The Witness and the Spectator: What 'Ashhadu' Asks of Us
On Ashura the Imam gave his blood; on Arbaeen the Ummah is called to testify — a reflection on the repeated 'I bear witness' at the heart of Ziyarat Arbaeen
Arbaeen is usually approached through the merit of visitation, the story of its first pilgrim, and the sheer scale of the walk. Yet within the text of Ziyarat Arbaeen lies something easily passed over: the insistent repetition of a single word — Ashhadu, “I bear witness.”
The pilgrim standing before Imam Husayn (peace be upon him) does not simply offer greetings, nor merely voice grief. Again and again he testifies: “I bear witness that you are the trustee of Allah and the son of His trustee”; “and I bear witness that Allah will fulfil what He promised you”; “and I bear witness that you fulfilled the covenant of Allah.” At last he calls upon Allah Himself to witness that he is a friend to whoever befriends Husayn and an enemy to whoever opposes him.
Why so much testimony? Had the truth of Ashura not already been made plain by the blood of the Imam and his companions?
The answer lies in the distance between a truth occurring and a truth enduring. Ashura revealed the truth; Arbaeen asks the Ummah not to let that truth be buried, distorted, or drained of effect. The Imam became a martyr on Ashura. Now the Ummah must become a witness.
By the “jurisprudence of testimony” I do not mean the technical chapter on legal witnesses, but the body of intellectual, moral, and social responsibilities that fall upon a people who have come to know the truth and no longer have the right to remain indifferent while it is distorted.
The martyrdom was not the end of the duty
No truth survives merely because it once happened. Events can be denied; victorious powers routinely rewrite their moral defeats as political triumphs. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn therefore required witnesses — people who would say plainly who was killed, why, and by which power.
The Qur’an does not treat the concealment of testimony as harmless silence: “Do not conceal testimony; whoever conceals it, his heart is sinful” (al-Baqarah 2:283). One who knows the truth and withholds it at the moment it is needed has not merely failed to attain a virtue — he has helped falsehood endure.
If Ashura was the summit of the Imam’s fulfilment of duty, Arbaeen marks the opening of a new stage in the duty of the Ummah. The Imam’s blood brought the truth out from beneath the rubble of distortion; the testimony of the Ummah must keep it in the memory of history.
The battle that began when the fighting stopped
The army of Umar ibn Sa’d considered the military engagement concluded by the afternoon of Ashura. The conduct of the Umayyad state suggests otherwise: it understood that battlefield victory was worthless without victory over the narrative. Accordingly, it laboured to present Imam Husayn not as the grandson of the Prophet and a reformer of the Ummah, but as a rebel against the ruler of the Muslims.
Ubaydullah ibn Ziyad exemplified this. Receiving the captives in Kufa, he cast himself as the representative of truth and — God forbid — called the Imam “a liar and the son of a liar.” Lady Zaynab (peace be upon her) broke the framing in a sentence: “It is the corrupt person who is disgraced, and the wicked person who lies — and he is other than us.”
Ibn Ziyad also worked to attribute the killing to the direct will of God, thereby lifting the crime from his own shoulders. Seeing Imam al-Sajjad (peace be upon him) among the captives, he demanded: “Did God not kill Ali ibn al-Husayn in Karbala?” The Imam answered: “I had a brother named Ali whom the people killed.” When Ibn Ziyad insisted, “Rather, God killed him,” the Imam recited: “Allah takes the souls at the time of their death” (al-Zumar 39:42) — establishing that while the taking of the soul belongs to God, murder is the deliberate act of guilty men.
In that brief exchange another instrument of distortion was exposed: the concealment of human responsibility behind the language of divine decree. The caravan of captives refused to let the regime dress its political crime as destiny. These exchanges are recorded by Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Tabari, and others.
The captives who became the first witnesses
From Karbala to Kufa and on to Damascus, the Ahl al-Bayt (peace be upon them) appeared outwardly as prisoners. In reality they became the first official witnesses of Ashura, carrying into public view precisely what the regime wished buried: the Imam’s relationship to the Prophet, the purpose of his uprising, the treachery of the Kufans, the character of Yazid’s rule, and the wrong done to the martyrs.
In the court at Damascus, when Yazid struck the blessed teeth of the Imam with a cane and recited verses avenging his pagan forefathers slain at Badr, Lady Zaynab rose and delivered a sermon like a storm: “O Yazid, do you imagine that because you have closed the horizons of the earth upon us… this is a sign of our humiliation before Allah and your honour in His sight?” Then she announced the outcome of the struggle in advance: “Plot whatever plot you can… By Allah, you will never erase our remembrance.”
Imam al-Sajjad, in the mosque of Damascus, introduced himself again and again: “I am the son of Mecca and Mina; I am the son of Zamzam and Safa… I am the son of Muhammad al-Mustafa; I am the son of Fatimah al-Zahra…” — making plain to a population fed on Umayyad propaganda that these captives were not strangers to Islam but the children of its founder.
The second stage of the Husayni movement, then, was not continued by the sword but by testimony. Sermon, tears, narration, and visitation became the instruments of a new struggle. On Ashura bodies were besieged; after Ashura, meaning was besieged. Had the Ahl al-Bayt not broken that siege, Karbala might today be recorded not as a divine and reformist movement but as a failed internal rebellion.
From event to memory
Any historical event, however grave or heroic, drifts into the past if left to time alone; it becomes a page in a book useful chiefly to historians. But when a community consciously and regularly returns to it, the event leaves the calendar and enters public identity.
This is precisely the work Arbaeen performs. It refuses to let Ashura remain a painful report from Muharram of the year 61. Each year it removes the file from the archive, opens it again, summons the witnesses, and puts a question to every new generation: what is your position today toward truth and toward the oppressor?
