---
title: "Shahada (Witness) - Arbaeen 1448 (2026) Series"
description: "In His Name, the Most High Across the ten nights of Muharram and the five of Arbaeen, The Shahada (Witness) Series asks a single question the world keeps getting wrong: \"What does it mean to bear witness?\" The Arabic shaheed means witness, not victim — and Karbala is not a defeat to be mourned but a testimony that has never stopped speaking. Each night follows the same arc. We open with verses of the Holy Qur'an, followed by poetic couplets that set the heart for what is to come. Then the sermon, drawing the night's theology out of scripture, history, and the witnesses of every age. Then the maqtal — the traditional narration of the events of Karbala and the deaths of the martyrs — here spoken in the voice of the Hidden Imam, looking back across time at those who gave their lives for the truth. This is followed by a nohe, an elegy sung in lament and devotion for the household of the Prophet. And we close with a poetic rendering of Ziyarat Arbaeen — the ancient salutation of peace upon Imam Husayn and his companions, and of disavowal of those who wronged them, recited by the faithful for over a thousand years. From the first blood of Abel to the noon of Ashura, this is the story of how a death can become the most living thing on earth. Where is your brother?  And at the end of the Arbaeen series, we can finally answer that question.  You can also find the answer in our Anthem/Trailer - \"From Karbala the Road Runs On\" NOTE: This series is a continuation of the Ashura series which was 10 sessions, this is 5 sessions.  You can find the 10 Ashura sessions here - https://tp313.me/s/38DNui"
published_at: "2026-07-30"
canonical_url: "https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/shahada-witness-arbaeen-1448-2026-series"
type: "event"
hijri_year: 1448
session_count: 6
---

# Shahada (Witness) - Arbaeen 1448 (2026) Series

In His Name, the Most High

Across the ten nights of Muharram and the five of Arbaeen, The Shahada (Witness) Series asks a single question the world keeps getting wrong:

"What does it mean to bear witness?"

The Arabic shaheed means witness, not victim — and Karbala is not a defeat to be mourned but a testimony that has never stopped speaking.

Each night follows the same arc.

We open with verses of the Holy Qur'an, followed by poetic couplets that set the heart for what is to come.

Then the sermon, drawing the night's theology out of scripture, history, and the witnesses of every age.

Then the maqtal — the traditional narration of the events of Karbala and the deaths of the martyrs — here spoken in the voice of the Hidden Imam, looking back across time at those who gave their lives for the truth.

This is followed by a nohe, an elegy sung in lament and devotion for the household of the Prophet.

And we close with a poetic rendering of Ziyarat Arbaeen — the ancient salutation of peace upon Imam Husayn and his companions, and of disavowal of those who wronged them, recited by the faithful for over a thousand years.

From the first blood of Abel to the noon of Ashura, this is the story of how a death can become the most living thing on earth.

Where is your brother?  And at the end of the Arbaeen series, we can finally answer that question.  You can also find the answer in our Anthem/Trailer - "From Karbala the Road Runs On"

NOTE: This series is a continuation of the Ashura series which was 10 sessions, this is 5 sessions.  You can find the 10 Ashura sessions here - https://tp313.me/s/38DNui

## Sessions

### [Session 1 — [11] Shahada (Witness) - The Witness After the Witness and the Theology of the Survivor](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/11-shahada-witness-the-witness-after-the-witness-and-the-theology-of-the-survivo)

*30 July 2026*

At the very moment the empire thought it had finished, the testimony did not stop. It changed mouths.

Night 11 opens the road to Arbaeen — and it begins where Ashura ended, at the body. Because the martyr's work is finished at the sword. The survivor's work begins there.

In tonight's sermon — The Witness After the Witness — Shaykh Shabbir Hassanally turns from the one who died to the ones who were made to live: Sayyedah Zaynab and Imam Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-Abedeen, peace and blessings be upon them. She was not spared. She was left. And she refused the mercy of dying so that the dead could keep speaking.

