their adversaries? Indeed, many of them hated him and his father. No one would do such a thing.
The dome over al-ʿAbbās’s grave in al-Baqīʿ is said to contain, alongside al-ʿAbbās, al-Hasan, ʿAlī ibn al-Husayn, Abū Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn ʿAlī, and Jaʿfar ibn Muhammad. It is also said that Fātima lies buried beneath the wall or nearby, and that al-Husayn’s head is there as well.
The sixth point: It has never been known that anyone, whether from Ahl al-Sunnah or the Shia, frequented the area of Ascalon for the sake of al-Husayn’s head. They neither visited it nor went there. Likewise, people did not formerly frequent the places now associated with the head, such as a site in Aleppo.
Since people neither frequented those places nor made them their destination, but instead frequented Karbalāʾ because the body was there, this was evidence that people in earlier times had not known the head to be in any of these places. Rather, what they knew and believed was that the body was in Karbalāʾ. They would visit it in the time of Ahmad and others. Indeed, Ahmad’s recorded responsa even include questions concerning practices at al-Husayn’s grave, which Abū Bakr al-Khallāl recorded in his al-Jāmiʿ al-kabīr (The Great Compendium), in the section on visiting shrines. No scholar has mentioned that they believed the head to be in any of these places other than Medina.