been there, Hussein, you would not have been killed,” he
swore, and gave orders for the captives to be treated as
honored guests in his own household. On the fortieth
day after Karbala—the day the Shia commemorate as
Arbain, or “forty”—he gave the women and girls and the
one surviving son his assurance of protection and had
them escorted back to Medina.
Perhaps he had remembered what some say was
Muawiya’s dying caution to him: “If you defeat Hussein,
pardon him, for he has a great claim.” If so, it was too
late. Reviled by the Shia, Yazid would hardly be better
treated in memory by the Sunnis. Few would grieve
when he died only three years after Karbala, just as his
forces were poised to take the city of Mecca, which had
risen up in rebellion under the son of Aisha’s ill-fated
brother-in-law Zubayr. Fewer still would grieve when
his sickly thirteen-year-old son died just six months after
that. And it is probably safe to say that none grieved for
his second cousin Marwan, who then proclaimed himself
Caliph. The man who had played such a devious role
behind the scenes throughout Othman’s and Ali’s
caliphates ɹnally achieved the power he had coveted for
so long, but only brieɻy; within the year he would be
smothered to death by his own wife.
All the while, “the Karbala factor,” as it would come to
be called, was rapidly gaining strength. The story told by
the seventh-century survivors would not only endure but
would grow in power to ɹnd renewed life in the