What followed is one of the strangest reversals in history. Yazid's men bound the women and the sick young Imam in chains and paraded them from Karbala to Kufa to Damascus as a trophy column — proof of a rebellion crushed. They did not understand that they were escorting the prosecution into their own house. Every town the column passed through became a courtroom. Every crowd that gathered to gawp became a jury. The chains they bound her with became the pulpit she preached from.

In the governor's hall at Kufa, Ibn Ziyad asked her how she found what God had done with her family, and she answered with four words that have outlived his name and his city: I saw nothing but beauty. In the throne room at Damascus she stood before the most powerful man on earth, unveiled and unashamed, and told him: you have not killed them — you have promoted them. You have buried nothing. She raised no weapon. She raised his own genealogy, and it cut him to the floor of his own court. And when he tried to close it, the chained young man beside her asked for the pulpit — and took the city apart from it.

The most dangerous thing a tyranny can face is not an army. It is a captive who refuses to be ashamed.

From there the sermon turns to a question this series has been building toward: what rank was she given? Drawing on Shaykh al-Mufid, Allamah al-Hilli, Allamah Tabataba'i, Ayatollah Jawadi-Amoli and Shaheed Mutahhari, it opens the doctrine of ʿiṣmah — the protection from error — and makes the case that matters most for us: the Ma'sumin are not a different species of being, made of some other clay. They are the human being as God designed the human being to be, the perfected end of the very road every one of us is invited to walk. It is a grace, not a cage. A door earns no praise for staying shut when it has no power to open — and the door of acquired ʿiṣmah is open to all.

The sermon closes on a harder discipline: that the method is part of the witness. It sets out the Islamic prohibition of fatk and ghīlah — treacherous killing — from al-Kāfī and Nahj al-Balagha, and Mutahhari's rule that we do not use an unholy means for a holy goal. Assassination, it argues, is not the weapon of the strong; it is the confession of the defeated. How you win is part of what you win.

Then the maqtal, told — as this whole series has been told — in the voice of the Awaited One, Imam al-Mahdi, may God hasten his return. His voice broke at the trampling on Ashura. Tonight, at the sound of his aunt's words, it begins to find its feet again: the strength you hear returning to this voice — it is borrowed. I borrowed it from my aunt.

And the charge it leaves is the one this night exists to hand over. The regime could behead the witness. It could not behead the witness-after-the-witness. You are the witness after the witness now.

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand Sayyedah Zaynab and her sermons at Kufa and Damascus, Imam Zayn al-Abedeen's stand in the court of Yazid, the captivity of the Ahl al-Bayt after Karbala, the doctrine of ʿiṣmah, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:17 Introduction
01:29 Quranic Verses — Sūrah al-Ahzab, 33:35
02:48 Poetic Couplets — Night 11
03:59 Sermon — The Witness After the Witness
1:37:42 Maqtal — The Witness After the Witness
1:50:56 Closing Supplication
1:57:16 Nohe — Ya Zaynab
2:12:01 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
2:20:30 Closing

### [Session 2 — [12] Shahada (Witness) - The Prayer for the Frontiers and the Theology of Holding the Line](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/12-shahada-witness-the-prayer-for-the-frontiers-and-the-theology-of-holding-the-)

*31 July 2026*

The frontier is not a line on a map. It is the seam between the oppressor and the oppressed — and you are already standing at one.

Night 12 of the Shahada (Witness) series asks the most practical question in our religion: what is the witness available to an ordinary believer, in an ordinary life, in a city far from any battlefield?

The answer comes from a man who had every other weapon taken from him. Imam Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-Abedeen, peace and blessings be upon him, survived Karbala as a fever-stricken prisoner, was marched in an iron collar from the killing-field to Kufa to Damascus, and then lived thirty-four years under the eye of an empire that had already shown him what it would do. He never held a sword again. So he held the line with the one thing a tyranny cannot ban: he hid a curriculum inside a book of prayers.

In tonight's sermon — The Prayer for the Frontiers — Shaykh Shabbir Hassanally opens Supplication 27 of al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya, the fourth Imam's prayer for the guardians of the frontiers, and finds a theology of murābaṭa: the holding of a line, and the most available grade of witness there is.

