Karbala Beyond History: Hussain’s Martyrdom as the Myth of Truth

این حسین کیست که عالم همه دیوانه‌ی اوست؟

Who is this Hussain, that the world is mad for him?

این چه شمعی‌ست که جان‌ها همه پروانه‌ی اوست؟

What candle is this, around which all souls swirl like moths?

چو در کربلا شور محشر بگشت،

When in Karbala the Day of Judgment rose,

زمین و زمان یکسر آتش فروز

Earth and time alike caught divine fire.

به جز از حسین کسی در زمانه یار نشد

None but Hussain befriended truth in his time,

دل آزرده‌ی حق، چنین دلاور نداشت

The wounded heart of Truth had no such brave friend.

In the early desert light of Ashura, in the year 680 CE, a man stood against an empire. His death, witnessed by few but mourned by multitudes, came not merely as a historical casualty but as the incarnation of a truth larger than death itself. Hussain ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), was slain on the arid plains of Karbala. His body was mutilated, his family humiliated, and his companions slaughtered. Yet from the ruin of that solitary stand emerged not silence, but a cry that has echoed through centuries: a cry not of defeat, but of unyielding witness. The event of Karbala is often narrated in terms of history, chronology, politics. But to speak of it only in terms of what happened is to miss what it means, and more vitally, what it continues to do. The martyrdom of Hussain is not a chapter in Islamic history. It is a mythic symbol, a cosmic metaphor, a poetic truth. And as such, it belongs not only to Muslims, nor even to Shia Muslims alone, but to all of humanity.

Myth, as great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade defines it, is not a falsehood but a structure of meaning. It is sacred history, history that is always happening, regardless of whether it “once happened” in the literal sense. It is the realm where time collapses, and symbols move more powerfully than facts. In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade notes that “a myth always reveals something about the structure of reality.” Karbala, seen in this light, is not an isolated tragedy but a prism through which we glimpse the perennial structure of human struggle: truth against power, sincerity against empire, light against the monstrous machinery of darkness. Hussain’s refusal to bow to Yazid is less a political gesture than a metaphysical stance, a rejection of compromise with falsehood, even at the cost of one's body.

At this junction, Martin Heidegger's concept of aletheia (truth as unconcealment) becomes crucial. In Being and Time, Heidegger reminds us that truth is not correspondence, but a process in which Being is disclosed. Hussain’s martyrdom, when approached phenomenologically, is not the occurrence of an empirical event, but a revealing of Being, the truth of being-for-truth’s-sake standing in radical opposition to beings who capitulate to power. Yazid, in this schema, represents the das Man, the inauthentic social order that hides Being through conformity. Hussain, by standing alone, unmasks the falsity of the “they” and calls Dasein (authentic existence) back to itself, a phenomenological rupture in the inauthentic flow of historical time.

This temporal collapse aligns with Heidegger’s ontological distinction between ‘ordinary time’ (vulgar time) and ‘kairological’ time: the moment of decision, the Augenblick, the sudden flash of presence where destiny is chosen. Karbala becomes an Augenblick, a kairological horizon where ethical decision is no longer deferred but made absolutely present. Hussain embodies Entschlossenheit, resoluteness, the decision to be truthful, even unto death. In this sense, Karbala becomes a phenomenological event, a tearing open of Being through a singular act of authentic refusal.

To understand the depth of this claim, one might turn to Walter Benjamin’s radical concept of history. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin argues against historicism, which “tells the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary,” and instead calls for a messianic conception of time, Jetztzeit, or “now-time”, in which a past moment flashes up in danger and demands redemption. Hussain’s martyrdom is not part of some chronological Islamic narrative; it is precisely such a flash, an explosive irruption into time which, in Benjamin’s language, is not “progress” but the dialectical image of justice arrested in blood. It does not move history forward, it breaks it open.

Persian poets and mystics understood this far more profoundly than many modern historians. They spoke not of what happened, but of what appeared. The battle was not for land or throne but for meaning.

Mohtasham Kashani, in his celebrated elegies, writes:

باز این چه شورش است که در خلق عالم است؟

What is this turmoil that has gripped all creation?

The poet does not limit the shock of Karbala to a moment in time, the entire cosmos is shaken. Just as the earth trembled at the crucifixion in Christian imagination, the very order of the universe convulses at the spilling of Hussain’s blood. This cosmic unease points to something deeper than historical injustice: the violation of a sacred archetype, the murder of the Truth-Bearer.

