Imam Husayn (a.

Imam Husayn (a.s.) could not, at any cost, accept an enemy of Islam as a ruler over Muslims. Moulvi al-Haj Ghulam Abbas Ali gives the reason for Imam Husayn (a.s.) in leaving Medina:“ In fact, the Umayyads fostered an inborn animosity to the Prophet (S) and his family. Their main object was to destroy even the last surviving soul among the Ahlul Bayt and their adherents.

Husayn (a.s.) had noted that his brother’s retirement to private life could not improve the Islamic world and set it thinking to distinguish the right from the wrong. Even his murder in secret was coolly heard by the Arabs and could not bring on a revolution. Husayn (a.s.) was sure that he would have to share the same fate as that of his elder brother and that the Umayyad’s animosity would pursue and kill him wherever he would go.

However, he desired that his valuable blood should not be so easily shed and the whole matter hushed up without a proper consequence. He was prepared to suffer martyrdom publicly and reap its fruit for religion.

He wanted to show the public how brutal and irreligious the Umayyads were and how the shedding of human blood, even that of the children of the Prophet (S), was a crime calculated as nothing… Above all, he wanted to set a lesson for upholding the right under the most adverse circumstances, in order to please God and thus tread the most difficult path of love and annihilate his separate existence in the All Pervading Existence, unmindful of the severe persecution at the hands of the devilish folk.

His means to this end was not aggression, but passive resistance in order that he might not be blamed for any oppressive act on his part .”[^2] Islam deprecates suicide. The protection of one’s life and the prevention from exposing one’s self to imminent danger is an obligatory part of a Muslim’s faith.

Mirza Ghulam Abbas Ali further notes, “ For fear of being criticized by the public that when he was sure of his murder at Medina, he ought to have taken shelter at Mecca and to be free before God from the blame that he had brought the trouble and ruin on himself, Husayn (S) thought it wise to settle within the precincts of the Kaaba.

”[^3] On the night preceding his departure, Imam Husayn (a.s.) visited the tombs of his grandfather the Prophet (S), his mother Fatima (S) and brother Imam Hasan (a.s.).