The thaghr, in the classical lexicon, is a mouth — a breach in the wall. But the prayer's own hinge asks God that no forehead of theirs be rubbed in the dust for anything less than Him. The frontier is not there to defend territory. It exists to keep the sujūd safe — and so it is the witness that guards the place where witness happens.

From there the sermon widens. It examines how the Muslim world's map was made — the three contradictory promises of McMahon–Hussein, Sykes–Picot and Balfour, exposed by the Bolsheviks in 1917 — while carefully correcting the popular myth: they did not draw our borders with a ruler; they presumed to own us. And it refuses the easy binary at every turn. Empire was a system, not a people: the same century produced the starving Lancashire mill-workers who refused slave-picked cotton at the cost of their own livelihoods. The Qur'an's own rule holds — no soul bears the burden of another (6:164). The oppressor is istikbār, an arrogance; it wears every nationality, and it is answered by li-taʿārafū, that you may come to know one another (49:13). Pharaoh's method was to divide a people into factions and hold a portion of them weak (28:4). Divide-and-rule has a Qur'anic name, and it is his.

The most uncomfortable turn is aimed inward. Drawing on Imam Musa al-Kadhim's teaching that the scholars are fortresses whose death leaves an unfillable breach — and on Imam Khomeini, Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi and Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli on the "greatest veil" — the Shaykh warns that a wall with a rotten stone in it is more dangerous than no wall at all. The frontier is held by the one who trembles at the responsibility of it, and lost by the one who has learned to enjoy it.

And then the pastoral gift at the end of the prayer, which is why this night exists. Imam Zayn al-Abedeen asks God to give the guardian's own reward — weight for weight, like for like — to the one who supports him, to the one who merely guards his honour in his absence, to the one who only prayed for him, and even to the one who fully intended to go and was prevented: to write his name among the worshippers, and place him in the ranks of the martyrs and the righteous. Intention is the witness. The grade is God's to assign.

So name your frontier. It may be a workplace, a home, or the inside of your own heart. The truest witness is the one no one will ever livestream.

This night also carries a full English recitation of Dua Ahl ath-Thughur — the Supplication for the People of the Frontiers — in its own segment, because the supplication is the very heart of the evening. It is the only night of the fifteen that departs from our usual seven-part run.

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya, the life of Imam Zayn al-Abedeen after Karbala, the concept of murābaṭa and the frontier in Islamic thought, the Sykes–Picot agreement and the making of the modern Middle East, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:17 Introduction
01:19 Quranic Verses 
02:15 Poetic Couplets — Becoming a Zaynabi
03:43 Sermon — The Prayer for the Frontiers
1:32:40 Maqtal — The Prayer for the Frontiers
1:46:06 Closing Supplication
1:51:51 Nohe — Zayn al-Abedeen
2:00:39 Dua Ahl ath-Thughur — The Supplication for the People of the Frontiers
2:14:34 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
2:22:45 Closing

### [Session 3 — [13] Shahada (Witness) - The Grades of Witness and A Child in the Dungeon](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/13-shahada-witness-the-grades-of-witness-and-a-child-in-the-dungeon)

*1 August 2026*

Most of us have quietly assumed that the witness — the shahīd — is the one who falls on a battlefield. Tonight takes that assumption apart, gently and completely.

Night 13 of the Shahada (Witness) series asks a question that changes how you read your own life: if the witness is the one who testifies to God with their life, and every believer is called to it, then how many roads run to that station? The takeaway is stated plainly and never softened: you do not have to die to be a witness — but you must be willing to.

