya, to Karbala — which is the road the second track of this series walks.

Verse 3

He is not the first victim — hear it plain —
he is the first witness, he’s the first flame;
the grain of the whole chain was in his throat:
“I fear my Lord” — the one unbroken note.

Session 1 — the five kinds of death, and the indictment. This is the verse that carries the sermon’s central claim, and the one the whole series turns on.

Shaheed Motahhari names five categories of death. The third is death as the victim of a crime — shocking and pitiable, but carrying no glory, because the victim had no voluntary part in it. The fifth is shahada: a death consciously and knowingly embraced for a sacred cause, in the way of God — the only death that is higher and holier than life itself. Two elements define it, and both are necessary: the life is offered for a cause, and the offering is made consciously.

And then the indictment, which the sermon reads aloud and lets sit in the room: “It is regrettable that most of the preachers who narrate the story of Karbala call Imam Husayn the Master of Martyrs — and yet they have little analytical insight into the question of martyrdom. They describe the events in such a way as though he lost his life in vain.”

Had it really been that simple, Shaheed Motahhari writes, the Imam would be remembered only as an innocent man greatly wronged — but he could not be called a martyr, let alone the Master of Martyrs. The same error a modern listener might make about Habil is the error our pulpits have been making about Imam Husayn for generations. The difference between the third category and the fifth is the difference between a victim and a candle. A victim is an object of pity. A candle is a source of light.

Outro

So where is your brother? The question’s in your hands;
the candle’s in your keeping where the long chain stands.
Don’t wait the dark in stillness — wait with your hand laid down,
wait with the candle burning, and an answer of your own.
Where is your brother?

(you always were his keeper)

Where is your brother?

(keep the candle lit)

Session 1 — the pact, and the supplication. The sermon ends by asking something of the room: for the nine nights that follow, do not use the word shaheed unless you can say what it means — not what it makes you feel, what it means. If you cannot define it, carry the silence instead, and let the silence ask the question you have been avoiding.

This is not a call to stop weeping. Tears without understanding water the soil; understanding without tears leaves it barren. What is warned against is grief that stops at grief — that never asks what the witness chose, and what that choice asks of us.

And the night closes on the image this track ends on: peace be upon the candle that was lit tonight, and that will not be put out.

Production Credits & Transparency

We believe in blending original, human creativity with the latest digital tools to bring these historical stories to life in new ways.

• Lyrics & Concept: 100% original, written by our human team, based on the sermons and maqatil indicated alongside each of the verses.

• Music & Vocals: Composed and generated using Suno AI.

• Visuals & Animation: Lego-style cinematic scenes generated and meticulously montaged using AI visualisation tools by our team.

Katika dunia inayogawanyika,
Katika wakati ambapo chuki inaenezwa kuliko upendo,
Leo Tanzania tuna ujumbe mmoja, sisi ni waislamu, Shia, Sunni, tofauti zetu zipo, Lakini Mola wetu ni mmoja, mtume wetu ni mmoja,
Kwa nini tugawanyike.

Tumezaliwa, katika ardhi moja,
Tanzania yetu, nyumba ya amani,
Msikiti mmoja, safu moja, tunasimama mbele ya Mola,
Mwingine ni Shia, mwingine ni Sunni,
Lakini wote tunasema, La ilaha illa Allah.

Sisi ni umma mmoja, sisi ni ndugu kwa Allah,
Shia na Sunni, tushikane mikono,
Mola mmoja, Quran moja, Qibla kimoja,
Umma mmoja, Tanzania simama, waoneshe dunia.

Sisi ni ndugu kwa Allah,
Kutoka Dar es Salaam, hadi Zanzibar ya bahari,
Kutoka Tanga nyupepo, hadi Pwani yenye minazi,
Kutoka Arusha, hadi Mwanza, sauti moja ipanza,
Sauti moja ipande, amani ndani ya umma.

Msikiti usiwe mahali pa chuki,
Dini ni rehema, dini ni udugu,
Allah ametukumbusha, nashikamaneni kwa kamba ya Allah nyote wala msifarikiane, Huu ni ujumbe kwa leo na kesho,
Kwa sababu adui wa umma hufurahia tunapogawanyika,
Lakini tunapoungana, tunakuwa nguvu.

Sisi ni umma mmoja, sisi ni ndugu kwa Allah,
Shia na Sunni, katika uislamu,
Tofauti zetu zisiwe kuta kati ya mioyo yetu,
Mola mmoja, Quran moja, Qibla kimoja,
Umma mmoja, Tanzania simama, waoneshe dunia.

Waislamu wanaweza kutofautiana bila kuchukiana.
Mola wetu ni nani? Allah.
Mtume wetu? Muhammad.
Sisi ni nani? Umma mmoja.

Tanzania, simama kama mfano wa umoja,
Shia na Sunni, ndugu chini ya Allah.

English Translation

In a dividing world,
In a time when hate is spread more than love,
Today in Tanzania we have one message: we are Muslims, Shia, Sunni; our differences exist,
But our Lord is one, our Prophet is one; why should we be divided?

We were born in one land,
Our Tanzania, a house of peace,
Our art, a sanctuary of peace,
One mosque, one row; we stand before the Lord.
One is Shia, another is Sunni,
But we all say, La ilaha illa Allah (There is no god but Allah).

We are one Ummah (community), we are brothers for Allah,
Shia and Sunni, let us hold hands,
One Lord, one Quran, one Qibla,
One Ummah, Tanzania, stand up, show the world.

We are brothers for Allah,
From Dar es Salaam, to Zanzibar of the sea,
From breezy Tanga, to the Coast with coconut palms,
From Arusha, to Mwanza, one voice rises,
Let one voice rise, peace within the Ummah.

Let the mosque not be a place of hate,
Religion is mercy, religion is brotherhood.
Allah has reminded us, “And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided.”
This is a message for today and tomorrow,
Because the enemy of the Ummah rejoices when we are divided,
But when we unite, we become a force.

We are one Ummah, we are brothers for Allah,
Shia and Sunni, within Islam,
Let our differences not be walls between our hearts.
One Lord, one Quran, one Qibla,
One Ummah, Tanzania stand up, show the world.

Muslims can differ without hating one another.
Who is our Lord? Allah.
Who is our Prophet? Muhammad.
Who are we? One Ummah.

Tanzania, stand as an example of unity,
Shia and Sunni, brothers under Allah.

A short, faithful rendering in the register of the maqtal series — grave, tender, elevated English that keeps the meaning and the tone of the Arabic. Voiced in the first person singular, because this text is an oath: the Arabic says my soul, my help, my love — and every listener says it for himself. Canonical order is preserved. Base text: the Mafātīḥ al-Jinān recension (the recited form). The appended supplication is included, as its own movement.

Why We Made This — A Note From Truth Promoters

The Arabic of the Ziyārah is the original, and it is beautiful — its sound carries something a translation can only point toward, and nothing here is meant to stand in its place.

But Arabic is a language most of the world does not speak.

Even among Muslims, a great many can read and recite the Arabic faithfully yet cannot follow what it means; and even among Arabs, the everyday tongue is colloquial — not the classical Arabic in which the Qurʾān, the supplications, and this Ziyārah were given.

So these words are spoken by millions, and understood by far fewer.

And God tells us of His Prophet:

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ

“And We did not send you except as a mercy to all the worlds.”

— Qurʾān, Surah al-Anbiyāʾ (the Chapter of the Prophets) #21, Verse 107

A mercy to all the worlds is, by definition, not a mercy only for those who happen to speak Arabic — and the same universality belongs to the household of the Prophet (peace be upon them).

So, as with ʿĀshūrāʾ and Arbaʿīn, we set out to make the most faithful, careful and genuinely poetic English rendering of this Ziyārah that we could, so that an English speaker anywhere, Muslim or not, can receive not only its sound but its sense.

To make it as beautiful and as reachable as our means allow, we have used the tools of our time — AI assistance for the recited voice and for the imagery that accompanies it — alongside careful human translation and checking against the classical sources.

We see no contradiction in this: if a tool can help carry a true and beautiful thing to people who would otherwise never reach it, then using it well is part of the work.

And one thing we want to be completely clear about: nothing has been left out.

Not a clause, not an epithet, not a petition — including the hard ones.

This is a text given by an Imam, and it is not ours to shorten, soften or tidy.

Where a line needs explaining, we explain it here, in the introduction, and let the recitation stand as it was given.

What a Ziyārah Is — And Why This One Is Not Like The Others

A ziyārah is a visitation — a way of standing before one of God’s friends and addressing them directly, by name, across distance and across time.

It is not a prayer to them; every petition in it is addressed to God.

It is closer to what you do at a graveside, or at the door of someone you love: you announce yourself, you greet, you say what you know about them and what you owe them, and you renew where you stand.

Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ and Ziyārat al-Arbaʿīn are both addressed to Imam Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī(peace be upon him), and both are spoken toward a grave — a man who lived, was killed, and is buried at Karbalāʾ.

This one is different, and the difference is the whole point.

Ziyārat Āl-e Yāsīn is addressed to the Twelfth Imam, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-Mahdī (may God hasten his return) — who, in the belief of the Shīʿa, is alive, and present, and unseen.

So there is no grave to stand at.

There is no burial place to face.

You are not visiting a memory; you are greeting someone who, on this understanding, may be near enough to hear you.

That changes the grammar of the thing entirely, and you will feel it in the recitation.

The Name: Āl-e Yāsīn, And A Reading Of The Qurʾān

The Ziyārah opens with a line that is itself a verse of the Qurʾān:

سَلَامٌ عَلَىٰ آلِ يَاسِينَ

“Peace be upon the family of Yā-Sīn.”

— Qurʾān, Surah al-Ṣāffāt (the Chapter of Those Ranged in Ranks) #37, Verse 130

Here we have to be careful and exact, because this is the point at which a careless claim would do real damage.

There are two canonical readings of this verse.

In the reading of Ḥafṣ from ʿĀṣim — the printed Qurʾān used across most of the Muslim world — it reads إِلْ يَاسِينَ, Il-Yāsīn, understood as a form of the name of the prophet Ilyās (Elias).

In the reading of Nāfiʿ of Madina, Ibn ʿĀmir of Damascus, and Yaʿqūb of Basra, it reads آلِ يَاسِينَ, Āl Yāsīn — the family of Yā-Sīn.

Both are canonical.

Neither is a sectarian invention.

The consonantal skeleton written in every early copy of the Qurʾān supports both — the difference lies entirely in the vowelling, which is why both readings have been transmitted side by side since the earliest generations.

A printed Warsh Qurʾān — a Sunni Qurʾān, sold today in Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, transmitted from Nāfiʿ — has آلِ يَاسِينَ on the page.

And Yā-Sīn is a name of the Prophet Muḥammad (peace be upon him and his family). Chapter 36 of the Qurʾān is called Yā-Sīn, and it opens by addressing him directly:

“Yā-Sīn. By the Wise Qurʾān, indeed you are among the messengers.”

Now the honest part.

We are not going to tell you that this settles anything, because it does not.

Most Sunni exegetes who accept the آلِ يَاسِينَ reading still understand it, from the surrounding passage, as the family of Ilyās — the verses on either side are about Ilyās.

