Aftermath · 11 Muharram onward

The captives and the message

For three days the bodies lay exposed on the plain, until the nearby tribe of Bani Asad came to bury them. The survivors — the women and children, and the ailing Imam ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn (a) — were chained and driven as captives to Kufa, and then to Yazid's court in Damascus.

It was here that Karbala was won. From within captivity, Sayyida Zaynab (a) and Imam Zayn al-‘Abidin (a) spoke truth to the faces of Ibn Ziyad and Yazid, turning the captors' triumph into their disgrace and carrying the message of Husayn (a) to the heart of the empire.

Within three years Yazid was dead; within decades the Umayyad house had fallen. The memory of Karbala has not faded in the fourteen centuries since.