In tonight's sermon — The Grades of Witness — Shaykh Shabbir Hassanally opens the map the jurists and the Imams actually drew. The word shahīd itself, al-Māzandarānī notes in his commentary on al-Kāfī, began by meaning the one slain on the field — and then widened to mean everyone killed unjustly, until it reached a woman of the House, Sayyedah Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ, named in our most rigorous hadith as a ṣiddīqa shahīda. The fiqh keeps two doors: the battlefield martyr, buried unwashed in the blood that is his purity — Imam Husayn and his companions its highest rank — and the martyr of the Hereafter, given the full funeral rites and the full martyr's reward: the one who dies defending family or faith, the mother who dies in childbirth, the stranger far from home, the one killed unjustly, the one who dies loving the Family of Muhammad. It is a wide gate. And the grade, the sermon insists, is God's to assign — never the chronicle's to award.

Then the heart of the night: three faces of the witness.

The one who chose — the scholar-martyrs, for whom the classroom was a frontier as real as any field. Imam al-Sadiq called the scholars of his Shīʿa the guardians stationed at the frontier facing Iblīs; the sermon names those who held that post to the last — Shaheed Murtadha Motahhari, Ayatollah Muhammad Mofatteh, Ayatollah Beheshti and the seventy-two of Haft-e Tir, Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda, Ayatollah Sayyid Hassan al-Shirazi. None was conscripted to the desk. Each chose it, knowing what it could cost. Their witness is their willingness.

The one who could not choose — the innocent killed in aggression. Here the sermon refuses to dodge the hardest question of our moment: the child in the bombed school did not willingly go to die, so is that child merely a victim taken in vain? The answer is in our own house. Ali al-Asghar was six months old; he could not choose; and he is a martyr of Karbala of the highest rank. If the infant of Karbala is a witness without choosing, so is the infant of Minab and of Gaza. The empire has a word for these dead — "collateral damage" — and the sermon names it for the counterfeit it is: Islam has no such laundering category. The wronged child is maẓlūm, crowned by God; and al-maqtūl ẓulman — the one killed unjustly — was written onto the martyr-roll by jurists centuries before the bombs were built.

The one who simply lived faithfully — the most available grade of all. The labourer who feeds his family only by the lawful, when the unlawful was easier, is "like the warrior in the path of God." His death is not the testimony; his life is. But — and the sermon is careful here — with its conditions: a wage earned servicing a killing regime carries no such grade, and "if I don't, someone else will" washes no hand clean, any more than it did for the looters who raced one another to the tents of the Household.

Three doors, one house. They resolve into a single truth: witness is what your life testifies to — not only how you die. And a clarification this series has been building toward: when we say a witness is no victim, we do not mean the witness is never wronged. The witness almost always is wronged — maẓlūm — but never maghlūb, never overcome. Husayn was the most wronged man on that field, and its victor. The victim's death is a full stop; the witness's death is a sentence God is still speaking.

Then the maqtal, in the voice of the Awaited One — A Child in the Dungeon — and the proof of the whole thesis: Sayyedah Ruqayyah, the smallest witness, in the ruins of Sham. Told with the family's own honesty (the record could barely hold her name or her age, and some of the telling grew in the centuries of love that followed) and its unbreakable certainty (God kept her where the chronicle nearly lost her). The witness is not measured by the loudness of the record.

You do not have to die to be a witness. But you must be willing to.

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the grades and types of martyrdom in Shia Islam, the fiqh of the shahīd and the martyr of the Hereafter, the scholar-martyrs of the Islamic Revolution, the theology of the innocent killed in aggression, Sayyedah Ruqayyah in the prison of Sham, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:17 Introduction
01:29 Quranic Verses — Sūrah al-Baqarah, 2:143
02:34 Poetic Couplets — The Wide Gate
05:43 Sermon — The Grades of Witness
1:44:01 Maqtal — A Child in the Dungeon
1:59:57 Closing Supplication
2:04:51 Nohe — Abaya of Tears
2:20:07 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
2:28:19 Closing

### [Session 4 — [14] Shahada (Witness) - The Living Witness and He Walked Toward Husayn](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/14-shahada-witness-the-living-witness-and-he-walked-toward-husayn)

*2 August 2026*

For thirteen nights this series has traced a chain of witness running from the first blood ever shed to a child in a dungeon. Tonight it asks the question waiting on the other side of all of it: is the chain past? Or is it still being forged, in our own lifetime, with names we have said aloud and faces we have watched on the glass of our phones?

