are killed, and the east wind blows dust over them.”
Nobody in Iraq needed to be told what that east wind
brought with it. That was the wind of blinding dust
storms, the very breath of trial and tribulation.
Even Shimr’s men repented when they heard her, or so
at least some of them would claim. “By God, she made
every friend and every foe weep,” one said later. But if
the soldiers did indeed weep, they still obeyed orders.
Ubaydallah had the captives publicly humiliated by
parading them through Kufa and, only once that was
done, sent them on to the Caliph Yazid in Damascus,
along with the severed heads.
Some say it was not Ubaydallah but Yazid himself
who then poked at Hussein’s head with a cane and
laughed gleefully as it rolled on the ɻoor at his feet. But
most say he angrily cursed Shimr and Ubaydallah for
their “excess of zeal,” his conscience roused by the fact
that Zaynab was there to call him to account.
No matter the chains, the torn clothing, the dust and
blisters of the long desert march from Kufa, she stood
proudly in front of the Umayyad Caliph and publicly
shamed him. “You, your father, and your grandfather
submitted to the faith of my father, Ali, the faith of my
brother Hussein, the faith of my grandfather
Muhammad,” she told him. “Yet you have viliɹed them
unjustly and oppressed the very faith you profess.”
At this, Yazid himself broke down in tears. “If I had