Here one must recall the profound insight of Carl Jung, who saw myth as the projection of the collective unconscious. In his essay The Psychological Aspects of the Kore, Jung writes, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” Karbala becomes the exteriorization of an archetypal human battle between the Ego’s thirst for power (Yazid) and the Self’s loyalty to the inner truth (Hussain).

Benjamin’s concept of allegory, developed in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, is likewise helpful. Allegory is the ruin through which truth shines. Karbala is not a resolved story, it is Trauerspiel, the mourning play where the hero dies and nothing is redeemed, yet the very non-redemption becomes the haunting of justice in the world.

Simone Weil, in her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, reminds us: “Violence turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” But Hussain was never reduced to a thing. His resistance turns even his body into a site of meaning, his silence, his thirst, his sacrifice, become the very speech of justice.

One sees the same tragic heroism in Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”, who acts beyond the ethical and the aesthetic, who leaps toward God with no guarantee. In Fear and Trembling, this knight defies the logic of ethics when he obeys a divine command that defies reason. Hussain, in marching to Karbala, enters this realm, he chooses death not because it is rational, but because it is true. He commits, as Kierkegaard says, to the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” in order to preserve a deeper divine responsibility.

In the Mahabharata, we find Bhishma on the bed of arrows, a body broken by his vow. Like Bhishma, Hussain lies slain by his own moral commitment. But while Bhishma’s body awaits time’s end, Hussain’s is buried by it, and yet from the grave, meaning begins.

As Rumi writes:

بمیرید بمیرید در این عشق بمیرید

Die before you die- die in this love!

This is not death in despair, but egoic death, the annihilation of self before the Beloved. It is the death that births the Real.

So too in Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics of fana, self-annihilation in the divine, Hussain is not destroyed but absorbed into the Truth. In Fusus al Hikam , Ibn Arabi speaks of death as the veil lifted from Reality. Hussain’s shahada is unveiling: his fall is the lifting of illusion.

In the cosmology of Suhrawardi, light overcomes shadow not by fighting it, but by remaining light. Yazid rules by darkness, Hussain by luminosity.

As the Quran affirms:

وَلَا تَحْسَبَنَّ الَّذِينَ قُتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ أَمْوَاتًا ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ

Think not of those who are slain in the path of God as dead; they are alive, with their Lord, sustained.

This “life” is not biological, it is symbolic immortality.

As one Urdu poet captured it:

قتل گاہِ وفا میں وہ سر جو کٹا

The head severed in the field of loyalty,

اب بھی نیزوں پہ بولتا ہے حسین

Still speaks from the tips of spears, it is Hussain.

Even Walter Benjamin saw such moments as flashes of messianic possibility. In Thesis IX, he imagines the Angel of History blown forward by the storm of progress, gazing back at endless catastrophe. And yet, through martyrdom like Hussain’s, we do not merely move through history, we interrupt it.

As Benjamin writes: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Karbala is this memory , forever flashing.

And in Levinas’s ethics, where the face of the Other precedes ontology, Hussain’s act of giving water to Hurr’s army before his own child drinks becomes the highest hospitality, an ethics that refuses even the politics of revenge.

Final Reflection: The Wound That Judges Us

Thus, Hussain’s martyrdom, viewed through phenomenology, mysticism, and radical metaphysics, becomes not a death but an event an ontological interruption, an ethical revolution, a cosmic unveiling.

In resisting empire, Hussain affirms not politics but ontology; not rebellion, but revelation.

His death is not a silence, but what Rumi would call:

مرگ او مرگ نبود، زندگی بود بلند

His death was not death- it was a higher life.

Karbala is the place where Being spoke, not through language, but through blood. Not to conquer, but to awaken.

It remains the wound of history that must never heal for only through that wound can the light of Truth continue to shine.

It reminds me of Molavi in Diwan-e Shams wherein Rumi writes:

از پی این زخم جان نو رسید / جان کهنه دست‌ها از خود بشو

From this wound a new life emerged; cleanse the old self from your hands.

This echoes the theme of Karbala, through the wound of Hussain’s martyrdom, a new spiritual life is born, human pretensions are cleansed, and the cosmos is purified.

Shoaib Mohammad (KAS), Chief Accounts Officer, Anti Corruption Bureau, J&K