Al-Ṭabarī, the earliest of the great commentators, prefers Il-Yāsīn and specifically rejects reading it as the family of Muḥammad.

Al-Qurṭubī disputes it too, though he adds a graceful note: when you salute a man’s family on his account, the greeting takes him in as well.

What is fair to say — and it is quite enough — is this.

A canonical reading of the Qurʾān contains the phrase Āl Yāsīn.

An attested strand of Sunni exegesis, including reports traced to Ibn ʿAbbās and preserved in the commentaries of al-Rāzī, al-Ālūsī, al-Shawkānī and al-Suyūṭī, reads Yā-Sīn here as the Prophet, and therefore Āl Yāsīn as his household.

That is a minority position within Sunni exegesis, reported and usually rejected there.

It is the settled reading in the Shīʿa tradition.

And when the Imam begins this Ziyārah by telling us to greet as God has greeted, it is that phrase he is pointing to.

We would rather give you the modest claim that holds than the grand one that collapses the moment someone opens a commentary.

Where It Comes From

The words are given as a tawqīʿ — a signed rescript, a written reply issued from what the sources call al-nāḥiya al-muqaddasa, “the sacred precinct”, the standing way of referring to the office of the Hidden Imam.

To understand what that means, you need the period.

Between 260 and 329 after the Hijra — roughly 874 to 941 of the common era — the Twelfth Imam was in what is called the Minor Occultation: unseen, but reachable in writing, through four successive deputies.

A believer with a question wrote it out, submitted it through the deputy of the day, and received back a written answer.

These answers are the tawqīʿāt, and a considerable archive of them survives.

The petitioner here was Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdillāh ibn Jaʿfar al-Ḥimyarī — a leading scholar of Qom in the early fourth century, graded thiqa (trustworthy) and wajīh (of standing) by the classical assessors, and one of the men whose correspondence with the Imam’s office forms a substantial part of that archive.

A note, because you will see it done wrongly: many popular write-ups — including one long-standing English commentary — attribute this to his father, ʿAbdullāh ibn Jaʿfar al-Ḥimyarī, the more famous man, author of Qurb al-Isnād. The Arabic sources name the son, Muḥammad. We follow the Arabic sources.

What survives in the books is the tail end of the reply.

Al-Ḥimyarī’s questions in this collection are mostly ritual and legal — ablution, prayer, purity.

Somewhere in that long questionnaire the tone changes, and what comes back is not another ruling but a rebuke, and then this.

The text reaches us principally through two books:

• al-Iḥtijāj, by Abū Manṣūr Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Ṭabarsī, who was teaching in the middle of the sixth century after the Hijra (twelfth century CE). (Not to be confused with al-Faḍl ibn al-Ḥasan al-Ṭabrisī, author of the Qurʾān commentary Majmaʿ al-Bayān — a different man, and the two are constantly mixed up.)

• al-Mazār al-Kabīr, by Ibn al-Mashhadī, of the same century — which carries a longer recension, with differences from the Iḥtijāj text.

It is also reproduced by al-Majlisī in Biḥār al-Anwār, and it reaches the modern reader through Shaykh ʿAbbās al-Qummī’s Mafātīḥ al-Jinān — the prayer manual of the twentieth century, where it is placed first among the visitations of the Master of the Age.

Almost everyone who recites it today does so because of that placement.

A practical note for anyone checking references: page numbers for al-Iḥtijāj differ between printings — you will see this text cited at 2:316, at 2:492, and at 4:342, all correctly, in different editions. Cite the edition, not just the page.

Being Honest About The Chain

We are going to say the difficult thing plainly, because it is the same commitment we made with everything else we publish, and because a reader who finds it out later from a hostile source is entitled to feel misled.

In al-Iḥtijāj, this text carries no chain of transmission.

It is mursal.

That is not a lapse — al-Ṭabarsī states in his own introduction that, with one exception, he gives the reports in his book without their chains, as a matter of editorial policy.

So anyone who tells you al-Iḥtijāj vouches for the chain here has not read its preface.

Ibn al-Mashhadī does supply a chain, and it is a serious one: it runs back through Shaykh al-Ṭūsī and his son, through the central teaching line of the Baghdad school, to al-Ḥimyarī.

That is materially better than no chain at all.

But it is not airtight either — it contains at least one link for whom the classical assessors give no explicit grading.

And the strongest form of the objection is worth stating in full: the earliest surviving witnesses to this text are from the sixth century after the Hijra, roughly two hundred and fifty years after the reply it reports.

It is not in al-Kulaynī’s al-Kāfī.

It is not in al-Ṣadūq’s Kamāl al-Dīn — which is precisely the book about the Occultation.

It is not in al-Ṭūsī’s Kitāb al-Ghayba, the standard collection of the rescripts.

For a text of this stature, that silence is not nothing.

So why do we recite it, and why have we put our work into it?

Because the standard that applies here is not the standard that applies to law.

Islamic jurisprudence has a settled principle — tasāmuḥ fī adillat al-sunan, leniency in the evidence for recommended acts — under which devotional material is not held to the evidentiary bar required of an obligation.

A ziyārah is not a fatwa.

Nobody’s duties change on the strength of it.

And because, when you actually read it, there is nothing in it to be suspicious of.

It is built from the Qurʾān, the tashahhud of the daily prayer, the standard creed, and the names of the twelve Imams.

It asks for nothing unusual.

It claims nothing that is not attested a hundred times elsewhere.

The ordinary warning signs of a fabricated text — exaggeration, novelty, a doctrine that appears nowhere else, a benefit accruing to whoever forged it — are simply not present.

There is even an argument from its awkwardness.

A forger writing a devotional text does not open it with a telling-off.

The rebuke at the head of this Ziyārah is the least marketable opening imaginable, and it is delivered in a dense Qurʾānic pastiche in the chancery register of the rescripts.

That is a strange thing to invent.

We think that is the honest position: a text of high content and imperfect documentation, recited as what it is.

We would rather hand you that, with the objections stated at their strongest, than a claim that cannot survive a determined reader with a search engine.

The Rebuke That Opens It — And Why We Kept It

It would have been easy to begin at “Peace be upon the House of Yā-Sīn” and drop what comes before.

We have not, because the opening changes what the whole piece is:

You do not reason concerning His command,
and you do not accept from those He has drawn near.
Far-reaching wisdom — and what use are warnings to a people who will not believe?

Peace be upon us, and upon the righteous servants of God.

If you would turn, through us, toward God — and toward us — then say what God the Exalted has said.

Read that again and notice what it does.

These are not our words offered upward.

They are his words, given back to him — because we were told, in so many words, that we did not know how to greet properly, and were then handed the greeting.

Two details worth having.

The rebuke is stitched together from the Qurʾān itself — “far-reaching wisdom, but what use are warnings” is Surah al-Qamar 54:5, and the clause that completes it is drawn from Surah Yūnus 10:101 — and “peace be upon us, and upon the righteous servants of God” is the line every Muslim says in the tashahhud of every prayer.

And the small word “through us” (binā) carries a whole doctrine: not turn toward God, and also toward us, but turn toward God by way of us.

We nearly lost that word in translation.

It is one letter in the Arabic and it is the hinge of the sentence.

The One Who Is Addressed

Every line is spoken to one person, and he is greeted by a cascade of titles.

Here is what they mean.

• Baqiyyat Allāh — “God’s Remnant”, what God leaves behind. The phrase is from Surah Hūd 11:86, where the prophet Shuʿayb tells his people that what God leaves you is better for you, if you are believers. Applied here to the last of the divine proofs still standing.

• Ḥujjat Allāh — “God’s Proof”. This is the load-bearing term, and it is legal rather than sentimental: a ḥujja is the standing evidence God maintains so that no one can plead ignorance — “so that people should have no argument against God after the messengers” (Surah al-Nisāʾ 4:165). It is the answer to why must there be an Imam at all, if he is unseen?

• al-Qāʾim — “the One Who Rises”. Note that the Ziyārah later greets him “when you rise”, using the same root — the title and the daily act are the same word.

• al-Muntaẓar — “the Awaited”. Its counterpart is intiẓār, the waiting that is asked of us, which in this tradition is an activity and not a mood.

• Ṣāḥib al-Zamān — “Master of the Age”; and Ṣāḥib al-Amr, “Master of the Command”, which is the title used of him in the rescript literature itself.

• Rabbānī of His signs — a genuinely dense phrase. Rabbānī means one deeply schooled in the divine; it also carries the sense of rabba, to nurture and bring to maturity. So: not merely one who recites God’s signs but one who tends them. Translations differ honestly here, and ours is one choice among several defensible ones.

• al-Mirṣād — in the creedal list, “the place of watching is real”. From Surah al-Fajr 89:14, “your Lord is ever watchful”, and Surah al-Nabaʾ 78:21. We have not used “the ambush”, which in English suggests treachery rather than vigilance.

• Nākir and Nakeer — the two angels who question the dead in the grave. (A textual note: the usual form of the first name in the hadith literature is Munkar. This Ziyārah reads* Nākir*, and some printings differ. We have kept what the text says rather than correcting it toward the more familiar form.)

The Heart Of It: Everything Is In The Present Tense

If you take one thing from this introduction, take this.

The central passage of the Ziyārah is a run of greetings that goes:

Peace be upon you when you rise.
Peace be upon you when you sit.
Peace be upon you when you recite, and when you make plain.
Peace be upon you when you pray, and when you stand in supplication.
Peace be upon you when you bow, and when you go down in prostration.

Nine of them, one after another.

Not a single one is in the past tense.

You are not being invited to remember a man.

You are greeting someone in the middle of his own worship, tonight — standing, sitting, bowing, prostrating, praising, asking forgiveness — and interrupting to say peace.

He is not a memory and he is not a doctrine.

On this understanding he is somewhere praying right now.

This is also the passage a producer will want to trim, because nine consecutive lines of the same shape look repetitive on a page.

We have not trimmed it, and we would ask that nobody else does.

The repetition is the argument.

The tradition behind it is the idea of ʿarḍ al-aʿmāl — the presentation of deeds.

The Qurʾān says: “Act, for God will see your work, and His Messenger, and the believers”(Surah al-Tawba 9:105), and the Imāmī commentators read the believers there as the Imams. In al-Kāfī there is a whole chapter of it — Imam al-Riḍā (peace be upon him): “Your deeds are presented to me every day and night.”

And in a different rescript of the same Hidden Imam — this one to Shaykh al-Mufīd, not to al-Ḥimyarī — the line that has become the most quoted sentence of the whole Occultation literature:

إِنَّا غَيْرُ مُهْمِلِينَ لِمُرَاعَاتِكُمْ وَلَا نَاسِينَ لِذِكْرِكُمْ

“We are not neglectful of attending to you, nor forgetful of remembering you.”

That is the doctrine.

The present tense of this Ziyārah is what it sounds like when you say it back to him.

Why We Voiced It In The First Person Singular

Our rendering of Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ is congregational — we, us, our — because it is a collective act of mourning and disavowal.

This one is not that.

This is a bayʿah — an oath of allegiance.

The Arabic says my soul believes, my help is made ready, my love belongs to you and to no one else.

Rendering it in the plural would let every listener hide inside the room.

We have kept it singular so that each person has to say it for himself.

