tapping his front teeth with a rod. Anas ibn Mālik witnessed this—or, according to another report, Abū Barzah al-Aslamī. Both were in Iraq. A report with a broken or unknown chain of transmission states that the head was brought to Yazīd, who began tapping its front teeth with a rod, and that Abū Barzah was present and condemned this. This is a lie, for Abū Barzah was not with Yazīd in Syria; he was in Iraq. As for “the body of al-Husayn,” it is in Karbalā’, by agreement.

Abū al-‘Abbās said:

Trustworthy people have told me—some reporting from Ibn Daqīq al-‘Īd, some from Abū Muhammad ‘Abd al-Mu’min ibn Khalaf al-Dimyātī, some from Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn al-Qastallānī, and some from Abū ‘Abd Allah al-Qurtubī, the Quran commentator—that each of these scholars rejected the claims concerning this shrine and said that they were false: it contained neither al-Husayn’s grave nor any part of his remains. For every one of these scholars, someone whose veracity I do not question reported this to me from him. In the case of some, a great many people reported it to me, each relating what one of these scholars had told him. Those who reported to me from Ibn al-Qastallānī related that he said, “It contains only a Christian.”

Another is “the grave of ‘Alī, may Allah be pleased with him,” within al-Najaf. What is known among the scholars is that ‘Alī was buried in the governor’s palace in Kufa, just as Mu‘āwiyah was buried in the governor’s palace in Syria, and ‘Amr was buried in the governor’s palace, out of fear that the Khārijites would dig up their graves. It has been said, however, that the grave in al-Najaf is that of al-Mughīrah