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We now declare—certain beyond doubt—that the head of al-Ḥusayn is not there, and that the Ashkelon sanctuary was never his shrine, for a number of reasons.

First: Had his head truly been located there, its discovery and public exhibition would not have been delayed for more than four hundred years after his martyrdom; and the Umayyad dynasty had already passed away more than three hundred and fifty-odd years before that claim first appeared.

Second: When the ʿAbbāsid caliphate arose, many shrines sprang up in Iraq and elsewhere, and a great many of them were fabrications. In the very year al-Ḥusayn was killed at Karbalāʾ a shrine was erected there, frequented by prominent princes, yet the leading scholars censured them for it. Caliph al-Mutawakkil even took measures against the practice; it is said that he went so far in denouncing it that he exceeded what was required.

Put aside the early, well-ordered period of the ʿAbbāsids: at that time they never glorified any shrine—genuine or spurious—as later generations did, for Islam was then advancing in its full strength and vigor.

Indeed, in the era of the Companions, the Followers, and their Followers, there was not, anywhere in the Muslim realm—whether the Ḥijāz, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Khurāsān, or the Maghrib—so much as a single shrine: not over the grave of a prophet, a Companion, a member of the Prophet’s Household, or any righteous person whatsoever. Almost all of the shrines were innovations introduced only later.