Sayyedah Zaynab, Imam Sajjad and the Messengers of Karbala

Imamah, Part 8 By the night after Ashura, eighty-four survivors remained in the camp — mostly women and children, with only one man among them, and he too ill to stand. That man was Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace be upon him, the fourth Imam. The person who held the camp together was his aunt, Sayyedah Zaynab, peace be upon her, daughter of Imam Ali and Sayyedah Fatimah. Senior companions of standing and lineage had hesitated to join Imam Husayn's caravan once the danger became clear. She did not. She brought her own two sons, Awn and Muhammad, into a field she knew was one of martyrdom, because she recognised what the session calls the obligation of the moment. What she did after Ashura is the session's real focus. An eyewitness, recorded in the sources, described her afterwards as "another Husayn in the clothing of a woman", whose eloquence "revived the hearts of the dead". She stood over her brother's body and cried out to their grandfather, the Prophet, by name. She then carried that same voice into the courts of Kufa and Damascus, delivering sermons as a captive that unsettled a city which had betrayed her brother by letter and then abandoned him on the field. A later scholar would call her not the narrator of Karbala, but its co-architect. If the tragedy had ended with the swords, who made sure it did not? What the evening covers The decision to go. Why senior companions hesitated to join the caravan to Karbala, and why Sayyedah Zaynab did not. Eighty-four survivors. The camp she held together on the night after Ashura, with only one gravely ill man left standing among them. "Another Husayn in the clothing of a woman." An eyewitness account of what her eloquence did to a grieving, defeated camp. The sermon in Kufa. How a captive's speech unsettled the very city that had betrayed her brother.

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Sermon: Sayyedah Zaynab, Imam Sajjad and the Messengers of Karbala

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Nohe: In Memory of Imam Khomeini

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Ziyarah: Ziyarat Aal-e-Yasin

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