a Muslim—al-Husayn or anyone else—is a falsehood and a lie, to be rejected. This alone is sufficient grounds for refusing to call it “the shrine of al-Husayn.”
Section
We go further: we know with certainty that it does not contain al-Husayn’s head, and that the shrine at Ascalon was never a shrine of al-Husayn, for several reasons. Among them is that, had al-Husayn’s head been there, its discovery and disclosure would not have been delayed until more than four hundred years after his death. The Umayyad dynasty had ended more than three hundred and fifty-odd years before that discovery. The Abbasid caliphate had succeeded it, and during its rule shrines appeared in Iraq and elsewhere, many of which were falsely attributed.
They had built a shrine at the site where al-Husayn was killed in Karbala. Powerful rulers used to frequent it, so much so that the imams censured them for this. Indeed, when certain matters were brought before al-Mutawakkil, he is said to have gone too far in opposing this and exceeded what was required.
This is to say nothing of the Abbasid caliphate in its early days and while it remained upright, for at that time they did not venerate shrines, whether genuine or spurious, as