Pass the Salaam: The Imam’s Lament from Captivity

Imam Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Husayn Zayn al-‘Abidin, when he was harassed by the Umayyad tyrants, lamented:

“O Winds!  If someday you pass by the sacred land, then pass my salaam

Before the Rawdhah al-Aqdas where the most exalted Nabi rests.

The sadness of separation from Madina feels,

Like a sword stuck deep into my liver.

How fortunate are the people of that city in,

Which is the Exalted and Beloved Prophet.

O Rahmatan li al-‘Aalamin!  Assist Zayn al-‘Abidin,

Who is standing alone and in difficulty amongst the tyrants.”

Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin survived Karbala in 680 CE only because illness had left him too weak to fight alongside his father, Sayyidina Husayn ibn ‘Ali.  He watched, from a sickbed, as the men of his own household were killed around him.  He was then taken captive, marched in chains alongside the surviving women of the Ahl al-Bayt across the desert to Damascus, and paraded before Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah’s own court, the same court responsible for the massacre he had just survived.

Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin was eventually permitted to return to Madina, but he lived out the remainder of his life under close Umayyad surveillance, his movements watched, his household never entirely free of the regime that had annihilated most of his family.  He responded to that captivity not with armed rebellion, which his own weakened circumstances after Karbala’ made practical only in theory, but by producing asw-Swahifah as-Sajjadiyyah, a collection of supplications so theologically rich it has been called the Psalms of the Household of Muhammad by later scholars, still studied and recited today across both Sunni and Shi’ah devotional traditions.  A man denied the freedom to even mourn openly channelled that grief into a body of prayer literature that outlived the dynasty holding him captive by well over a millennium.

Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin was the last man of his immediate line left to carry the household’s continuity, surrounded by the regime responsible for eliminating everyone who might otherwise have stood with him.  Loneliness of that specific kind rarely produces poetry this restrained.  Most men in his position would have written of rage.  He wrote of longing for a city and a grave, and asked only for the Prophet’s own mercy to reach him where he stood.