Night 14 — The Living Witness — is the heaviest night of the Shahada (Witness) series, and the one where its whole contemporary argument lands. Its thesis is blunt: martyrdom is not history. It is happening now. And to see the witnesses of our own age for what they are, Shaykh Shabbir Hassanally argues, is the test of whether we understood any of the previous thirteen nights.

It opens with the Sacred Defence — the Difāʿ-e Muqaddas, the eight-year war Iran did not start — and with Imam Khomeini's reclamation of the frontier as ʿibāda, worship: the murābaṭa of Night 12 made national, and made flesh in a generation of volunteers. Their waṣiyya-nāmehs — the final wills they left for their mothers, published now in their thousands — read like the layperson's Sahifa, extensions of Imam Zayn al-Abedeen's Prayer for the Frontiers. And the sermon is honest about what came after: the witness was institutionalised, with real strengths and the real risk this series has named since Night 8 — that a witness can curdle into an aesthetic, a slogan, a career. It names both. It is not selling anything.

From there, the chain of our own lifetime — the Axis of Resistance across Lebanon, Iraq and Iran; the scientists killed by stealth (what is the excuse for assassinating a cancer researcher or a professor of physics, except to keep a people subordinate by killing knowledge itself?); and the genocide of 2023–2026, the children of Gaza as a generation of witnesses broadcast into our hands — and the question no community in the West can honestly avoid: what does watching that require of us for the rest of our lives?

At the centre of the night is its most misunderstood sentence, given a clean name and a clean theology: "Down With the Throne" — Marg bar Amrika, Marg bar Esra'il. The sermon does with it exactly what this series did with laʿan. It names the literal word — marg bar, "death to" — and refuses to hide it; then it clarifies the meaning. Islam's fight was always against injustice, never against belief — "there is no compulsion in religion," because forced faith is a contradiction in terms. So marg bar is not a wish on any body. It is "down with the king," the French "à bas," the Arabic yasquṭ — the repudiation of a throne, of the system of istikbār, arrogance. It is the Qur'an's barāʾa, the disavowal of oppression, spoken aloud in the street — and it is for the peoples, not against them: for the American mother who lost her son to a war built on a lie, the Jewish family whose conscience refuses what is done in their name, the Israeli child raised on fear, the teacher whose schools are starved while the bombs are shipped. The regime is the disease; the named ruler is only a symptom. We say "down with the throne" — never "down with a man," and never "down with a people."

And because you cannot be against a thing until you have shown plainly what it is, the sermon works the evidence like a fair arbiter, not a mob — the way one judges a marriage, hearing every side and silencing the whispering lobby: Iran's oil, Mossadegh, and the 1953 coup; the compromise networks by which power is captured and kept; European complicity and the policing of those who protest; and the oldest excuse of all — "if I don't, someone else will" — answered, as it was on the night after Ashura, by the looters who raced one another to the tents. A sin done because another stood ready is still, wholly, yours.

It closes on two lessons. That Imam Khamenei's last words restated Husayn's first refusal — one like me does not give his hand to one like Yazid — and that the refusal is first a refusal in the heart, against the false lords of our own age: state, market, career, the crowd. And that it always returns to God: a resistance without tawḥīd collapses into nationalism, a tawḥīd without resistance collapses into quietism, and our witnesses, from Husayn to Khamenei, refused both.

Then the maqtal, in the voice of the Awaited One — He Walked Toward Husayn. On the first fortieth day, a blind old companion of the Prophet, Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari, led by Atiyya, became the first pilgrim ever to reach the grave. He had not been at Karbala. He did the one thing left to a witness who survives: he walked. The chain did not close. You are its next link.

