for I have slain the veiled king.
I have slain the best of people in mother and in father,
the noblest of all when pedigrees are proclaimed.

He said: Ibn Ziyād then dispatched the head to Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiyah. It was set before him while Abū Barzah al-Aslamī sat nearby. Yazīd began prodding its mouth with his cane and recited:

We split the skulls of haughty men
who lorded it over us, yet proved the most treacherous and unjust.

Abū Barzah said to him, “Lift your cane! By Allah, more than once I saw the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—press his lips to those very lips and kiss them.”

He continued: ʿUmar ibn Saʿd sent the womenfolk and dependants of al-Ḥusayn to Ibn Ziyād. None of al-Ḥusayn’s family remained save a boy who was ill and kept among the women. Ibn Ziyād ordered that he be killed, whereupon Zaynab threw herself over him, saying, “By Allah, he will not be slain unless you kill me first.” Ibn Ziyād’s heart softened and he spared the boy.

Thereafter he forwarded them to Yazīd. Yazīd gathered the notables of Syria who were present, and when they entered they congratulated him on the victory. One of them, a ruddy, blue-eyed man, looked at a young girl from among Ḥusayn’s daughters and said, “Commander of the Believers, grant me this one.”

Zaynab replied, “Never! No honor for you or for him unless you both renounce the religion of Allah.”

The blue-eyed man repeated his request, but Yazīd said to him, “Desist from this.” Yazīd then had the captives taken into his household and afterwards sent them on to Madīnah. When they entered the city, a woman of Banī ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib came out with her hair dishevelled and her sleeve thrown over her head. She met them weeping and reciting:

What will you say when the Prophet asks you:
“What have you done—you, the last of the nations—
to my family and household after I was gone?
Some are captives, others slain, their blood soaking the earth. ⦗1⦘
Was this the recompense I deserved when I counseled you,
that you should treat my kin with such evil in my absence?”

Abū Mikhnaf relates, on the authority of Sulaymān ibn Abī Rāshid, from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿUbayd Abī al-Kanūd, that it was a daughter of ʿAqīl who composed these verses. Al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār likewise reported that the author was Zaynab the Younger, daughter of ʿAqīl ibn Abī Ṭālib, when the family of al-Ḥusayn entered the Prophet’s City.

Abū Bakr ibn al-Anbārī, however, transmitted with his chain that Zaynab, daughter of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib from Fāṭimah—wife of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Jaʿfar and mother of his sons—raised the curtain ⦗2⦘ of her tent on the day of Karbalāʾ, when al-Ḥusayn was killed, and recited these same verses. ⦗3⦘ Allah knows best.