On The Closing Petition

The supplication appended to the Ziyārah ends with a series of requests: that God shelter him, help him, make justice appear through him — and that God, through him, shatter the tyrants of unbelief and kill the deniers, the hypocrites and all the apostates, wherever they are, in the easts of the earth and its wests, on its land and on its sea.

We have rendered that in full, and we want to say clearly what it is and what it is not.

It is eschatological.

It belongs to the rising of the Qāʾim at the end of time and to those who take the field against him then.

It is a petition addressed to God about the final settlement of injustice — in the same register as the many passages of scripture, in this tradition and in others, that ask God to bring an end to tyranny and to those who will not let go of it.

It is not a statement about anybody’s neighbours, and it has never been used as an instruction to anyone.

And it is not ours to edit.

We considered softening it, and we decided against, for the reason we would give about any transmitted text: the moment you begin trimming an Imam’s words for comfort, you have handed every critic the only accusation that would actually stick.

We have not manipulated the Ziyārah.

It is complete, and the difficult line is explained here rather than removed there.

A Few Recurring Words And Phrases

• Ziyārah — a visitation; addressing one of God’s friends directly.

• Tawqīʿ — a signed written reply issued from the Hidden Imam’s office during the Minor Occultation.

• al-Nāḥiya al-Muqaddasa — “the sacred precinct”; the standing periphrasis for that office.

• Ghayba — occultation. Not absence: concealment. The distinction is the whole doctrine.

• Ḥujja — a proof, in the legal sense of a warrant that removes any excuse.

• Bayʿah — an oath of allegiance, given by hand or by word.

• Mursal — a report transmitted without its chain of narrators.

• Tasāmuḥ fī adillat al-sunan — the principle that recommended devotional acts are not held to the evidentiary standard required of legal obligations.

• ʿArḍ al-aʿmāl — the presentation of deeds; the belief that what we do is shown to the Prophet and the Imams.

• Qāʾim — the one who rises.

• Muntaẓar — the one awaited.

The Full Text Of The Ziyārah

I · The Command

In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the Especially Merciful.

You do not reason concerning His command,
and you do not accept from those He has drawn near.
Far-reaching wisdom — and what use are warnings to a people who will not believe?

Peace be upon us, and upon the righteous servants of God.

If you would turn, through us, toward God — and toward us — then say what God the Exalted has said.

II · The Naming

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.

III · The Deposit

Peace be upon you in the watches of your night, and at the edges of your day.

Peace be upon you, O Remnant of God upon His earth.

Peace be upon you, O covenant of God — which He took, and which He made fast.

Peace be upon you, O promise of God — which He guaranteed.

Peace be upon you, O standard raised, and knowledge poured out;
O succour; O vast mercy —
a promise that will not be belied.

IV · The Watching

Peace be upon you when you rise.

Peace be upon you when you sit.

Peace be upon you when you recite, and when you make plain.

Peace be upon you when you pray, and when you stand in supplication.

Peace be upon you when you bow, and when you go down in prostration.

Peace be upon you when you declare that He is One, and when you declare that He is greater.

Peace be upon you when you praise, and when you ask forgiveness.

Peace be upon you when the morning finds you, and when the evening finds you.

Peace be upon you in the night when it covers over, and in the day when it blazes out.

Peace be upon you, O Imam in whom trust is kept.

Peace be upon you, O one set foremost — O one longed for.

Peace be upon you, with every peace that peace can gather.

V · The Testimony

I call you to witness, my master, that I bear witness:

that there is no god but God, alone, no partner beside Him;

and that Muḥammad is His servant and His messenger —
there is no beloved but him, and those of his house.

And I call you to witness, my master:

that ʿAlī, Commander of the Faithful, is His proof;
and al-Ḥasan is His proof;
and al-Ḥusayn is His proof;
and ʿAlī son of al-Ḥusayn is His proof;
and Muḥammad son of ʿAlī is His proof;
and Jaʿfar son of Muḥammad is His proof;
and Mūsā son of Jaʿfar is His proof;
and ʿAlī son of Mūsā is His proof;
and Muḥammad son of ʿAlī is His proof;
and ʿAlī son of Muḥammad is His proof;
and al-Ḥasan son of ʿAlī is His proof.

VI · And You

And I bear witness that you are the proof of God.

You are the first, and you are the last.

And that your Return is true — there is no doubt in it —
on a day when no soul is profited by a faith it did not hold before,
or by any good it did not earn while it still believed.

And that death is true.

And that Nakir and Nakeer, the two who come with their questions, are true.

And I bear witness —

that the unfolding is true;
and the raising is true;
and the bridge is true;
and the place of watching is true;
and the balance is true;
and the mustering is true;
and the reckoning is true;
and the Garden and the Fire are true;
and the promise and the warning of them both are true.

VII · The Allegiance

My master —

wretched is the one who set himself against you,
and blessed is the one who obeyed you.

So bear witness to what I have called you to witness.

I am your friend, and I am free of your enemy.

The truth is what you have been pleased with.
The false is what you have been angered by.
The good is what you have commanded.
The wrong is what you have forbidden.

So my soul believes in God, alone, no partner beside Him;
and in His messenger;
and in the Commander of the Faithful;
and in you, my master — the first of you, and the last of you.

My help is made ready for you.

My love belongs to you and to no one else.

Amen. Amen.

VIII · The Light (The Supplication Following the Ziyārah)

In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the Especially Merciful.

O God, I ask You —

to send Your blessing upon Muḥammad, the prophet of Your mercy, the word of Your light;

and to fill my heart with the light of certainty;
and my breast with the light of faith;
and my thinking with the light of clean intention;
and my resolve with the light of knowledge;
and my strength with the light of doing;
and my tongue with the light of truth-telling;
and my religion with the light of clear sight from You;
and my seeing with the light of brightness;
and my hearing with the light of wisdom;
and my love with the light of belonging to Muḥammad and the people of his house, peace be upon them —

until I meet You, and have kept Your covenant and Your pledge.

Then let Your mercy envelop me, O Guardian, O Praiseworthy.

IX · The Rising

O God, send Your blessing upon Muḥammad, Your proof in Your earth,
and Your vicegerent in Your lands;
the one who calls to Your path,
who stands up for Your justice,
who rises in revolt at Your command;

the guardian of the believers, and the perdition of the disbelievers;
who lifts the darkness, and makes the truth shine;
who speaks with wisdom and with truth;
Your complete word in Your earth;

the one who watches and waits, the one in fear; the sincere guardian;
the ship of rescue, and the standard of guidance;
the light of the eyes of the world;
the best of all who ever put on a shirt and wore a cloak;
the one who clears away the blindness —

who will fill the earth with fairness and justice, as it was filled with tyranny and wrong.

Indeed You have power over all things.

O God, send Your blessing upon Your friend, and the son of Your friends —
those whose obedience You made a duty, whose right You made binding,
from whom You removed all impurity, and whom You purified with a purifying.

O God, help him, and by him give victory to Your religion;
and by him help Your friends, and his friends, and those who follow him, and those who stand with him —
and make us of them.

O God, shelter him from the evil of every oppressor and every tyrant,
and from the evil of everything You have made.
Guard him before him and behind him, at his right hand and at his left.
Keep watch over him, and bar any harm from reaching him.
And in him, keep safe Your messenger, and the family of Your messenger.

Make justice appear through him.
Strengthen him with victory.
Help those who help him, and forsake those who forsake him,
and break those who would break him.

And through him shatter the tyrants of unbelief,
and through him kill the disbelievers, and the hypocrites, and all the apostates —
wherever they are, in the easts of the earth and its wests, on its land and on its sea.

And fill the earth through him with justice.
And make the religion of Your prophet — God’s blessing be upon him and his family — appear through him.

And make me, O God, of those who help him, and stand with him, and follow him, and are counted among his own.

And show me, in the family of Muḥammad, peace be upon them, what they have hoped for;
and in their enemy, what they have feared.

O God of truth — Amen.

O Possessor of Majesty and Generosity.

O Most Merciful of the merciful.

This is a poetic English language translation and rendition of Ziyārat Arbaeen - the Visitation of Arbaeen - recited at least on the Day of Arbaeen, the fortieth day following the Martyrdom of Imam Husayn - to understand the notion of Martyrdom (or Witness) please visit Reflections313 and study the material there on the subject.

Why We Made This — A Note From Truth Promoters

The Arabic of the Ziyārah is the original, and it is beautiful — its sound carries something a translation can only point toward, and nothing here is meant to stand in its place.

But Arabic is a language most of the world does not speak.

Even among Muslims, a great many can read and recite the Arabic faithfully yet cannot follow what it means; and even among Arabs, the everyday tongue is colloquial — not the classical Arabic in which the Qurʾān, the supplications, and this Ziyārah were given. So these words are spoken by millions, and understood by far fewer.

And God tells us of His Prophet:

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ

“And We did not send you except as a mercy to all the worlds.”

— Qurʾān, Surah al-Anbiyāʾ (the Chapter of the Prophets) 21:107

A mercy to all the worlds is, by definition, not a mercy only for those who happen to speak Arabic — and the same universality belongs to the household of the Prophet (peace be upon them).

So, as with Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ, the Truth Promoters team set out to make the most faithful, careful, and genuinely poetic English rendering of this Ziyārah that we could — so that an English speaker anywhere, Muslim or not, can receive not only its sound but its sense.

To make it as beautiful and as reachable as our means allow, we have used the tools of our time — AI assistance for the recited voice (through Suno) and for the imagery and short films that accompany it — alongside careful human translation and checking the meaning against the classical sources.

We see no contradiction in this: if a tool can help carry a true and beautiful thing to people who would otherwise never reach it, then using it well is part of the work.

And one thing we want to be completely clear about: we are not here to convert anyone.

That is not our aim and never has been.

Whether a person comes to a faith, and when, is between them and God. Our task is only to educate — to clear away misconceptions and let the reality of things be seen plainly.

This is the work we call tabyeen — clarification — and it is, as it happens, the whole meaning of the day this Ziyārah belongs to: Arbaeen is the day the truth of Karbalā was carried out of the killing-field and made plain to the world.

What The Ziyārah Is — And The Day It Belongs To

A ziyārah is a visitation — a way of standing before one of God’s friends and addressing them directly, even across distance and across time. Ziyārat al-Arbaʿīn is the visitation of Arbaeen — the fortieth day after Ashura, the twentieth of the month of Safar — the day the Muslim world returns, in body or in heart, to the grave of Imam Husayn (peace and blessings be upon him).

The fortieth day carries two rememberings at once.

It is the day, in the tradition, when Jabir ibn ʿAbdillāh al-Ansari — the aged, blind companion of the Prophet — came with ʿAtiyya al-ʿAwfi to stand at the fresh grave at Karbala, the very first pilgrim to make this visitation.

And it is remembered as the day the captives of the household, returning from Damascus, came back to the grave to mourn.

Either way, its meaning is one: after the killing, the family and the friends came back — and the coming-back is itself a witness.

The blood that was spilled on Ashura was not the end of the story; on Arbaeen the story is carried home and told.

This is why Arbaeen is called the day of the victory of blood over the sword, and the day of tabyeen — the making-plain of what Karbala was.