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the Sacred Defence and the Iran–Iraq war, the Axis of Resistance, the true meaning of Marg bar Amrika — "down with" versus "death to" — the mustakbirīn-versus-mustaḍʿafīn axis of the Qur'an, the 1953 coup against Mossadegh, the first pilgrimage of Jabir al-Ansari on Arbaeen, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:17 Introduction
01:13 Quranic Verses 
02:18 Poetic Couplets — The Chain Is Not Broken
05:02 Sermon — The Living Witness
1:57:18 Maqtal — He Walked Toward Husayn
2:12:44 Closing Supplication
2:18:23 Nohe — Hear the Chains
2:26:31 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
2:34:41 Closing

### [Session 5 — [15] Shahada (Witness) - The Covenant of Arbaeen and Until the Imam Rises](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/15-shahada-witness-the-covenant-of-arbaeen-and-until-the-imam-rises)

*3 August 2026*

For fourteen nights this series has traced a single chain of witness — from the first blood ever shed on earth to the children of our own age. Tonight the road comes home. And it comes home the way this community brings every Arbaeen home: not by adding one more weight, but by renewing a covenant.

Night 15 — The Covenant of Arbaeen — is the final night of the Shahada (Witness) series, and its warmest. It is the eve of the twentieth of Safar: at this very dawn the fortieth day breaks and the longest road in the world reaches a single grave. So tonight is not a night of new argument. It is a homecoming. Its thesis is gentle and total: the chain of witness is not only history. It is ritual, it is daily, and it is alive in you.

In the final sermon, Shaykh Shabbir Hassanally begins before Karbala, before you, at the oldest covenant of all — al-A'raf 7:172, when God gathered the children of Adam and asked, "Am I not your Lord?" and every soul answered, "Yea — we bear witness." The first thing every human being ever did was bear witness. So the series has not been teaching us a new thing; it has been reminding us of the oldest thing we already are. And that covenant is not left in pre-eternity: Du'a al-'Ahd, the Supplication of the Covenant, is the believer renewing it every single dawn — "O God, on the morning of this day, and for as long as I live, I renew for him the covenant, the pledge, and the allegiance upon my neck."

From there the sermon keeps two texts clean that are often blurred — the daily Du'a al-'Ahd and the fortieth-day Ziyarat Arbaeen — and grounds the whole night not on any contested chronology but on the Imam's own word: Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace and blessings be upon him, named the visitation of Arbaeen among the five signs of a believer. But a list of five marks can look arbitrary from the outside, so the sermon opens each one and shows the wisdom inside it — that these are not empty rituals, but the portrait of a single life turned wholly toward God: love beyond duty, a loyalty that will not forget, devotion in the smallest thing, the ego brought to the ground, and God named openly as the first word of everything.

Then it stands up and walks. The Arbaeen pilgrimage — the largest annual gathering of human beings anywhere on earth, tens of millions on foot from Najaf to Karbala on these very days, and millions more walking in spirit from London to Dearborn to Sydney — is the covenant made visible: the frontier of Night 12 and the grades of witness of Night 13 no longer abstractions, but a whole ummah living them with its feet. And behind the walk, the quiet miracle of how we even have these words: an unbroken chain of scribes who carried them across the centuries and the empires — reaching back through al-Tusi, who lost his library to the sack of Baghdad, carried what he could to Najaf, and founded the hawza there. They burned his books; he built the school that made the road.

The sermon gathers the five practices the whole series has pointed to into one breathing rhythm — the daily covenant at dawn, the refusal of every false lord five times a day in the prayer, the Thursday plea for one undivided devotion, the Friday lament of longing, and the Arbaeen visitation once a year — and crowns them with al-An'am 6:162: "Say: my prayer, my rites, my living and my dying are for God, Lord of the worlds." A whole life turned into a single act of witness.

And then it turns outward, to close: we love all, and disavow only arrogance — the door stays open, questions welcome, no compulsion, ever — and we must rise. "Where is your brother?" — the question this series has carried for fifteen nights — is answered tonight, reflexively, with the feet: you have walked to him.

