Atish Taseer in The New York Times:
GRIEF, MEMORY, LOVE. I had not planned for this trinity of themes to become the substratum of my pilgrimage. Yet six months on, to arrive in Iraq in the nights leading up to Ashura — the climactic 10th day in a ritual period of mourning for the world’s more than 150 million Shiite Muslims — was to be confronted by a grief so fresh that the event that inspired it, the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein in 680, might have occurred yesterday.
To be Shiite was to live with the pain, never more acute than at Ashura, of not having been there for Hussein when it mattered most. In 680, Hussein had hearkened to the call of Muslims in the garrison town of Kufa, a few miles east of Najaf. His grandfather the Prophet had been dead for less than 50 years. In that time, the small community of believers had grown into the vast Arab Muslim empire. Hussein’s father, Ali — the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law and cousin — was the last of the four Rashidun (“rightly guided”) caliphs until he died in 661 at the hands of an assassin who struck him with a poisoned sword as he prayed. The Shiat Ali (Partisans of Ali) were at first merely his followers, people who believed that the mantle of the Prophet could only be assumed by one of his bloodline. So when, in 680, Muawiya, the first caliph since Ali, died and the caliphate passed to his dissolute son, Yazid, the Shiat Ali implored Hussein to take his rightful place at the head of Islam.
More here.