(2) Here...

(2) Here, Husain is praised, again in the mystical vocabulary, as the Imam of the lovers, the son of the virgin, the cypresso of freedom in the Prophet’s garden. While his father, Hazrat ‘Ali, was, in mystical interpretation, the b of the bismi’llah , the son became identified with the ‘mighty slaughtering’, a beautiful mixture of the mystical and Qur’anic interpretations.

But Iqbal, like his predecessors, would also allude to the fact that Husain, the prince of the best nation, used the back of the last Prophet as his riding camel, and most beautiful is Iqbal’s description of the jealous love that became honoured through his blood, which, through its imagery, again goes back to the account of the martyrdom of Husain b.

Mansur al-Hallaj, who rubbed the bleeding stumps of his hands over his blackened face in order to remain surkh ru , red-faced and honoured, in spite of his suffering. For Iqbal, the position of Husain in the Muslim community is as central as the position of the Surat al-Ikhlas in the Holy Book. Then he turns to his favorite topic, the constant tension between the positive and negative forces, between the prophet and saint on the one hand, and the oppressor and unbeliever on the other.

Husain and Yazid stand in the same line as Moses and Pharaoh. Iqbal then goes on to show how the khilafat was separated from the Qur’anic injunctions and became a worldly kingdom with the appearance of the Umayyads, and it was here that Husain appeared like a raincloud, again the image of the blessing rain which always contrasts so impressively with the thirst and dryness of the actual scene of Karbala’. It was Husain’s blood that rained upon the desert of Karbala’ and left the red tulips there.

The connection between the tulips in their red garments and the bloodstained garments of the martyrs has been a favorite image of Persian poetry since at least the 15th century, and when one thinks of the central place which the tulip occupies in Iqbal’s thought and poetry as the flower of the manifestation of the divine fire, as the symbol of the Burning Bush on Mount Sinai, and as the flower that symbolizes the independent growth of man’s khudi (=self) under the most difficult circumstances, when one takes all these aspects of the tulip together, one understands why the poet has the Imam Husain ‘plant tulips in the desert of Karbala”.