“Be patient, Abū ʿAbd Allāh! Be patient, Abū ʿAbd Allāh, on the bank of the Euphrates!” I asked, “What do you mean?”
He replied, “One day I entered upon the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and his eyes were overflowing with tears. I said, ‘What has made you weep, O Messenger of Allah?’ He said, ‘Just now Gabriel left me; he told me that Ḥusayn will be killed on the bank of the Euphrates. Would you like me to let you smell some of the soil from that place?’ He then stretched out his hand, scooped up a handful of earth, and gave it to me. I could not hold back my tears and they poured forth.” It is related solely by Aḥmad. ⦗1⦘

Muḥammad ibn Saʿd ⦗2⦘ also transmitted it—from ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad, from Yaḥyā ibn Zakarīyā, from an unnamed man, from ʿĀmir al-Shaʿbī, from ʿAlī—in similar wording.

Muḥammad ibn Saʿd and others, through several lines of transmission, relate from ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib that when he passed by Karbalāʾ, where colocynth trees grow, on his way to Ṣiffīn, he asked about the name of the place. He was told, “Karbalāʾ,” whereupon he said, “Karb and balāʾ—anguish and affliction.” He dismounted, prayed beneath a tree there, and said, “Martyrs will be slain here—the best of martyrs after the Companions; they shall enter Paradise without reckoning.” He pointed to a spot that they marked, and it was there that Ḥusayn was killed.

Reports concerning Karbalāʾ have also come down from Kaʿb al-Aḥbār.

Abū’l-Janāb al-Kalbī and others recount that the people of Karbalāʾ still hear the lament of the jinn women for Ḥusayn as they chant:
“The Messenger wiped his brow,
so his cheeks began to shine;
His parents are of noble Quraysh,
while his grandfather is the best of grandsires.” ⦗3⦘

Some people have replied to them, saying:
“They led him forth as a delegation to the Lord,
yet proved the vilest of delegations;
They slew the son of their Prophet’s daughter,
and thus earned for themselves the trenches of perdition.”

Ibn ʿAsākir relates that a party of Muslims once marched on campaign to the lands of Byzantium. In a church they found written:
“Does a nation that slew Ḥusayn
still hope for his grandfather’s intercession on the Day of Reckoning?”
They asked the church-goers, “Who wrote this?” They replied, “It has been written here three hundred years before the sending of your Prophet!”