How should the killing of al-Husayn and the day of Ashura be regarded?

After his chapter on Yazid, Ibn Taymiyya wrote two consecutive chapters in Minhaj al-Sunna: "People on the killing of al-Husayn: two extremes and a middle" and "People introduced two innovations on the day of Ashura". They are among the passages of the book most closely tied to the memory of Karbala and to the day of Ashura. ^{1 2}

Ibn Taymiyya states that al-Husayn was killed wrongfully as a martyr, like others of the wronged martyrs; that killing him was disobedience to God and His Messenger by whoever killed him, helped or was content with it; that it was a calamity for the Muslims, his family and others; and that for him it was martyrdom and a raising of rank. ³ He holds that al-Hasan and al-Husayn had been destined for a felicity reached only through some trial, having grown up in the strength and safety of Islam, so that one died poisoned and the other killed. He compares this with the killing of prophets, and says that the killings of Ali and of Uthman were greater still as sins and as calamities. ³

The first extreme says that al-Husayn was killed rightly, because he came when the Muslims' affair was united under one man and sought to divide them, and cites the sound hadith on killing whoever does so; some said that he was the first in Islam to rise against those in authority. ¹

The second extreme says that he was the imam whose obedience was due, without whom no matter of faith is carried out, behind none but whose appointee congregational and Friday prayer may be prayed, and without whose leave no enemy may be fought. ¹

The middle, which Ibn Taymiyya calls the view of the Sunnis: he was killed wrongfully as a martyr, and he was not the ruler of the community. He holds that the hadith in question does not apply to him: when he heard what had been done to his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil he gave up seeking power and asked to go to Yazid, or to the frontier, or to his own town; they would not let him, and demanded that he give himself up as their captive, which he was not obliged to do. ^{1 2}

For Ibn Taymiyya the duty at a calamity is patience and saying "We belong to God and to Him we return". He cites a hadith that al-Husayn himself related from the Prophet ﷺ, through his daughter Fatima bint al-Husayn: no Muslim is struck by a calamity and remembers it, however long ago, and says these words anew, but God gives him a reward like that of the day it struck; he sees a sign in the fact that al-Husayn and his daughter, who witnessed his death, transmitted it. ⁴ Against this he sets what he regards as forbidden – slapping the cheeks, tearing garments, the cries of the Jahiliyya and lamentation – citing hadiths from the two Sahihs and a report of Umar having a lamenting woman beaten. ^{4 1}

Ibn Taymiyya says that al-Husayn's killing became the occasion for two innovations: the innovation of grief and lamentation on Ashura – slapping, crying out, weeping, going thirsty and reciting elegies, which in his view lead on to reviling the early generations – and the innovation of joy and rejoicing. ² He traces both to Kufa: there were partisans of al-Husayn among the Shi'a, headed by al-Mukhtar ibn Abi Ubayd, and people of the Nasiba who hated Ali and his sons, among them al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf al-Thaqafi; he reads the hadith "There will be among Thaqif a liar and a destroyer" as referring to these two. The first introduced grief, the second rejoicing. ² He reports from Harb al-Kirmani that Ahmad ibn Hanbal said of the hadith on being generous to one's family on Ashura that it has no basis; he mentions the reports about applying kohl and bathing on that day, says that none of the four imams recommended either practice, and that what is recommended on Ashura, in the view of most scholars, is fasting, with the ninth fasted alongside it. ^{2 5}

Ibn Taymiyya's description of Shi'i Ashura observances is that of an opponent and is given here attributed to him; the Imami position on the imamate and on mourning needs their own texts, and the first position needs its holders named from their own sources.