178 No god but God
independence from Damascus and selecting their own leader to rep-
resent them in Medina.
Yazid responded to these rebellions by turning his army loose.
At his command the Syrian forces surrounded Mecca and Medina
with massive catapults from which they indiscriminately launched
fireballs at the inhabitants. In Mecca, the fires quickly spread to the
Ka‘ba, burning the sanctuary to the ground. When the flames finally
subsided, both sacred cities lay in ruins. Medina immediately surren-
dered and pledged allegiance to Yazid. But it took another decade for
the Umayyads, under the Caliphate of Abd al-Malik, to defeat the
forces of Ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca once and for all and restore the
absolute sovereignty of Damascus.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Umayyad Caliphs, there was a
subtler and far more significant revolution taking place in the Empire:
a revolution not for political control but for control of the very
essence of the Muslim faith. Four years after the events at Karbala, in
684 C.E., a small group of individuals from Kufa who called them-
selves the tawwabun, or Penitents, gathered at the site of the mas-
sacre—their faces blackened, their clothes torn—to mourn the death
of Husayn and his family. This was an informal and unceremonious
gathering meant not only as homage to Husayn but as an act of atone-
ment for their failure to aid him against the Umayyad forces. The
Penitents had assembled at Karbala to display their guilt publicly,
and their communal act of mourning was a means of absolving them-
selves of their sins.
Although the notion of lamentation as atonement for sin was a
common practice in most Mesopotamian religions, including Zoroas-
trianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Manichaeism, it was an unprece-
dented phenomenon in Islam. Indeed, the collective lamentations of
the Penitents at Karbala were the first documented rituals of what
would eventually become a wholly new religious tradition. Put simply,
the memory of Karbala was slowly transforming the Shi‘atu Ali from a
political faction with the aim of restoring the leadership of the commu-
nity to the family of the Prophet, into an utterly distinct religious sect
in Islam: Shi‘ism, a religion founded on the ideal of the righteous
believer who, following in the footsteps of the martyrs at Karbala, will-
ingly sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice against oppression.