Tom Holland

But more particularly, Ali's son, the grandson of the Prophet, we've already mentioned him, Hussein, who was killed in a battle in Iraq at a place called Karbala in 680.

by the Umayyads who are the dynasty who then establish a kind of imperial rule.

And this for the Shia is where everything goes wrong, not just in the context of kind of late antique politics, but on a cosmic scale, because this for them is about the triumph of evil over good.

And it's about the derailing of Muhammad's prophetic mission, which is a mission for the whole of humanity, the embodiment of God's plan for the world.

And so Hussein's death in this battle at Karbala is seen as the primal catastrophe.

And it is commemorated as a kind of great act of self-sacrifice on the part of Hussein.

He's laying down his life for the good of all the world.

It will strike people that there are slight echoes there of Good Friday, of the death of Christ.

I mean, I think that's not coincidental.

There are a lot of Christians in this period in Iran and in Iraq.

And I think it is channeling those kind of Christian understandings of sacrifice on the part of humanity.

And so the day of Hussein's death, Ashura, which is the 10th day of the first month of the Muslim calendar, Muharram, is the great day of mourning for the Shia.

And it is essentially their kind of Good Friday.

And this in turn feeds into a strongly apocalyptic perspective on the world, because if things have gone wrong, then at some point God will intervene to ensure that they will go right.

And the person who will emerge is this figure called the Mahdi.

who is the 12th of the Imams.

And the Imams are people with a kind of cosmic mission to write and order the world.

And the first of these Imams have been Ali.

Hussein had been the third.

The 12th Imam, the hidden Imam, the Mahdi, he will appear.