WILAYAH NEWS VOICE OF THE GLOBAL AWAKENING
Related Articles
Abd al-Sattar al-Jabiri
The Effects of Imam Husayn’s Revolution (peace be upon him)
Fourth: Reviving the Ummah Politically
After the passing of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), the Ummah was subjected to political marginalization: the will of the people was suppressed, voices were stifled, freedoms were confiscated, and the sword replaced wisdom and gentle exhortation as the arbiter of affairs. This was manifested clearly in the forcible expulsion of those who objected to the outcome of the Saqifah from their homes to compel their allegiance; in the storming of the house of ʿAli and Fatimah (peace be upon them); in dragging ʿAli (peace be upon him) from his home by the straps of his sword and threatening him with death should he refuse to pledge allegiance; and in the tragic events inflicted upon a household that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) would never enter without permission.
These events did not stop at Madinah, the political center of the state, but extended across the Arabian Peninsula. The tribes of Banu Yarbuʿ and Banu Hanifah were liquidated: men were killed, wealth was confiscated, free women were taken captive and counted as spoils of war, and what God had forbidden regarding them was unlawfully violated in injustice and aggression.
The fate of thought and intellect suffered no less confiscation and distortion than political freedom. For the political survival of the Qurayshi faction required banning the recording of the Prophet’s hadith (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), restricting its dissemination, and confining religious instruction to bare juridical necessities—such as rulings on prayer, other acts of worship, and transactions—presented as legal opinions without reference to the Prophet. Matters then went further, culminating in the establishment of dynastic rule. This pushed yesterday’s companions into conflict among themselves once all the resources of the state—stretching from Egypt in the west to Persia in the east, and from Armenia and Azerbaijan in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south—were funneled into the pockets of the Umayyads.
The Ummah rose up to defend its livelihood, which had been used as a weapon against it; to protect its gains won by its own swords; and to safeguard its social order, now in peril. The Ummah spoke its word, changed the administration of power and the law devised by Quraysh to rotate authority within their own clans, and expressed its will by electing the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (peace be upon him), as a just ruler and an Imam who would lead the Ummah upon the truth.
Quraysh and the Umayyad family together then returned to circumvent the will of the Ummah—just as they had previously circumvented the will of Heaven. They waged against the Ummah and its Imam the Battles of the Camel and Siffin, which in turn gave rise to the emergence of the ignorant among the Ummah as a new political force, leading them to fight the state of truth in the Battle of Nahrawan. Not long afterward, the Commander of the Faithful (peace be upon him) was assassinated in his prayer niche. The Ummah then, with conviction, pledged allegiance to Imam Hasan (peace be upon him) as caliph and ruler.
However, the internal collapse of the Ummah, the long-standing effects of political marginalization since the year 11 AH, the Ummah’s inability to grasp political realities and what was being done to it, its abandonment of ʿAli and then of Hasan (peace be upon them), and the rallying of the people of Syria around Muʿawiyah—all of this enabled Muʿawiyah to extort the Ummah’s authority and seize the reins of power, thereafter establishing hereditary rule in the lands of the Muslims.
From this overview, the immense importance of Imam Husayn’s revolution (peace be upon him) and its role in reviving the Ummah politically becomes clear. Imam Husayn (peace be upon him) was not merely a rebel against the tyranny of a ruler; he was a revolutionary against a political course drawn by the Umayyads to control the Ummah’s destiny. The Umayyads had no acceptance among the Ansar, and the Qur’an warned against them when God showed His Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) a vision informing him of what the leadership of the Ummah would come to after him. They proposed to Quraysh the rotation of the caliphate within their own clans and the exclusion of Banu Hashim from it—an idea that found wide acceptance among the Qurayshites.
When ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan, an Umayyad, assumed power, he worked to place all the levers of the state under Umayyad control. They committed injustice and oppression, provoking resentment from both Quraysh and the general populace. Quraysh resented that the very authority for which ʿAli (peace be upon him) had been excluded now became exclusive to the Umayyads; the populace suffered the humiliation and injustice imposed by ʿUthman’s governors. When Muʿawiyah took power, he turned it into a monarchical, hereditary rule.
The greatest enemy of the Umayyad future was the authentic Sunnah and ʿAli and his household (peace be upon them). Thus, in addition to banning the recording of the Sunnah and the narration of the Prophet’s hadith (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), Muʿawiyah paid money for the fabrication of false hadiths and institutionalized the public cursing of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib (peace be upon him), daily from mosque pulpits. In this way, religion was distorted, the Sunnah was corrupted, and the Ummah’s political right was confiscated.
The Umayyad project faced three opposing forces: Ibn al-Zubayr, the Kharijites, and Imam Husayn (peace be upon him). As for Ibn al-Zubayr, he was a seeker of power; had authority come to him, he would have been no better than the Umayyads. The Kharijites, by the very origin of their emergence, suffered from a flawed understanding of religion and did not truly carry the concern for the Ummah’s welfare and salvation. Imam Husayn (peace be upon him), however, was the scion of Prophethood, the fifth among those encompassed by the Verse of Purification, the Verse of Mutual Imprecation, and Surah al-Insan. He is from the Household about whom the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) declared—through the widely transmitted Hadith of the Two Weighty Things—that they are the counterpart of the Book of God, that they will never lead the Ummah out of guidance nor plunge it into misguidance. At the outset of his movement, he declared (peace be upon him) that he did not rise out of insolence, arrogance, corruption, or rivalry for power, but sought reform in the Ummah of his grandfather (peace and blessings be upon him and his family).
Today, fifteen centuries after the martyrdom of Imam Husayn (peace be upon him), we live the effects of his blessed revolution and its role in reviving the Ummah politically. The Ummah has transformed from a mere populace ruled by depraved rabble into a community that speaks its word before tyrants, striving and fighting to exalt the Word of God. Day by day, the clouds of the Umayyad project recede from the Ummah, replaced by the light of the revolution of the Master of Martyrs (peace be upon him). The struggle between the two paths is enduring: the path of marginalizing the Ummah and confiscating its rights, practiced by various unjust authorities; and the path of establishing truth and justice and returning to the Book of God and the Sunnah of His Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), for which Imam Husayn (peace be upon him) rose. In every era and land, the Ummah witnesses this kind of struggle, and the fragrance of Imam Husayn’s revolution (peace be upon him) is manifest in all who seek reform in the Ummah of his grandfather.