The text of this Ziyārah is narrated from Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq (peace and blessings be upon him), the great-great-grandson of Imam Husayn, who taught its very words to his companion Safwan ibn Mihran al-Jammal, and instructed him to recite it “when the day has risen high” — at mid-morning, the forenoon, not at dawn.

It is preserved in the earliest books of the tradition — Shaykh al-Tusi’s Tahdhib al-Ahkam and Misbah al-Mutahajjid — and carried to the present day in Shaykh ʿAbbās al-Qummi’s Mafatih al-Jinan.

Our rendering follows the Ziyārah’s own arc: the greeting of peace by his by-names; the testimony to who he was and all that he gave; the betrayal by those the world deceived; his struggle unto the pouring-out of his blood; the distancing (barāʾah) from his killers; the return of the greeting and the witness to his life and death; God’s promise of requital; the witness to his light and his imamate and the Imams of his line; and, at the last — the note that Ashura does not sound — the pledge and the readiness: “our help is made ready for you, until God gives you His leave — so, with you, with you, and never with your enemy.”

Why The Imams Called It A Sign Of A Believer

There is a narration, deeply loved in the tradition, from Imam Hasan al-ʿAskari (peace and blessings be upon him):

عَلَامَاتُ الْمُؤْمِنِ خَمْسٌ: صَلَاةُ الْإِحْدَى وَالْخَمْسِينَ، وَزِيَارَةُ الْأَرْبَعِينَ، وَالتَّخَتُّمُ فِي الْيَمِينِ، وَتَعْفِيرُ الْجَبِينِ، وَالْجَهْرُ بِبِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

“The signs of a believer are five: the fifty-one units of daily prayer; the visitation of Arbaeen; wearing the ring on the right hand; setting the forehead upon the earth; and saying Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim (In the Name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate) aloud.”

— Imam Hasan al-ʿAskari; Shaykh al-Tusi, Tahdhib al-Ahkam, vol. 6, p. 52; also in Misbah al-Mutahajjid and Mafatih al-Jinan

It is a striking list.

Four of the five are small, private, daily things — the prayers, the ring, the forehead in the dust, the opening of the recitation.

And set among them, as though it were one of them, is this Ziyārah.

The Imam is teaching something by the placement: that keeping the covenant of Karbala is not a once-a-year grand gesture but a marker of the believing self, as ordinary and as constant as the ring on the hand and the forehead on the ground.

To make the Ziyārah of Arbaeen is to say, with your whole life, whose side you are on. (Two of these five signs — the ring, and the forehead to the earth — return in the imagery that accompanies our recitation.)

To learn more, you can view, listen or study our Shahada (Witness) series, and specifically session 15.

On The Word Laʿn — Why We Say “May The Mercy of God Be Distant,” Never “Curse”

Part of the Ziyārah invokes laʿn upon the killers of Imam Husayn.

In English this is almost always mistranslated as “curse,” which gives entirely the wrong idea — as if one were wishing magical harm, or simply venting hatred.

That is not what the word means, and we have deliberately not used it.

Laʿn means to be placed at a distance from God’s mercy.

To say laʿn upon someone is to affirm that, by persisting in injustice and refusing to turn back, they have set themselves outside the reach of God’s grace — and to disavow their wrong.

The point is theological, not emotional.

And one distinction matters above all: it is God’s mercy that is held at a distance — never God Himself.

God is al-Qarīb, the Near; He is near always, to everyone.

What the wrongdoer loses is not God’s nearness but God’s mercy, refused by their own choosing.

So throughout our rendering we say “may the mercy of God be distant from…” rather than “curse” — because mercy is everything, and to be without it is everything, and that is the real weight the Arabic carries.

It follows that this distancing is aimed at injustice and those who embodied it and would not turn from it — a moral stand against tyranny in every age.

It is not hatred of a people, a tribe, or a lineage.

And it is worth noticing how this Ziyārah frames it: unlike Ziyārat Ashura, it names almost no one.

It does not list Yazid, or Ibn Ziyad, or Shimr.

It speaks instead of “the one whom this world deceived,” “who sold his portion for the basest price,” “the people of discord and hypocrisy.”

The disavowal is aimed at a kind of person — the one who chose the cheap price and the passing power over the truth — precisely so that no reader could mistake it for a grudge against a name.

It disavows the choice, in whoever makes it, in any age.

The One Who Is Honoured

The whole of this Ziyārah is addressed to a single figure — Imam Husayn ibn ʿAlī (peace and blessings be upon him) — and it greets him by a cascade of by-names, each of which says something:

• The friend of God and His beloved (walī Allāh wa ḥabībuh) — the one God took as His own and loved.

• The intimate of God and His chosen (khalīl Allāh wa najībuh) — the word khalīl is Prophet Abraham’s title; Imam Husayn is named the intimate of God, and His noble one.

• The pure one of God and the son of His pure one (ṣafiyy Allāh wa-bnu ṣafiyyih) — the chosen, from a line of the chosen.

• The wronged, the witness slain (al-maẓlūm al-shahīd) — killed unjustly; a witness (shahīd) in the full sense the whole series has traced.

• The captive of sorrows, the one killed amid a world of tears (asīr al-kurubāt wa qatīl al-ʿabarāt) — two of the most beloved phrases in all of the ziyārāt: the one besieged by grief, whose killing the believing world has never stopped weeping.

• The trust of God, and the son of His trust (amīn Allāh wa-bnu amīnih) — the one to whom God’s cause was entrusted.

The Ziyārah also honours, without naming them one by one:

• The prophets — when it says God gave Imam Husayn “the inheritance of the prophets” (mawārīth al-anbiyāʾ): he carries what every prophet carried.

• The appointed heirs (al-awṣiyāʾ) — the line of the guardians of the Prophet’s household; Ḥusayn is “the son of the master of the appointed heirs,” Imam ʿAlī (peace be upon him).

• The Imams of his line (al-aʾimma min wuldik) — his descendants, named “the word of God-consciousness, the banners of guidance, the firm handhold that does not break, and the proof of God over the people of this world.”

• The awaited Imam — carried in the extraordinary phrase “we are certain of your return” (bi-iyābikum mūqinūn): the believer’s certainty that the account of Karbalā is not closed, and that the household will return to set it right. It is in the same breath that the reciter makes the pledge of the still-living helper — “our help is made ready for you, until God gives you His leave.”

The Ones Who Are Disavowed

Because this Ziyārah names no killer by name, there is no roll of individuals to gloss here as there is for Ashura — and that silence is itself the point.

What it disavows is a portrait, drawn in a few strokes:

• the one “whom this world deceived,”

• who “sold his portion for the meanest, basest price,”

• who “bartered his Hereafter for the cheapest coin,”

• who “grew arrogant and threw himself away in his own appetite,”

• who “angered God and angered His Prophet,”

• and who “obeyed the people of discord and hypocrisy.”

These are the people of Karbalā’s other army — Yazīd, ʿUbaydullāh ibn Ziyād, ʿUmar ibn Saʿd, Shimr, and all who followed them (we name them, and gloss them, in the Ziyarat Ashura introduction) — but the Ziyārah of Arbaʿīn declines to name them, and describes instead the shape of the choice they made, so that every reader is left holding it up against himself.

For the fuller reading of who stands behind that portrait, and of the much-misread “the first… the second… the third… the fourth… and Yazīd the fifth” passage of Ziyārat Ashura — and why it is the archetype of oppression from Cain to Pharaoh to Yazīd, and never a sectarian attack on any community — please see our companion introduction, Ziyārat Ashura — An Introduction, and Who’s Who.

Arbaeen Is Not Only the Past — The Return That Is Asked Of Us

It would be the smallest possible reading of this Ziyārah to think it a remembrance of something finished.

The captives came back; Jabir came back; the world has come back every fortieth day for fourteen centuries — and the whole point of the coming-back is that it is ours to do.

The Imams did not teach these words so that we would admire a pilgrimage from a distance; they taught them so that we would make the pilgrimage — with our feet if we can, and with our hearts wherever we are — and so renew, on the fortieth day, the covenant that Ashura cut into us.

And the Ziyārah asks something Ashura does not quite ask.

Its last movement is not grief but readiness: “our help is made ready for you, until God gives you His leave — so, with you, with you, and never with your enemy.”

That is a strange thing to say to someone killed fourteen centuries ago.

It only makes sense if the killing is not over — if the same drama is still being staged, a power that demands the conscience bow and a witness who will not bow — and if the believer’s task is to stand ready, in his own time, on the right side of it.

To recite Ziyārat al-Arbaʿīn is to enlist: to tell Imam Husayn that when his cause rises again, your hand is already raised.

Every day is Ashura; every land is Karbala — and every fortieth day is the day we come back and say so.

Going deeper.

For any reader who wishes to follow these threads further, from the Shahada (Witness) series (the Arbaeen nights):

• The witness who carried the truth out of Karbalā and made it plain — Night 11, The Witness After the Witness (Sayyedah Zaynab and Imam al-Sajjād).

• The witness available to an ordinary believer far from any battlefield — Night 12, The Prayer for the Frontiers.

• The grades of witness, and “you do not have to die to be a witness — but you must be willing to” — Night 13, The Grades of Witness.

• The chain of witness still being forged in our own lifetime — Night 14, The Living Witness.

• The covenant renewed, the daily pledge, and Ziyārat al-Arbaʿīn itself — Night 15, The Covenant of Arbaeen.

A Few Recurring Words And Phrases

• Arbaeen — “the fortieth”; the twentieth of Safar, forty days after Ashura.

• Walī Allāh / Ḥabīb Allāh — the friend of God / the beloved of God: the opening greeting of the Ziyārah.

• Asīr al-kurubāt / Qatīl al-ʿabarāt — “the captive of sorrows / the one killed amid tears”: two of the most beloved epithets of Ḥusayn.

• Barāʾah — disavowal; turning away from injustice and from those who chose it.

• Walāyah / muwālāt — loyalty; turning toward God through love of the Prophet’s household. Tawallā and tabarrā — turning toward, and turning away — are the two beats of the whole Ziyārah.

• “Our help is made ready for you” (nuṣratī lakum muʿaddah) — the pledge of the living helper: standing ready for the Imam’s cause until God permits its rising. The heart of Arbaeen.

• Tabyeen — clarification: the making-plain of the truth of Karbala, which is the work of the fortieth day.

The Full Text Of The Ziyārah

I — The Greeting

Peace be upon the friend of God, and His beloved.
Peace be upon the intimate of God, and His chosen one.
Peace be upon the pure one of God, and the son of His pure one.
Peace be upon Ḥusayn — the wronged, the witness slain.
Peace be upon the captive of sorrows, the one killed amid a world of tears.

II — The Testimony

O God, we bear witness that he is Your friend, and the son of Your friend;
Your chosen, and the son of Your chosen — the one who won through by Your honouring of him.
You ennobled him with witness; You favoured him with felicity; You chose him for the purity of his birth.
You made him a master among masters, a leader among leaders, a defender among defenders.
You gave into his hands the inheritance of the prophets, and set him a proof over Your creation, among the appointed heirs.

So he left no excuse unanswered in his calling;
he gave every counsel he could give;
and he poured out his very lifeblood in Your cause —
to draw Your servants back out of ignorance, and out of the bewilderment of going astray.

