In His Name, the Most High
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.