A person may love Imam Husayn privately and weep for him at home. This is a beautiful thing, but it is not sufficient to stand against unjust structures. A public and organised distortion is never corrected by hidden and individual affection.
The crime of Karbala was no assault in the dark. It was an open crime, backed by the media power of the state and accompanied by a propaganda campaign designed to present truth as falsehood and falsehood as truth. Protecting the truth suffocated there cannot therefore be a private matter; it must be visible, social, and transnational.
Seen this way, Arbaeen is not a headcount of pilgrims. It is the great assembly of witnesses. In a world where manufactured narratives work constantly to alter reality, walking toward Karbala is a form of testimony given with the body. The pilgrim’s body becomes a medium; the testimony of footsteps proves that Ashura has not ended, and that Arbaeen is the beginning of the Ummah’s continuous presence on the front of truth.
The architecture of the Ziyarat
Ziyarat Arbaeen, narrated by Shaykh al-Tusi from Safwan al-Jammal from Imam al-Sadiq (peace be upon him), is built with great care.
The pilgrim first bears witness to the Imam’s identity: “I bear witness that you are the trustee of Allah and the son of His trustee.” He then passes judgement on the quality of his life and death: “You lived in felicity, departed praiseworthy, and died missed, oppressed, and martyred.” He testifies to his faithfulness to the covenant: “And I bear witness that you fulfilled the covenant of Allah and struggled in His path until certainty came to you.”
But the Ziyarat does not stop at reporting the past. Having recognised the Imam and judged the event, the pilgrim must locate himself within it: “O Allah, I call You to witness that I am a friend to whoever befriends him and an enemy to whoever opposes him.” With that, Ashhadu moves from the statement of a historical fact to the declaration of a moral and social position.
The sequence is exact: first recognition, then judgement, and finally commitment.
One who does not know why the Imam rose is not an aware witness. One who can tell truth from falsehood yet takes no position is not a just witness. And one who holds a position with his tongue while acting against it has not yet accepted the consequences of his testimony.
A witness is not a spectator
A spectator may see an event, be moved, and return to ordinary life. A witness understands that seeing carries responsibility. Many knew the Imam was truthful and grieved his martyrdom, yet paid no price to support the truth.
The Qur’an instructs: “Be maintainers of justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves” (al-Nisa 4:135). Testimony proves its worth precisely where interest, attachment, and reputation would otherwise silence a person. Had the people of Kufa wished to move from spectators to witnesses, they would first have had to confess their own betrayal, fear, and expediency before accusing anyone else.
Arbaeen is therefore not only a court in which the Imam’s killers are judged. It is a mirror in which the conscience of the Ummah is examined. The pilgrim does not only ask what they did to Husayn; he is driven, inevitably, to ask what he himself would do with the truth in a comparable hour.
From the tongue to readiness
The summit of the Ziyarat is where testimony passes from speech into the heart, the decision, and the deed: “My heart is at peace with your heart, my affair follows your affair, and my support is prepared for you.”
Three levels of loyalty are sketched here: harmony of heart and mind; obedience in personal practice; and a social readiness that takes a position. First the heart must be reconciled with the values of the Ahl al-Bayt and come to care about what concerned the Imam. Then the programme of one’s life must follow their guidance. Finally, one’s abilities and resources must be held ready in the service of truth.
A successful visitation, then, is not one that yields more tears. It is one that yields greater readiness.
That readiness may mean speaking a forgotten truth and breaking a spiral of silence; defending someone oppressed and without a voice; refusing an unlawful gain; or raising a generation able to distinguish propaganda from truth. What unites them all is a departure from indifference. With the words “my support is prepared for you,” the Ziyarat draws the pilgrim out of the safe zone of detachment and makes of him an active, responsible, witnessing presence in society.
The responsibility of the present
The Ziyarat states the purpose of the uprising directly: “He gave the blood of his heart in Your path so that he might rescue Your servants from ignorance and the bewilderment of misguidance.” If the aim was rescue from ignorance, then commemorating Arbaeen must produce greater insight.
Ignorance is not simply not knowing what happened. Sometimes a person holds a great deal of information but cannot discern between competing narratives. Sometimes he knows the truth but fears the isolation that comes of saying it. Sometimes he sees the oppressed but is silenced by his own interests. Arbaeen exists to heal that gap between knowing and standing.
The pilgrim today might ask himself whether his presence makes the truth any clearer; whether his family, his society, and the media around him see a more accurate image of the school of Husayn through his conduct; whether his love for the Imam has made him firmer in speaking truth, seeking justice, keeping covenants, and supporting the wronged. Where no such change occurs, a person may stand within the assembly of witnesses and still not have risen beyond the rank of spectator.
Final word
Arbaeen may best be understood as the link between the martyrdom of the Imam and the responsibility of the Ummah. On Ashura, Imam Husayn testified with his blood that the religion of God cannot be reduced to the rule of oppression. After Ashura, the Ahl al-Bayt, through sermon and clarification, denied the Umayyad apparatus any claim to the meaning of that blood. And at Arbaeen, that responsibility passed from the first witnesses to every generation that followed.
This is the philosophy behind the repetition of Ashhadu: the pilgrim recognises the Imam, judges his truthfulness and his enemies’ falsehood, determines his own place in that confrontation, and declares his readiness to continue the path. Visitation thus ceases to be a memorial of the past and becomes a covenant for the future.
On Ashura, the question put to the Imam was whether he would give his blood so that truth might survive. On Arbaeen, the question put to the Ummah is whether it will bear witness to that truth — or conceal it amid the crowd of its fears, its interests, and its expediencies.
Ashura was the day of the Imam’s martyrdom. Arbaeen is the appointed time for the Ummah to become witnesses.