III — The Betrayal

And there banded against him the one whom this world deceived —
who sold his own portion for the meanest, basest price,
and bartered away his Hereafter for the cheapest coin;
who grew arrogant, and threw himself away in his own appetite;
who angered You, and angered Your Prophet;
and who obeyed, from among Your servants, the people of discord and hypocrisy —
the bearers of sin, who had earned the Fire.

IV — His Struggle

So he strove against them for Your sake — patient, seeking only Your reckoning —
until his blood was poured out in obedience to You,
and all that he held sacred was violated.

V — The Distancing

O God, let Your mercy be far from them, a heavy, bitter distance;
and punish them with a punishment that gives no rest.

VI — The Greeting Returns, and the Witness

Peace be upon you, O son of the Messenger of God.
Peace be upon you, O son of the master of the appointed heirs.

We bear witness that you were the trust of God, and the son of His trust:
you lived in felicity,
you passed on praised,
and you died — mourned by too few, wronged, a witness.

VII — God’s Promise, and the Faithful Servant

And we bear witness that God will bring to pass what He promised you;
that He will destroy the one who abandoned you,
and punish the one who killed you.

And we bear witness that you kept faith with the covenant of God,
and struggled in His path until the certainty came upon you.

So may the mercy of God be far from the one who killed you;
and may the mercy of God be far from the one who wronged you;
and may the mercy of God be far from a people who heard of it — and were content.

O God, we call You to witness that we are the friends of whoever befriends him,
and the enemies of whoever shows him enmity.
By our fathers and our mothers — for you, O son of the Messenger of God.

VIII — The Light, the Pillar, the Imam

We bear witness that you were a light in the exalted loins and the purified wombs;
the age of ignorance never defiled you with its filth,
nor could its darkest garments ever be laid upon you.

And we bear witness that you are one of the pillars of the faith,
one of the supports of the Muslims,
and a stronghold of the believers.

And we bear witness that you are the Imam — upright, God-fearing, well-pleasing, pure, the guide, the rightly-guided.

And we bear witness that the Imams from your line are the word of God-consciousness,
the banners of guidance,
the firm handhold that does not break,
and the proof of God over the people of this world.

IX — The Pledge, and the Readiness

And we bear witness that we believe in you, and are certain of your return —
firm in the laws of our faith, and in how our deeds will end.
Our hearts are at peace with your hearts;
our affair follows your affair;
and our help is made ready for you, until God gives you His leave —
so, with you, with you — and never with your enemy.

The blessings of God be upon you all —
upon your souls and upon your bodies,
upon the one of you present and the one absent,
upon what is seen of you and what is hidden.

Amen, O Lord of the worlds.

Raise your hand
Swear to God upon the sand
Teach us mercy to every land
Holy union, joyous band

This track is the second companion track - and each of its lines are built from the series of sessions developed by the Truth Promoters Group for Muharram (Ashura) 1448 (June 2026) and Safar (Arbaeen) 1448 (July/August 2026).

This second track, is build specifically from sessions and maqtals 11 thru 15 (which were for the nights of Arbaeen).

You can view the first anthem below:

Each of the verses encapsulate lessons from one sermons and one maqtals from the Shahada (Witness) Series - specifically the last 5 that were written for Arbaeen specifically.

The relevant sermon and maqtal links are provided alongside each verse.

Lyrics for the Song (Anthem/Nasheed)

Intro

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we're walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Verse 1

When all the swords were finished, a heavier grief began —
not his who gave his life to God, but hers who had to stand.

She lifted up the broken form and named it sacrifice,
and wore the chains they bound her in as robes of paradise.

They paraded her to break her; she met their cruelty,
and put them all on trial: "I have seen naught but beauty."

A sick boy, bound in iron, rose where they had thought him done —
the witness does not die with him; it falls now to the ones who come.

Chorus

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we're walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Verse 2

A fever kept him from the field; they could not reach his life —
God kept the last man breathing so the line would not run dry.

They chained his neck and drove him, but no iron ever made
can hold the light a fevered boy was carrying, unafraid.

When he could raise no sword again, he raised his hands instead,
and hid a whole religion in the prayers the tyrants dread.

The fortress was never the wall — it is the heart held true;
so bind yourself to God alone, and hold the line He drew.

Chorus

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we’re walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Verse 3

The smallest witness of them all kept asking for her father —
they had no gentle answer left, and could not shield her farther.

She gathered what the swords had left, and her small heart gave way,
and chose with nothing but her grief — and God received her that day.

You need not fall upon a field to answer to the call:
the ink of one who guards the truth stands beside the martyr's fall.

The grade is His alone to give; the record may forget —
but God will keep the witness that the world has never kept.

Chorus

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we’re walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Verse 4

A blind old man, too frail and far too late to lift a blade,
turned his face toward Husayn and walked the road the faithful made.

His friend became his eyes; the two of them the first to come,
and twenty million walk that road behind them now, as one.

"You did not have to be there to be counted with the brave:
whoever loves a people shares the offering they gave."

So love enough to walk. And down with every borrowed throne:
no soul like ours gives fealty to man; we bow to God alone.

Chorus

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we’re walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Verse 5

He asked us, "Am I not your Lord?" before we drew a breath,
and "Yes" is the covenant we renew from dawn to death.

You bow to no man's grave or throne — you bow to God alone,
and press your brow to the one earth His blood has made its own.

"My prayer, my living and my death are God's" — so let it all return,
and let the one flame kindle many; that's the only proof we earn.

Behind the veil he waits, not risen yet — so rise, and clear the throne,
and keep the small lamps burning till the Promised One comes home.

Chorus

From Karbala the road runs on, and it runs on to you;
the grave they dug to bury him became the road we're walking through.

So carry the flame you were given till it kindles other eyes —
one road, one flame, one covenant: we walk until his rise.

Outro

So where is your brother now? He is here — he walks beside;
you did not leave him in the field, you did not pass him by.

We curse no people, only thrones; we break no soul, but every lie —
there is no lord but God alone, and Husayn showed us why.

The road that has no ending still runs from Karbala to you;
so renew the vow, and rise for God, and keep the promise true.

Walk on, and do not walk alone, with the flame still in your hand,
until the Awaited One rises — and finds you where you stand.

Production Credits & Transparency

We believe in blending original, human creativity with the latest digital tools to bring these historical stories to life in new ways.

• Lyrics & Concept: 100% original, written by our human team, based on the sermons and maqatil indicated alongside each of the verses.

• Music & Vocals: Composed and generated using Suno AI.

• Visuals & Animation: Lego-style cinematic scenes generated and meticulously montaged using AI visualisation tools by our team.

This is a poetic English language translation and rendition of Ziyarat Ashura - the Visitation of Ashura - recited at least on the Day of Ashura, the day of the Martyrdom of Imam Husayn - to understand the notion of Martyrdom (or Witness) please visit Reflections313 and study the material there on the subject.

Why We Made This — A Note From Truth Promoters

The Arabic of the Ziyārah is the original, and it is beautiful — its sound carries something a translation can only point toward, and nothing here is meant to stand in its place.

But Arabic is a language most of the world does not speak.

Even among Muslims, a great many can read and recite the Arabic faithfully yet cannot follow what it means; and even among Arabs, the everyday tongue is colloquial — not the classical Arabic in which the Qur’an, the supplications, and this Ziyārah were given.

So these words are spoken by millions, and understood by far fewer.

And God tells us of His Prophet:

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ

“And We did not send you except as a mercy to all the worlds.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Anbiyāʾ (the Chapter of the Prophets) #21, Verse107

A mercy to all the worlds is, by definition, not a mercy only for those who happen to speak Arabic — and the same universality belongs to the household of the Prophet (peace be upon them).

With that before us, for Muḥarram 1448 the Truth Promoters team set out to make the most faithful, careful, and genuinely poetic English rendering of this Ziyārah that we could — so that an English speaker anywhere, Muslim or not, can receive not only its sound but its sense.

To make it as beautiful and as reachable as our means allow, we have used the tools of our time — AI assistance for the recited voice (through Suno) and for the imagery and short films that accompany it — alongside careful human translation and checking the meaning against the classical sources.

We see no contradiction in this: if a tool can help carry a true and beautiful thing to people who would otherwise never reach it, then using it well is part of the work.

Helping people understand is, as we see it, a duty — and we have tried to discharge it with care.

One thing we want to be completely clear about: we are not here to convert anyone.

That is not our aim and never has been.

Whether a person comes to a faith, and when, is between them and God — it comes in its own time, if it comes at all, and the giving of guidance belongs to God alone, not to us.

Our task is only to educate: to clear away misconceptions and let the reality of things be seen plainly.

This is the work we have called tabyeen — clarification — which we set out more fully in our Tabyeen (Clarification) series, beginning with Understanding Tabyeen.

If, having read, you agree, we are glad; if you disagree, that is entirely your right and no quarrel of ours.

We ask only that no one be left uninformed — because people have a right to know, and to decide for themselves.

What The Ziyārah Is

A ziyārah is a visitation — a way of standing before one of God’s friends and addressing them directly, even across distance and across time.

Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ is the visitation of Imam Ḥusayn (peace be upon him), the grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), who was killed with his family and companions on the plain of Karbalā on the tenth day — ʿĀshūrāʾ — of Muḥarram, in the year 61 after the Hijrah (680 CE).

It is not a poem written about him; it is words taught by the Imams of his household to be said to him.

The text is narrated from Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir (peace be upon him), the great-grandson of Ḥusayn, through the companion ʿAlqama ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥaḍramī, and is preserved in the earliest books of visitation — Ibn Qūlawayh’s Kāmil al-Ziyārāt and Shaykh al-Ṭūsī’s Miṣbāḥ al-Mutahajjid — and carried to the present day in Shaykh ʿAbbās al-Qummī’s Mafātīḥ al-Jinān.

It is recited especially on the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ and throughout the days of mourning.

Its structure moves through a clear arc, and our rendering follows it: the greeting of peace (salām); the affliction — the grief that reaches even the heavens; the distancing (barāʾah) from those who built and carried the injustice; the drawing near (walāyah) to God through love of the Prophet’s household; the marking of this day; the return of the greeting; the naming; and the prostration.

Two movements beat through the whole: tawallā — turning toward the household in love — and tabarrā — turning away from injustice.

Peace to the wronged; distance to the wrong.

Its Origin, And The Call To Recite It

The Ziyārah reaches us through a narration of the companion ʿAlqama ibn Muḥammad al-Ḥaḍramī from Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir (peace be upon him), the great-grandson of Ḥusayn.

In it the Imam does not only teach the words; he teaches a whole way of standing — to give the salutation, to invoke the distancing upon the oppressors and the peace upon the household, to pray two units of prayer afterward, and to renew the covenant.

The narration promises the one who keeps it an immense reward: that God receives their visitation as though they had been present at Karbalā itself and had stood and fallen at Ḥusayn’s side.

It is preserved in the earliest sources — Ibn Qūlawayh’s Kāmil al-Ziyārāt and Shaykh al-Ṭūsī’s Miṣbāḥ al-Mutahajjid.

