To pray, when all hope seemed lost.
The tragedy of Karbala, where Imam Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and his 72 companions fell as martyrs, moves hundreds of millions of people around the world every year, who with ceremonies, lamentations and prayers remember the noble sacrifice of those heroic and fearless warriors.
But the story of Karbala is not only a tale of death, but also of survival: there were those who did not fall in battle, those who were forced to watch helplessly as their relatives were massacred and to suffer the humiliation of their executioners. These are the noble Zaynab, sister of Imam Hussein, and his son, Imam Ali Sajjad, who escaped death due to an illness that prevented him from taking part in the battle. And just as emotion comes to us when we think back to the martyrs of Karbala, our thoughts should also turn to those who survived, without whom the testimony of what happened would not have reached us at all, and we, today, would have forgotten that epochal event.
Imam Sajjad's role was precisely to ensure that the tragedy of Karbala was not forgotten, preventing the lesson of that immense sacrifice from being lost from the memory of history and the faithful. In other words, without him, the immense outpourings of grief we witness today, the powerful gatherings in every corner of the world, and the incessant flow of pilgrims to the mausoleum of Karbala would not have been possible. Imam Sajjad is reported to have said: "Any believer whose eyes shed tears at the sight of the killing of Husayn ibn Ali and his companions, so much so that tears roll down his cheeks, will be welcomed by Allah into the highest abodes of Paradise.".
Imam Husayn's son faced a different kind of battle than his father, yet his valor should in no way be diminished: he tirelessly fought a war against oblivion, a struggle in the name of truth, justice and remembrance, without which his father's sacrifice would have been in vain and its effects would not have reverberated to this day.
Imam Sajjad fought, and his weapon was prayer. In contemporary times, prayer tends to be equated with the desperation of the weak, while the strong, resolute, and proud, far from appealing to God, act on their own. Islam, however, recognizes the human being's rank in relation to this world and the divine, and Muslims turn to God always, whether in moments of ease and tranquility or in times of fear and despair. Imam Sajjad spread the weapon of prayer among believers, transforming spiritual language into a form of political struggle against the deviant oppressors who had massacred his family before his eyes.
Praying, when all hope seemed lost, when evil seemed to have triumphed over good and corruption obscured the truth, was a true act of resistance. A revolutionary behavior whose undeniable fruits are us: we who pray today and continue to pray despite this world disappointing us, afflicting us, oppressing us, despite the Karbala attacks spreading throughout the world... and yet we continue to pray, because prayer is hope. And if the survivor of Karbala relied on prayer, seeing his people fall before him, what right do we have to abstain, to give ground to despair?