The red sky of Muharram

Express Tribune

08-07-2025

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Each year, as the Islamic calendar turns to Muharram, a familiar question resurfaces: why does a 7th-century event in the deserts of Karbala continue to command such deep emotional, political and ethical resonance across the world?
In the blistering heat of Karbala, a man named Hussain stood without an army. Without food. Without water. Without the political alliances that make victories inevitable. He stood with only his name, his faith, and a commitment not to bow to tyranny. Before him lay Yazid's empire, an empire fattened on fear and allegiance. Behind him stood history, watching.
The events of Karbala, though set in 7th-century Arabia, belong as much to our present as they do to the past. The image of a small group, led by Hussain ibn Ali, resisting the overwhelming machinery of a state that sought legitimacy through fear, feels uncomfortably familiar. Their isolation was moral. Karbala is a case study in how societies often fail the very people who stand for them.
Across the world today, this dynamic repeats with alarming regularity. Wherever truth is seen as a threat, and power demands submission rather than accountability, we are living in the shadow of Karbala. Whether in occupied territories, silenced courtrooms, or the unseen margins where communities are stripped of dignity, the choice presented by Ashura remains: compliance or conscience.
We are taught that the tragedy of Karbala is mourned because of its brutality. But its true horror lies in how familiar it has become. Every generation thinks it would never be among the silent majority that allowed Hussain to walk alone. But every generation builds new palaces and sharpens new swords.
Muharram returns each year to strip away the illusions. To force a reckoning. It is a mirror, held up to every nation, every institution, every individual: Who are you when your comforts are threatened? Who are you when neutrality is the same as complicity?
We live in a world where compromise is lauded, where cleverness is rewarded over conviction, survival over struggle. It is a world in which principles are bartered in exchange for access, and where many of the gravest injustices are carried out not by monsters, but by administrators. It is here that the story of Hussain cuts through the noise. Karbala reminds us that some stands must be taken, even when they are doomed. Especially when they are doomed.
Societies often celebrate strength shaped by strategy, but Karbala offers another measure. Strength appears in the resolve to speak without hesitation, even when the audience turns away. Strength emerges through loss that refuses to bend into regret.
The world continues to raise structures built on silence. Files disappear. Witnesses vanish. Laws bend. Yet Karbala reminds us that ethical clarity requires neither majority nor institutional power. It asks only for a line to be drawn, quietly, firmly.
In this way, Hussain's stand lives beyond religion. It travels through every tradition that values conscience. It appears in the quiet defiance of a government official refusing to endorse an order that violates conscience, even as pressure mounts and consequences loom. It appears in the work of a lawyer who defends the disappeared. It breathes through the poem that slips past censors.
The tragedy of Karbala implicates not only the swords that struck, but the silence that enabled them. In that sense, Hussain's stand is meant to be understood as a universal ethic, an insistence that injustice must be challenged, even when the odds are insurmountable.
This is why Karbala has always spoken as much to the political imagination as to the spiritual. It presents a framework of resistance rooted in ethical clarity, rather than strategic gain. Hussain marched because not marching would have meant surrendering the very soul of the faith he inherited. This refusal to compromise remains one of the most powerful ideas in human history.
To mourn Karbala, then, is to interrogate what has been normalised. What does it mean to live in a society where injustice no longer shocks? Where moral clarity is dismissed as naïveté, and where the vocabulary of resistance is constantly diluted by the language of pragmatism?
In such a world, the annual return of Ashura becomes an ethical checkpoint. It asks each of us where we stand, and what we are willing to endure for the truth. Not in grand gestures, but in everyday choices, in the stories we amplify, the silences we keep, the comfort we guard, and the injustices we excuse.
Muharram begins with a silence that creeps through the soul. The kind that precedes heartbreak. The kind that asks: If you were there, would you have stood beside Hussain, or watched from the shadows?
Because Karbala was never about numbers. It was about one man's stand when everyone else chose to sit. It was about a moral line drawn in the soul.
And though centuries have passed, the battlefield has not changed.
It has only expanded.
Ashura endures through meaning rather than vengeance. It teaches that the measure of a people lies in what they refuse to accept, in the truths they choose to carry even when the weight becomes unbearable. The rituals of mourning, the black flags, the elegies, they do more than remember. They remind. They return us to that moment in Karbala when history watched as power demanded silence and a single voice answered otherwise.
That voice continues to echo.
It travels through corridors where compromise lingers, into homes where fear is taught as survival, across borders where resistance remains unwelcome. It carries no slogans. It makes no promises. But it speaks; firmly, quietly, to those willing to listen.
In every age, a Yazid rises. And in every age, someone chooses to rise against him.
Karbala lives in that choice.
And when the red sky of Muharram returns, it carries with it a question older than empires and louder than swords: who will you become, when the moment arrives?