For this reason the tradition has long encouraged reciting Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ not only on the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ but regularly — even every day — as a standing renewal of allegiance: the believer beginning the day by greeting Ḥusayn, affirming loyalty to the household of the Prophet, and disavowing injustice.

Many keep it as a daily practice; some recite it for forty consecutive days for a need, in the hope of being counted among the helpers of the awaited Imam.

However one keeps it, its purpose is one: to keep the covenant of Karbalā fresh, and never to let it harden into a mere memory of the past.

On The Word Laʿn — Why We Say “May The Mercy of God Be Distant,” Never “Curse”

Much of the Ziyārah invokes laʿn upon the oppressors.

In English this is almost always mistranslated as “curse,” which gives entirely the wrong idea — as if one were wishing magical harm, or simply venting hatred.

That is not what the word means, and we have deliberately not used it.

Laʿn means to be placed at a distance from God’s mercy.

To say laʿn upon someone is to affirm that, by persisting in injustice and refusing to turn back, they have set themselves outside the reach of God’s grace — and to disavow their wrong.

The point is theological, not emotional.

And one distinction matters above all: it is God’s mercy that is held at a distance — never God Himself.

God is al-Qarīb, the Near; He is near always, to everyone.

What the wrongdoer loses is not God’s nearness but God’s mercy, refused by their own choosing.

So throughout our rendering we say “may the mercy of God be distant from…” rather than “curse” — because mercy is everything, and to be without it is everything, and that is the real weight the Arabic carries.

It follows that this distancing is aimed at injustice and those who embodied it and would not turn from it — a moral stand against tyranny in every age.

It is not hatred of a people, a tribe, or a lineage.

The Ziyārah disavows the foundation of oppression; it does not condemn anyone for their birth.

The People Who Are Honoured

Imam Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (peace be upon him) — Abā ʿAbdillāh, “the father of ʿAbdullāh,” is his by-name, used throughout the Ziyārah.

The grandson of the Prophet, son of Imam ʿAlī and Sayyedah Fāṭima, and the third of the Imams of the household.

He refused to pledge allegiance to the tyranny of Yazīd and was killed at Karbalā with around seventy-two of his family and companions.

The series tells his death in full in the maqtal Peace Upon You, O Abā ʿAbdillāh.

The Messenger of God, the Prophet Muḥammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) — Ḥusayn’s grandfather.

The Ziyārah greets Ḥusayn first as “son of the Messenger of God.”

The Commander of the Faithful, Imam ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (peace be upon him) — Ḥusayn’s father, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, the first Imam, and “the master of those entrusted to come after” (the waṣiyyīn, the appointed successors).

Sayyedah Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ (peace be upon her) — Ḥusayn’s mother, the daughter of the Prophet, named in the Ziyārah “mistress of the women of all the worlds.”

Imam Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī (peace be upon him) — Ḥusayn’s elder brother, the second Imam, named in the drawing-near.

ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn — Imam al-Sajjād, Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (peace be upon him) — Ḥusayn’s son, who was gravely ill at Karbalā and so survived, becoming the fourth Imam and the voice of the household afterward.

The closing salām greets “ʿAlī son of Ḥusayn.”

The children of Ḥusayn, and the companions of Ḥusayn (peace be upon them) — “the souls that came to rest about you”: the family and friends who fell at his side.

Among them al-ʿAbbās, his brother and standard-bearer; ʿAlī al-Akbar, his eldest son; the youth Qāsim; the infant ʿAlī al-Aṣghar; and devoted companions such as Ḥabīb ibn Muẓāhir, Ḥurr ibn Yazīd, Zuhayr ibn al-Qayn and Burayr — many of whom the series treats in their own maqtals.

The aided Imam — the guiding Imam who will rise — when the Ziyārah asks God “to grant us to seek the requital of your blood at the side of an Imam divinely aided” and “a guiding Imam, manifest, speaking with the truth,” it looks to the awaited twelfth Imam, al-Mahdī (may God hasten his return), in whom the reciter hopes the long account of Karbalā will at last be set right.

The People Who Are Disavowed

These are the historical figures of the injustice at Karbalā and the power behind it.

We name them plainly, as the Ziyārah does — and the distancing invoked upon them is the distance of God’s mercy, as explained above.

The clan of Umayya (Banū Umayya) — the branch of Quraysh that held the caliphate as a hereditary monarchy after the death of Imam ʿAlī; the dynasty under which Karbalā took place.

Abū Sufyān — the Umayyad chief who led the opposition to the Prophet for years before the conquest of Mecca; father of Muʿāwiya, grandfather of Yazīd.

Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān — the first Umayyad caliph, who turned the leadership of the community into hereditary rule and named his son Yazīd to succeed him. The Ziyārah’s phrase “the son of the devourer of livers” refers to him: his mother, Hind bint ʿUtba, mutilated and chewed the liver of Ḥamza, the Prophet’s uncle, at the battle of Uḥud.

Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya — the second Umayyad caliph, in whose reign and on whose authority Ḥusayn was killed; the refusal to pledge to his rule is the hinge of the whole story.

ʿUbaydullāh ibn Ziyād — Yazīd’s governor over Kufa, who dispatched the army to Karbalā and gave the orders that ended in the killing.

The Ziyārah also names him “the son of Marjāna,” after his mother — the same man.

The house of Ziyād (Āl Ziyād) — the family of ʿUbaydullāh and his father Ziyād.

The house of Marwān (Āl Marwān) — the Marwānid branch of the Umayyads (after Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam) who consolidated and continued the dynasty.

ʿUmar ibn Saʿd — the field commander of the Kufan army at Karbalā, who took the command in exchange for the promised governorship of Rayy (near modern day Tehran).

Shimr ibn Dhī al-Jawshan — the commander who pressed the final assault and is named in the tradition as the killer of Imam Ḥusayn.

“The first… the second… the third… the fourth… and Yazīd, the fifth” — near its close the Ziyārah counts a line of oppressors by order rather than by name, beginning with “the first who wronged the right of Muḥammad and the family of Muḥammad” and reaching Yazīd as the fifth.

This passage is the most misread in the whole Ziyārah, and it matters greatly to read it rightly.

The misreading is this: that the ordinals point to particular figures from the first decades of Islamic history — and on that basis the whole Ziyārah is cast as a sectarian attack on one group of Muslims by another.

That is a profound misunderstanding, born more of emotion than of knowledge, and it is the very opposite of what the words mean.

History did not begin with Islam.

It began with Adam — and with Adam began both the line of God’s witnesses and the line of those who rise against them.

This is the arc the Muharram series for 1448 (2026) traces from its very first night, in Abel — the first witness — and the brother who shed the first innocent blood.

In the teaching of the Prophet’s household, the light and the right of Muḥammad and his family precede all creation; so “the right of Muḥammad and the family of Muḥammad” is the right of divine guidance itself — the same right carried by every prophet — and “the first who wronged” it is the first who ever rose against a witness of God.

Scholars have genuinely differed over the exact referents, and the Ziyārah deliberately leaves them unnamed.

But the sound reading — and the one we follow — understands the four not as figures internal to one community’s quarrels at all, but as the archetypal oppressors of God’s witnesses across the ages: the first to shed innocent blood (Cain, who killed his brother Abel); Nimrod, who rose against Abraham; Pharaoh, who rose against Moses; and the tyrant in whose time John the Baptist — Yaḥyā — was slain (Herod, in the Gospel telling).

Yazīd is named the fifth because he belongs to that lineage — not to any list of caliphs, but to the company of Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh and Herod: the line of those who, in every age, kill the witness of God and call it order.

So the point of the passage is barāʾah — the disavowal of the kind of oppression that runs unbroken through all of human history, of which Karbalā is the sharpest wound — never the settling of one community’s grudge against another.

As with every laʿn in the Ziyārah, what is invoked is the distance of God’s mercy from injustice that was never repented; and what is affirmed against it is loyalty to the witnesses of God in every age, from Abel to Ḥusayn.

Karbalā Is Not Only The Past — The Ḥusayn And The Yazīd Of Every Age

It would be the smallest possible reading of this Ziyārah to think its loyalty and its disavowal are spent on people long dead.

Yazīd, ʿUbaydullāh and Shimr are gone; the choice they embodied is not.

Every age stages the same drama — a power that demands the conscience bow to it, and a witness who will not bow — and the Imams taught these words for every day precisely so that the believer would carry the criterion of Karbalā into his own time, not leave it in the year 61.

So the believer’s task is a present one.

It is to recognise the Yazīd of his own time — wherever a power kills the innocent and calls it order, demands the pledge and calls refusal treason, dresses oppression as necessity — and to recognise the Ḥusayn of his own time — wherever someone refuses that pledge and bears the cost of refusing.

And then to do exactly what the Ziyārah trains the tongue and the heart to do: give loyalty to the Ḥusayn of the age, and hold the distance of God’s mercy from its Yazīd.

Every day is ʿĀshūrāʾ; every land is Karbalā — because the criterion does not change, only the names do.

And the hardest Yazīd to name is the one within.

The same refusal the Ziyārah rehearses outwardly is owed inwardly — to the part of the self that would make its peace with comfort at the cost of the truth.

Whoever says “may the mercy of God be distant from the oppressor” and then bows, in private, to his own tyranny of appetite has learned only half of the prayer.

To know the Ḥusayn of your time begins with refusing the Yazīd in yourself.

Going deeper.

For any reader who wishes to follow these threads further:

From the Shahada series (this Muḥarram (1448/2026)):

• Karbalā as a living, daily criterion rather than a remembered event — Night 4, Every Day Is Ashura.

• Telling the true witness from the counterfeit, and the counterfeits of our own age — Night 9, The False Shahada.

• Ḥusayn as the furqān, the criterion that weighs both the empire outside and the self within — Night 10, Husayn, Heir of Adam.

• Loyalty to the just and disavowal of the unjust today — how one disowns a regime while honouring the very people it wrongs — Night 7, Nothing More Precious Than Independence.

From the Lantern of the Path series:

• Why loyalty is owed to the rightful leadership of the Prophet’s household — #24, Imāmah: The Commander of the Faithful, Imam ʿAlī.

• Imam Ḥusayn himself — #27, Imāmah: Imam Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, the Master of the Martyrs.

• Giving one’s loyalty to God and the rightful guide, and refusing it to the tyrant (ṭāghūt) of one’s own time — #19, Wilāyah to the Ṭāghūt and #20, Migrating to the Wilāyah of God.

• Awaiting the Imam of the age as active recognition and preparation, never passivity — #46, Mahdawiyyah: The Philosophy of Intidhār — Action, Not Apathy.

A Few Recurring Words And Phrases

• Abā ʿAbdillāh — Imam Ḥusayn’s kunya (honorific by-name), “father of ʿAbdullāh,” after his infant son.

• Ahl al-Bayt / People of the House — the family of the Prophet: ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan, Ḥusayn and the Imams of their line.

• “O blood whose claim is God’s” (yā thār Allāh) — Ḥusayn as the one whose spilled blood God Himself will vindicate; “the solitary one, his due not yet redeemed” (al-witr al-mawtūr) names him as the one left alone, whose account is not yet settled.

• Barāʾah — disavowal; turning away from injustice and from those who chose it.

• Walāyah / muwālāt — loyalty; turning toward God through love of the Prophet’s household. The two together are the heart of the Ziyārah.

