chapter 12

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 9 IN THE YEAR 680, A SMALL caravan set out

from Mecca, heading for Iraq, and at its head Hussein,
Ali’s younger son. Nineteen years had passed since he
and his brother had buried their father on that sandy
rise outside Kufa, then made the long, dispiriting trek
back across northern Arabia to the shelter of the Hijaz
mountains. Hussein had waited with almost impossible
patience as Muawiya consolidated his rule over the
empire, but now the waiting was over. Muawiya was
dead, and Hussein was intent on bringing the caliphate
back where it belonged, to the Ahl al-Bayt, the House of
Muhammad.

The divisiveness that had begun with Muhammad’s
death and then taken shape around the ɹgure of Ali had
now reached into the third generation. And here it was
to harden into a sense of the most terrible wrong—a
wrong so deeply felt that it would cut through the body
of Islam for centuries to come, with still no end in sight.

Hussein was by  now in  his mid-ɹfties, and it  surely