Imam Ḥusayn: Exploring the life, legacy, and significance of Imam Ḥusayn in Islamic history” Sensitivity during the month of Muharram in the fore front of the Islamic calendar is of the remembrance of the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn رَضِيَ ٱللَّٰهُ عَنْهُ , the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and his honorable companions.
This article shows great respect towards Imam Husayn رَضِيَ ٱللَّٰهُ عَنْهُ and an introduction to the events, reasons and repercussions of the tragedy of Karbala. It is presented with the wish that it will help build Islamic team spirit and the brotherly feeling that the author wants in his foreword.
Preface
The following pages are purely and simply the record of an address which I delivered in London on Thursday, 28 May 1931 (Muharram 1350 A. H.) at the Waldorf Hotel. This document in the end got a few corrections and entered the realm of ‘just’ improvement. Majlis was a superb collecting which was held on the invitation of Mr. A. S. M. Anik.
In his chair was Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan, Tiwana, and people of all the faculties of thoughts related to Islam and other non-Muslims participation also remained present and seems to be very respectable while giving tribute to the memory of the ‘Martyr of Islam’. In putting it in the Progressive Islam Pamphlets series it was expected to gain a wider circulation than could be obtained in character.
Maybe, too, it could strengthen one of the ties that bind in unity all who revere the Articles of Faith proclaimed by the Prophet through the last Sermon. A. Yusuf Ali.
This article is a shorter version and has been abridged from Progressive Islam Pamphlet No. 7, September 1931.
Shi’a Muslims believe in a man named Imam Ḥusayn and the events that led to his death.
If we formally or informally, introduce strangers or guests into our own circles of family and make them feel as being a part of it- that indeed needs the finest of the heart to flow out towards the guests. The occurrences that I am going to narrate align with one or the other of the most appealing episodes of our home history within its religious dimension.
We invite our brothers and sisters of other faiths to come and express to us some of the ideas which might be conceived by this event. As a depend of reality, all college students of history are aware that the horrors that are related with the notable occasion of Kerbela did more than something else to bring together the various contending factions which have regrettably emerged at that early stage of Muslim history. You know the vintage Persian pronouncing carried out to the Prophet:You know the vintage Persian pronouncing carried out to the Prophet:
Tu barae wasl kardan amadi; – Ni barae fasl kardan amadi.
You got to the arena to bring together, not to sever.
This is splendidly reflected in the sorrows and suffering, and martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn; an incident which remains significant till this day.
Let me start with roughly introducing you to the geographical context and the historical previous. Then I will very briefly discuss the realistic activities that happened in that calamity struck Muharram and lastly invite your attention to the gorgeous lessons that may be learned from such actualities.
The general topic of the book ‘Cities and their Cultural Meaning’ reflects on the cultural implications of living in cities.
The constructing of Kufa and Basra, the two exemplary quality outposts of the Muslim Empire, inside the sixteenth yr of the Hijra, became a visible manifestation of an Islamic faith that changed into transferring its military, constructing a new civilizational culture, not only mailed fist but additionally ethical and social thoughts and in sciences and arts.
The vintage effete towns did not satisfy it any more than the antique and effete systems which it displaced. But it did not cease with these preliminary steps It continued. It is being constantly inspecting, exploring, rejecting, and re-creating its own production in a way. There was always a party that wanted to stay on old policies, to seize towns like Damascus ready-made, that loved comfort and the path of least inclination.
It means that the extra souls reached out to new horizons- of ideas and territory. They thought that old seats had been as chair-like useless timber which bred worms and rottenness threatening better forms of life. This conflict among them become a pal of the tragedy of Kerbela. These are the possible foundations on which often there may lay the emergence of recent ideas apropos of new cities. We must, therefore, take slight a bit more time in studying the problem. It will also screen the hidden springs of a few very interesting records.
Vicissitudes of Mecca and Medina
Remarkable towns of Islamic states founded with Mecca and Medina. Dodging with no reply he rode a mule that in Mecca the middle of the old Arabian pilgrimage the birthplace of the Prophet rejected the Prophet’s coaching and forged him off. Its idol worship became effeminate; its clan consciousness became effeminate; its animalist savagery against the Teacher of the New Light was effeminate.
The Prophet therefore left it and tread it saying that the dust of Makkah is off his feet and went to Medina. It was the properly-watered town of Yathrib; the town with an enormous Jewish community. It was happy to get instructions of the Prophet; It afforded shelter to him and his Moslem friends and wives or ‘Helpers’. He reinvented it and it emerged as the brand new historical city of light.
This firmament and its old gods, this antique superstition about Mecca, tried to conquer this new Light, to throw it out. People had been favoring the opposition of human Tragedy in Mecca. But God’s reason maintained and kept on supporting the light and defeated the Arabian Mecca of vintage wine. However the Prophet came also to build, as well as to pull down. He broke the idol and set up a torch of a new passion in Mecca – the passion of Arab solidarity and humanitarianism.
In the course of death of the Prophet on this earth his spirit survived. This motivated his humans and took them from triumph to triumph. In every combination that exists between moral or spiritual and fabric victories, the spirit of guy is progressive step by step. But once in a while there may be a material victory with a spiritual fall, and now and again there’s a spiritual victory with a cloth fall, and then we’ve tragedy.
Spirit of Damascus
Islam’s first expansion was towards Syria in which the concentration of energy was on the city of Damascus. If evaluate among residing towns, it could be the oldest metropolis on the earth. Its basaars are crowded with guys of all countries, and the splenours and refinements of each international regions are ensured a healthy receptiveness in these markets. If you go back to it, westward, from the wilderness of Syria, the whole is complete in the unity of the states and within the people.
And all of a sudden you shift back from the desert and its scorching heat to waterfalls and wine yards and apple gardens and the sound of the noisy roads. Starting from the ordinary, muscular and tactless Arab man, you get the squishy, luxurious, technologically advanced Syrian man. That assessment was imposed on the Muslims while Damascus turned into a Muslim city.
The children had been in a quite different ethical religious environment. Some yielded to the softening effects of the aims and ideals of success, richness, snobbishness of blood, laziness and the like. Islam continued to rise due to the fact it turned into the protector of the first-rate rugged moral absolutes. It interfaced no accommodation with the dark in any guise or form, with beauty, with indolence, with the temptations of this world.
It transformed or became a protest against these things. But the representatives of that protest were given softened at Damascus. They mimicked the hedonistic princes of the sector instead of attempting to be specialists of the religious idea. Discipline appeared friendly and governors wanted to be referred to as something more than Khalifas. This reaped bitter fruit later on.
Categories: PRAYER (Salat), ALMS (Zakat), SAWN (Fasting) HAJJ (Pilgrimage) & DUA (Supplications), Hadith and Tafseer, The Holy Quran, Quran Jaz 1- 114
Topics: Hijab, Arabic Corner, Islamic History, Biography, Islamic Studies, Halal & Haram