Then the final maqtal, in the voice of the Awaited One, now wholly come home — Until the Imam Rises — the caravan's reunion at the grave on the fortieth day, carried not as a lament but as a living liturgy: every Arbaeen a continuation of that reunion, this one too. The single candle that stood on the grey stone for fifteen nights kindles others, until many are burning as one. The candle was never the point. We are the candles now.

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the meaning of Arbaeen and the fortieth day, Ziyarat Arbaeen and Du'a al-'Ahd, the primordial covenant of al-A'raf 7:172, the five signs of a believer, the theology behind the largest peaceful gathering on earth, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:17 Introduction
01:29 Quranic Verses 
02:29 Poetic Couplets — Bear the Witness
04:45 Sermon — The Covenant of Arbaeen
1:14:51 Maqtal — Until the Imam Rises
1:28:27 Closing Supplication
1:33:29 Nohe — We Will Rise
1:43:05 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
1:51:32 Closing

### [Session 6 — Arbaeen Day 1448/2026 - Special Program](https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/arbaeen-day-14482026-special-program)

*4 August 2026*

The sword won the tenth of Muharram. The blood won the fortieth of Safar.

This is the Day of Arbaeen — the complete forenoon programme for the twentieth of Safar 1448, and the close of the Shahada (Witness) series.

Forty days ago we left Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, on the burning plain of Karbala — killed, unburied, and alone. This morning we come back to the grave, at the hour Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, appointed for the visitation of the fortieth: when the day has risen high. This is the hour the blind old companion Jabir ibn Abdillah al-Ansari reached that grave, led across the desert by Atiyya — the first pilgrim on a road that fourteen centuries of feet have walked since.

At the heart of the programme is the Arbaeen maqtal — The Victory of Blood, the Legacy of Witness — the long road of the captives from Karbala to Kufa to Damascus and home again, and the testimony they bore along every mile of it. It is told, as this whole series has been told, in the voice of the Awaited One, Imam al-Mahdi, may God hasten his return. On Ashura that voice broke. Today, at the grave, it speaks whole.

There are grades to the witness. There is the witness sealed in blood — Husayn and the seventy-two, who testified with their bodies at noon. And there is the witness carried in word, in chains, in survival — Sayyedah Zaynab, the ailing Imam Ali Zayn al-Abedeen, and the little ones of the House, who testified in the tyrant's own hall and refused to be silenced or to disappear. The first witness is the more glorious. The second is the one that carried the first out of the desert and into every century since. A witness sealed in blood and never spoken of again, the empire could have buried. It was the witness in word that the empire could not kill — and that is why the blood was victorious over the sword.

The programme closes with Ziyarat Arbaeen, the salutation Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq taught his companion Safwan ibn Mihran al-Jammal — recited here on the very day and at the very hour it was given for, in a full poetic English rendering made so that every word can be understood. It does not end the way Ziyarat Ashura ends. It does not close in grief. It closes in a pledge: our help is made ready for you, until God gives you His leave — so, with you, with you, and never with your enemy.

Then the two rak'ah of the visitation, the supplication that follows it, and the question this series has carried from the very first field to this grave, and now leaves with each of us for the rest of our lives: Where is your brother?

Essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand Arbaeen and the largest annual gathering on earth, the captivity of the Ahl al-Bayt, the sermons of Sayyedah Zaynab in the courts of Kufa and Damascus, the meaning of Ziyarat Arbaeen, and the theology of shahada — witness — that Karbala made permanent.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome
00:15 Introduction — The Meaning of the Fortieth Day
02:50 Adhaan
07:23 A View from Karbala and Damascus
10:43 Quranic Verses
12:29 Maqtal of Arbaeen — The Victory of Blood, the Legacy of Witness
35:23 Introduction to the Nohe
35:58 Nohe 1 — Hear the Chains
43:54 Nohe 2 — We Will Rise
53:34 Ziyarat Arbaeen — A Poetic English Rendering
1:02:33 The Two Rak'ah of the Visitation
1:09:55 Supplication After the Prayer
1:13:46 Closing

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_Read this event on the web: https://www.truthpromoters.com/events/shahada-witness-arbaeen-1448-2026-series_