The Seventh Night

Feb 05, 2006 23:29

Both the English and Urdu speakers bored me tonight. The English speaker is just a bundle of statistics with popping-eyes, while the Urdu speaker can speak of nothing else but the Imam 'Ali.

Tonight was the night of Qasim. Thirteen-year-old Qasim, son of the Imam Hasan - the Imam Husayn's deceased brother.
When Qasim saw that the people in the Imam's army were readily giving their lives up to protect the Imam, he too went up to the Imam and asked for permission to fight the enemy. The Imam refused to let him fight, saying that Qasim looked just like his brother and he couldn't let his brother's children fight.
Qasim, feeling rejected and disheartened, went to his mother, Ummé Farwah, with a sad air about him. When he told his mother what had happened, she handed him a pendant which had a tiny, tiny letter which had been penned by the Imam Hasan on his deathbed. The Imam Hasan had written a command to Qasim to help the Imam Husayn when he was in dire need of whatever help was available.
Happy now, he ran to his uncle and showed him the letter. The Imam Husayn then allowed him to go fight.
When he first began to fight, it is said that the Yazeedi army was mesmerized by the beauty of this youth. Sources say that some soldiers were in awe of this child with "a face like the moon". They could not bring themselves to hurt, to destroy such beauty.
As the child began moving through the ranks of the Yazeedi forces, the enemy soldiers saw that Qasim was killing with ease. They ambushed him and surrounded him and then showered spears and arrows at him. Falling from the horse, he called for the Imam Husayn saying "Uncle, come for me!"
As the Imam rushed towards his dying nephew, the enemy decided to do a horrid thing: the horses from the right moved to the left and the horses from the left moved to the right, trampling the poor boy's young body underneath their hooves.
This death was different from others. The Imam, on all occasions, brought back whole bodies with him. But Qasim's body was in pieces. Thus he gathered the pieces in a sheet and went back to his tents. As he approached the tents, Qasim's mother came out of the tent expecting to see her son's dead body. All she saw was the blood-stained sheet in the Imam's hand, and under the sheet, her once-lovely son's remains.

karbala, imam husayn, majlis

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