The suffered at the Umayyad and the ‘Abbaside hands from all...

The suffered at the Umayyad and the ‘Abbaside hands from all types of harm and annihilation, so they preferred isolation to taking to arms and fighting the promoters of falsehood despite their seeing them going to extremes in their oppression and in being unfair to the followers of the Commander of the Faithful and to his offspring (‘a), pursuing them under every rock and in every city so that they would remove the ‘Alawides from the face of earth.

They saw how al-Mansur and al-Rashid placed the offspring of Fatima, peace be upon her, inside building columns in order to suffer a slow death, all out of injustice and oppression.[^1] Yet all of this did not distract them from urging the upholding of the supreme struggle by admonishing their Shi’as to hold majalis [^2] to commemorate the Taff incident.

Disgust persisted on account of the calamities and catastrophes, and floods of tears were shed because of the abundance of their painful tragedies. They went to extremes in explaining the merits of doing so because they were convinced that that was the strong factor for maintaining the religious link for which the Commander of the Faithful (‘a) suffered what he suffered, and so did his son al-Hasan (‘a) as well as al-Husayn (‘a), tragedies which shook the firm mountains.

The (‘a) used to explore various avenues to explain the spiritual importance of remembering al-Husayn (‘a) because of the perfect link between such remembering and the safeguarding of the creed from extinction. They expressed it once in general terms and once in specific references.

Imam al-Baqir (‘a), for example, has said, “ May Allah have mercy on one who meets with another to discuss our cause, for the third of them will be an angel seeking forgiveness for them; so, keep such memory alive, for your meetings and discussions keep our cause alive, and the best of people after us are those who discuss our cause and invite others to remember us .” Imam as-Sadiq (‘a) once asked al-Mufaddal Ibn Yasar, “ Do you meet and discuss?

” He answered the Imam (‘a) in the affirmative, whereupon the Imam (‘a) said, “ I surely love such majalis; so, keep our memory alive; whoever sits at a majlis in our memory, his heart will not die when hearts die.