Question

I am a student and appreicate the works and views of the religious scholar Javed Ahmed Ghamdi and his School. I rely on their views to know about Islam and to get the solution of religious problems. Please help and guide me for literature to know about the indecent Karbala (with Imam Hussain) in reality rather than the common typical stories.

Answer

First please bear in mind that knowing part of the Muslim history is educational, eye opener and interesting but it should not affect our understanding of Islam which as you know should be based in the Qur’an and then Sunnah only.

It is difficult to know the reality of something that happened about 1400 years ago. There are incidents happening at our time yet despite so many technological and audio visual advances and tools we can never make sure that we have some to understand the reality of them.

The problem of the story of Karbala is that it relates to sectarian and political debates, while also related to religion. The incidents like this normally are targets of so many exaggerations and story telling.

On one hand there are sectarian motives to exaggerate about the sad story of Karbala. On the other hand there have been political motives of the state at the time and after that during the Umawi regime to affect the way people would see this incident.

In these cases the best is to read books written by people from various backgrounds. I am not sure whether you are limited to English language or if you can also read Arabic or Urdu. In any case I suggest you need to get hold of some of the books on history where the author simply narrates the records that are usually a mixture of false and truth (like Tarikh Tabari), then also get hold of books written by Shia scholars about the incident and also find some books written by those who have positive views about Yazid.

I cannot guarantee that after such study you will be able to get hold of the reality but at least you will have a good chance to get some balanced views and perhaps some very good questions about the incident of Karbala.

Answered by: Farhad Shafti

Date: 2015-01-14