Sources Drawn On For This Introduction

• Ibn Qūlawayh, Kāmil al-Ziyārāt, and al-Ṭūsī, Miṣbāḥ al-Mutahajjid (for the text and its transmission);

• al-Mufīd, Kitāb al-Irshād;

• al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh;

• Ibn Ṭāwūs, al-Luhūf; and Ayatollah Rayshahrī, The Chronicles of the Martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn (for the figures and the events of Karbalā) — the same source base the series rests on. The explanation of laʿn follows the series' locked theological convention: it is the distancing of God's mercy, never the distancing of God Himself.

The Full Text Of The Ziyārah

I — The Greeting

Peace be upon you, O Abā ʿAbdillāh.
Peace be upon you, O son of the Messenger of God.
Peace be upon you, O chosen of God, and son of His chosen.
Peace be upon you, O son of the Commander of the Faithful, son of the master of those entrusted to come after.
Peace be upon you, O son of Sayyedah Fāṭima, mistress of the women of all the worlds.
Peace be upon you, O blood whose claim is God’s, and son of that same claim — the solitary one, his due not yet redeemed.
Peace be upon you, and upon the souls that came to rest about you.

Upon you all, from us, be the peace of God —
for as long as we remain, and as long as night and day endure.

II — The Affliction

O Abā ʿAbdillāh —
immense is the calamity, and bitter;
great is the wound of your loss upon us, and upon all the people of Islam.
Great and grievous is your affliction in the heavens, upon all who dwell there.

III — The Distancing

May the mercy of God be distant from a people who laid the first foundation of injustice and tyranny against you, O People of the House.
May the mercy of God be distant from a people who drove you from your station, and tore you from the ranks in which God Himself had placed you.
May the mercy of God be distant from a people who killed you —
and from those who smoothed their road, and gave into their hands the power to make war upon you.

We disown them before God and before you — them, and their partisans, their followers, their friends.

O Abā ʿAbdillāh — we are at peace with all who are at peace with you, and at war with all who war against you, until the Day of Resurrection.

May the mercy of God be distant from the house of Ziyād and the house of Marwān;
from the clan of Umayya, every one of them;
from the son of Marjāna;
from ʿUmar son of Saʿd;
from Shimr;
and from a people who saddled their horses, and bridled them, and masked their faces to make war upon you.

By our fathers and our mothers — for you, we would give them.

IV — Seeking Nearness

Great is our grief for you.
And so we ask of God — who ennobled your station, and honoured us through you —
that He grant us to seek the requital of your blood
at the side of an Imam divinely aided, from the household of Muḥammad, peace and blessings be upon him and his family.

O God, make us, in Your sight, honoured through Ḥusayn — peace be upon him — in this world and the next.

O Abā ʿAbdillāh, we draw near to God, and to His Messenger, and to the Commander of the Faithful, and to Sayyedah Fāṭima, and to Ḥasan, and to you — through our love and loyalty to you;
and through our disavowal of the one who fought you and raised against you the standard of war;
of the one who laid the first foundation of injustice and built his house upon it, and carried on in oppression against you and against those who follow you.
We disown them before God and before you.

We draw near to God — and then to you — through loyalty to you, and to the one who holds your guardianship;
and through disavowal of your enemies.
We are at peace with all who are at peace with you, and at war with all who war against you;
friends to all who befriend you, foes to all who show you enmity.

So we ask of God — who honoured us with knowing you, and knowing those who love you —
that He place us with you, in this world and the next;
that He set firm for us, in your presence, a footing of truth;
that He bring us to the praised station that is yours with God;
and that He grant us to seek our requital at the side of a guiding Imam — manifest, and speaking with the truth — from among you.

And we ask of God, by your right, and by the rank that is yours with Him,
that He grant us, for our sorrow over you, the finest gift He gives to any soul stricken in its grief —
an affliction: how immense it is, how great its sorrow, in Islam, and in all the heavens and the earth.

O God, make us, in this our standing, among those whom Your blessings reach, and Your mercy, and Your forgiveness.
O God, make our living the living of Muḥammad and the family of Muḥammad,
and our dying the dying of Muḥammad and the family of Muḥammad.

V — This Day

O God, this is a day on which the clan of Umayya rejoiced and counted itself blessed — and the son of the devourer of livers;
the one cast far from mercy, son of the one cast far from mercy — upon Your tongue, and the tongue of Your Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, in every place and at every standing where Your Prophet stood.

O God, let Your mercy be far from Abū Sufyān, and Muʿāwiya, and Yazīd son of Muʿāwiya — upon them, from You, be that exile from mercy, for all the ages without end.

This is a day on which the house of Ziyād and the house of Marwān rejoiced — at their killing of Ḥusayn, God’s blessings be upon him.
O God, multiply upon them the distance of Your mercy, and Your punishment.

O God, on this day, and in this our standing, and through all the days of our lives, we draw near to You —
by disowning them, by calling the distance of Your mercy down upon them, and by our loyalty to Your Prophet and the family of Your Prophet, peace be upon them.

VI — The Sealing

(the hundredfold remembrance, said once)

O God, let Your mercy be distant from the first who wronged the right of Muḥammad and the family of Muḥammad — and from the last who followed him upon that road.
O God, let Your mercy be distant from the band who fought against Ḥusayn, and sided with his killing, and pledged to it, and followed in it.
O God — let Your mercy be distant from them, all of them.

VII — The Greeting Returns

(the hundredfold remembrance, said once)

Peace be upon you, O Abā ʿAbdillāh, and upon the souls that came to rest about you.
Upon you, from us, be the peace of God — for as long as we remain, and as long as night and day endure.
And may God never make this the last of our covenant with you, the last of our coming to you.

Peace be upon Ḥusayn,
and upon ʿAlī son of Ḥusayn,
and upon the children of Ḥusayn,
and upon the companions of Ḥusayn.

VIII — The Naming

O God, single out the first oppressor for the distance of Your mercy, from us; begin with him, first of all — then the second, the third, the fourth.
O God, let Your mercy be distant from Yazīd, the fifth;
and from ʿUbaydullāh son of Ziyād, and the son of Marjāna, and ʿUmar son of Saʿd, and Shimr, and the house of Abū Sufyān, and the house of Ziyād, and the house of Marwān — until the Day of Resurrection.

IX — The Prostration

O God, to You belongs all praise — the praise of those who give thanks to You, even in their affliction.
All praise is God’s, for the immensity of our sorrow.

O God, grant us the intercession of Ḥusayn on the Day we come before You.
And set firm for us a footing of truth in Your presence — with Ḥusayn, and the companions of Ḥusayn, those who poured out their very lifeblood for Ḥusayn, peace be upon him.

This track is a companion track - and each of its lines are built from the series of sessions developed by the Truth Promoters Group for Muharram (Ashura) 1448 (June 2026) and Safar (Arbaeen) 1448 (July/August 2026).

Each of the verses encapsulate lessons from two sermons and two maqtals from the Shahada (Witness) Series. Specifically those for the Ashura segment - Sessions 1 thru 10 and Maqtals 1 thru 10.

The relevant sermon and maqtal links are provided alongside each verse.

Lyrics for the Song (Anthem/Nasheed)

Intro

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel's field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Verse 1

It started with two brothers, an offering, a field —
one raised his hand to take a life, one would not lift a sword.
"I fear my Lord," said Abel, "I will not raise my hand" —
the first to bear the witness, the first true martyr's stand.

Before the worlds were fashioned, before we had a name,
"Am I not your Lord?" He asked us — and "Yes" became the flame.
Through Noah, through Abraham, through each prophet's weeping eye,
the tear was passed from hand to hand; that chain would never die.

Chorus

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel's field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Verse 2

Not every death is equal, not every fall the same —
some lives are torn away by force, some chosen without blame.
He did not lose his life that day — he placed it in God's hand;
the death that looks like ending is the seed that makes us stand.

At Mina stood the warning: the silent scholars knew,
but fear and ease and blindness kept their tongues from speaking true.
The tongue may say "I love him" — but the life must answer too;
for every day is Ashura, and Karbala is you.

Chorus

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel’s field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Verse 3

The witness knows no border; it speaks in every tongue —
the captain turned his horse around before the day was done;
a Christian crossed his own creed to fall on that same sand:
one oil had lit their every lamp, one light in every hand.

The chosen are not chosen for their blood or flag or throne —
the chosen bear a burden, and they bear it not alone.
They sought their own deliverance down every road but His;
the anchor that they ached to find was the covenant that is.

Chorus

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel’s field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Verse 4

What cause is worth the dying? What banner, and what name?
But one alone was worthy, and it bowed to no man's claim
but God's — so at the river, when both his hands were shorn,
Abbas still raised the standard for the Proof that he had sworn.

No empire's borrowed beauty, no falling petal's art
could match the faithful lamps that would not flicker in the dark.
He offered them their freedom — and not one of them would flee;
and Zaynab saw, through all of it, a beauty none could see.

Chorus

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel’s field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Verse 5

Beware the counterfeit witness that steals the holy word;
the truest, smallest witness was the cry no mercy heard —
an arrow found an infant in his father's aching hold;
no liar steals that witness, and no lie can make it cold.

He is the heir of Adam, of every prophet's light,
the measure of all empires, the criterion of right.
He bowed his final sajdah, at peace with God's decree:
"no soul like mine," he told them, "pledges to a man like he."

Chorus

A witness is no victim, not conquered and not slain —
he speaks the truth his Lord revealed and bears it through the pain.
From Abel’s field to Karbala one fire has not grown cold:
one chain, one flame, one loyalty — to God alone we hold.

Outro

So where is your brother? Are you walking, are you true?
The chain has reached your hands at last — the witness falls to you.
Each day we clear the throne of every idol, every lie:
there is no lord but God alone — and Husayn showed us why.

Production Credits & Transparency

We believe in blending original, human creativity with the latest digital tools to bring these historical stories to life in new ways.

• Lyrics & Concept: 100% original, written by our human team, based on the sermons and maqatil indicated alongside each of the verses.

• Music & Vocals: Composed and generated using Suno AI.

• Visuals & Animation: Lego-style cinematic scenes generated and meticulously montaged using AI visualisation tools by our team.

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!
Yet the story of Love is far deeper, captivating all of humanity.
This is the eternal Love, that forever remains in the hearts.

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Calamitous is a place that lies between,
That makes fiery shadows in the flames,
There once was a madness in it’s midst,
Swaying the marshes to it’s tune,
Take these tunes and weave them together,
In the raging furnace that ignites the flames.

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

He made himself a host for the fiery flames,
Till he burned within the searing fire,
Divine love is what is found over here!
Transforming the teardrops falling here into boundless oceans,
For a moment, leave this world,
Be transfixed, as your heart breaks.

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Calamitous is a place that lies between,
That makes fiery shadows in the flames,
There once was a madness in it’s midst,
Swaying the marshes to it’s tune,
Take these tunes and weave them together,
In the raging furnace that ignites the flames.

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

He made himself a host for the fiery flames,
Till he burned within the searing fire,
Divine love is what is found over here!
Transforming the teardrops falling here into boundless oceans,
For a moment, leave this world,
Be transfixed, as your heart breaks.

