In His Name, the Most High
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.
