In His Name, the Most High
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.