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind, until you’ve seen!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind until you’ve seen!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind until you’ve seen!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind until you’ve seen!

The curtains were raised, and that which was and was not, revealed,
Truly, you’ve been blind until you’ve seen!

Hearts beating in unison with the same rhythm,
This is the cry of Love that sets everything ablaze

We pray that Allah hasten the return of our Master, Imam al-Hujjah(AJ) and alleviate our suffering. Amen, Oh Lord Sustainer of the Universes.

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be
Your ransom, When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Oh Our Mahdi(AJ), long is the delay, for when will we see the moon (like a bright moon lighting up a dark night)?!
All the world’s eyes are exhausted, from seeing the pain (of separation from You)!
In every heart (with every beat) resonates the calls, yearning for the Awaited(AJ)!
And the hearts - Oh our Master(AJ) - call to You, when will You see us, and we see You?

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Who else is there for this world, except the Imam(AJ) to ensure it’s guidance?!
Hasten! Hasten! Oh Our Mahdi(AJ)! Let’s all raise this call!
In the darkness of the night, Oh Aba Saleh(AJ), we yearn for the morning!
And raise with it (with the dawn of the new morning), your call of guidance... ... when will You see us, and we see You?!

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Oh the Promised One(AJ), who will ensure Justice across every nation (every peoples), Oh the son of Guidance (al-Hadi)!
Oh he who is the bearer of all the that is good and the best (and most sublime) of values, Take your steed, and ride swiftly, and hold high that flag (of the true Islam)! Reveal for us the light of Your presence,
When will You see us and we see You?!

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Rise and spread the banners of Justice, and remove the darkness of this (perpetual) night, And raise the true religion of the Guide Ahmad(S) (Prophet Muhammad(S)) throughout the World!
And help the hands that are raised to You (to Allah through You), Oh Mahdi(AJ) with cries for help!
When will the lovers eyes behold the Beloved?!
When will You see us, and we see You?!

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Oh the final Light from the Lights at the origin of the Universes!
All the souls, Oh Aba Saleh(AJ), sing (and yearn) for your return!
The world is united in longing for Your return (the desire for Your return is universal)! That we can see an end to the oppression of Tyrants When will You see us and we see You?!

Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?
Oh Son Of Hasan(AJ), my soul be Your ransom,
When will You see us and we see You?

Oh Our Mahdi(AJ), long is the delay, for when will we see the moon (like a bright moon lighting up a dark night)?!
All the world’s eyes are exhausted, from seeing the pain (of separation from You)!
In every heart (with every beat) resonates the calls, yearning for the Awaited(AJ)!
And the hearts - Oh our Master(AJ) - call to You, when will You see us, and we see You?

A voice a whisper midst the pain
From the soul declared insane
No one listened no one heard
Hatred defined that sinful world.

Then a son from midst that soil
One who longed for righteous toil
Took the hand out stretched in peace
Bonds of love that could never cease

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah

The earth could never be the same
The sacred house had birthed the flame
Joy and heart ache from the start
Rent asunder and cleaved apart

Holy child and sacred kin
Battled for the souls of men
Godly words filled with light
Conquered hearts and conquered spite

Filled with awe the people turned
Love for Ahmad surely burned
By his side a light sublime
Sagious warrior love divine

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

Valley of echoes, sacred word
Deceitful water where truth unfurled
Those who love me will love him
Those who leave him will turn to sin

Murderous slaughter in minds of men
Burning hatred for Islam
Pagan tyrants mushrikeen
Depravity of the mustakbireen.

Mighty warrior Mortadha
Fearsome soldier of Allah
Raised his sword for the world’s oppressed
Armour of god upon his chest.

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

The cleavened Kaaba foretold the path
Some of the saved and some of the wrath
Some would be love and some were hate
Ascension assured through the city’s gate

A cloak defines the holy proof
Lamentation their weapon of truth
The broken hearts and the vale of tears
An enemy forms when truth appears

Too much for they who opposed Ali
His justice love and piety
They feigned religion and the raiment wore
They sold their souls and revenge they swore .

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

The garden of Ali defiled
His holy sons would be reviled
His precious joy, sweet Fatima
Taken from him in his darkest hour.

The beloved of the mustadhafeen
Ya Amirul mumineen
Lies were spread, and deceit proclaimed
The name Ali would be defamed.

Creeping satans on the night of power
Demonic agents skulk and cower
Gentle ruku and sajdah
Precious the worship of Mortadha

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

The tender teacher of the poor
Taught the hearts to rise and soar
Elevated the ummahs path
Cleaved the world from sin and wrath

Martyred they our blessed Ali
In the month of serenity
At the banquet of Allah
Sacrificed our morning star

Men of Hajj and dhikrallah
As those who’d March at Karbala
Cleaved the head of the holy one
Masters of a satanic throng.

Stand all upon a precipice
A choice to make twixt hell or bliss
Cleaved unto or cleaven from
Master he the cleaven one.

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

See the Kaaba still it stands
Now it’s held in traitors hands
Those who walk with a faith that’s faigned
Those who live with a life profane.

Cleave they to a life of death
Witness they with every breath
Hypocrisy and evil deeds
While Orphans and poor ones they cry and bleed.

We long to walk with our Ali
A painful path it’s sure to be
So we must dwell in Allahs word
Divorce this wicked and fruitless world

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

Resistance surely is his way
The tyrants must be made to pay
Take up the fight, we Ayer you be
Put on the garb of unity.

The lovers, we must stand as one
Battle hard against every wrong
Inward struggle and outward war
No stone unturned no unsettled score.

In the name of Blessed Ali
On the path of Haidery
Build this hope in every land
For Imam Az-Zaman, we will make our stand.

Ya Ali Ali AL Mortadha
Ya wali ya wali of Allah.

Of a flower of purity who dwells in every heart.

O Princess of Qom, O light of this land,

O Karima of the Household, O purity of faith.

She is Fatima al-Ma’sumah — the fairest of all names,

Daughter of al-Kadhim, a light that lifts every sorrow.

Born in Medina, in purity and grace,

In her, the light of mercy; in her, the beauty of hope.

A sister to al-Ridha, a full moon on a luminous night,

Her mother is Najma — a heart both pure and great.

Knowledge and patience, a light that never fades,

And worship as gentle as the dawning light.

In her veil is shelter, in her modesty is grace,

In her purity is a path, a path toward perfection.

In the year 201 of the Hijra, she departed by the will of the Merciful,

In Qom, she rests — a sanctuary of the highest majesty.

We come to you in longing, O light of every heart,

O model of purity, O way of all our ways.

Credits:

Tasneem Morthuda
instagram.com/tasneem_morthuda
www.youtube.com/@Tasneem_morthuda313

Oh Proof of Allah(AJ), we complain to You!
Come to us, come to us
We are here for You, we are here for You!

Time is coming towards us, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Come to our aid, Oh son of Hasan(AJ), Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Time is coming towards us, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Come to our aid, Oh son of Hasan(AJ), Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!

Oh the Remnant of Allah(AJ) (Baqiyyat Allah(AJ)), we complain to You!
Come to us, come to us
We are here for You, we are here for You!

Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)! Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)! Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)! We complain to You!

The hope of the oppressed, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Oh the call of the revolutionaries, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
The hope of the oppressed, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Oh the call of the revolutionaries, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!

Oh the cry of the oppressed ones, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
Oh the cry of the oppressed ones, Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!

The hearts of the children, yearn for You!
Come to us, come to us
We are here for You, we are here for You!

Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)! Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)! Oh Proof of Allah(AJ)!
We complain to You!

When will the relief come (with Your return), Oh our Master(AJ)?!
Ya Mahdi!
And the joy for the believers (upon Your return), Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
When will the relief come (with Your return), Oh our Master(AJ)?!
Ya Mahdi!
And the joy for the believers (upon Your return), Oh our Master(AJ)?!
Ya Mahdi!

And the destruction of the criminal and tyrants!
Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!
And the destruction of the criminal and tyrants! Oh our Master(AJ)!
Ya Mahdi!

The command of Nasrallah(HA), guides us towards You.
Come to us, come to us
We are here for You, we are here for You!

Oh Proof of Allah(AJ), we complain to You!
Come to us, come to us
We are here for You, we are here for You!

With all desires prostrated, devoted only to Allah in the presence of your purity;
Until they are transformed into sonnets and supplications glorifying Allah.

With all desires prostrated, devoted only to Allah in the presence of your purity;
Our eyes overflow with tears as they look towards the skies.
Our Master Mahdi(AJ), refreshes our eyes through meeting with you!

Create for us, in the midst of our morning, a sonnet full of light;
That tells the tale of your glory and majesty!

Our eyes overflow with tears as they look towards the skies.
Our Master Mahdi(AJ), refreshes our eyes through meeting with you!

Create for us, in the midst of our morning, a sonnet full of light;
That tells the tale of your glory and majesty!

Your sonnets are like unto the Spring of Love;
We know that Isa(AJ) (Jesus(AJ)) longs to pray behind you!

The voices are constantly saying, separation from you is heartbreaking!
Oh the son of Guidance(AJ), yearning for you tears our hearts apart!

The voices are constantly saying, separation from you is heartbreaking!
Oh the son of Guidance(AJ), yearning for you tears our hearts apart!

So pour the pure water of your purity; and fill our cups;
And honour us with your presence, to cool the desert of our hearts.

Be merciful to the hearts that melt with your love,
Hearts from whence, the signs of grief are shown, as were seen in Ya’qub(A).

So pour the pure water of your purity; and fill our cups;
And honour us with your presence, to cool the desert of our hearts.

Be merciful to the hearts that melt with your love,
Hearts from whence, the signs of grief are shown, as were seen in Ya’qub(A).

Your eyes; are like unto the Spring of Love;
So revive our existence and enliven our souls;

For how long must we bear this heart and soul wrenching separation from you?
How can the Earth or the skies ever contain your greatness, Oh our Leader(AJ)?

The lungs of the Earth are suffocating,
Till when will it breath the sweet air of your kindness?

So will you or will you not return (at this time), Oh Our Master(AJ)?
There is a blazing thirst in our souls; and only you are our water!

The cries of the bewildered and confused are deafening,
Only your presence can bring them into a state of serenity.

Your presence can see it in the form of the coming dawn, the perfect image of the Quran.
At every twilight, your mystical love mixes with our blood.

Sometimes your promise is on the Earth, sometimes it gives us patience to bear our tale of oppression and sorrow.
And it tells us with the clearest of proofs; that truly our need for your is immense.

The promise was truly going to be fulfilled, projecting the most perfect Prophetic Light. (reference to South Lebanon)
It left the Universes and chose, the home of the free in the South (reference to South Lebanon);

The Sincere Promise, that has never lied; a fiery thunderbolt that was never put out.
And it shall remain for always a Karbalai (Revolutionary) fire.

With your assistance, Hezbollah has wiped out the illegal occupation
They showed us the true remnants of the heroes of Siffin!

Hearts beat, each beat longing for the Revolution, even before the beat forms.
From the wombs of Glory, they said to come, for the Victory is coming!

Oh Raised Sword of Allah (against the oppressors)!

Peace be upon your pure Soul!

Pray Ardently for the Return of Imam al-Hujjah(AJ)