The War for Your Memory
🌿 Why We Return, Year After Year
Every year we gather to remember Aba Abdillah al-Husayn (عليه السلام). The same stories, the same eulogies, the same tragedy of Karbala — and someone always asks: why come back to it again and again?
The answer is in the verse the Sayed opened with:
وَذَكِّرْ فَإِنَّ الذِّكْرَىٰ تَنفَعُ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ
Wa dhakkir fa-inna al-dhikrā tanfaʿu al-muʾminīn
"And remind, for indeed the reminder benefits the believers." (Qur'an 51:55)
This was no ordinary loss. The Prophet encouraged its remembrance, the angels wept over it, and Allah Himself ensured that the tragedy of Karbala would live on the hearts, the minds, the tongues and the actions of every believer until the Day of Judgment. The majālis of al-Husayn exist to keep alive our love for the Ahl al-Bayt and for Allah — and that love has to be renewed, because we are people who forget.
🔔 A Life Built on Reminders
Look at how your own day works. An alarm wakes you for work or school. A notification tells you a meeting is about to start. At your job, a safety briefing reminds you of an incident so it never repeats. The little beep of your seatbelt — irritating, yes — is a reminder of safety, and once you hear it enough, putting the belt on becomes automatic.
The majlis works the same way. When you hear the names — Ali al-Akbar, Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas, Imam al-Husayn, Sayyida Zaynab — something is triggered inside you without your even thinking about it. That is the reminder doing its work on the heart.
⚔️ The Greatest Battle
The greatest battle is not the one fought on the battlefield. It is not the battle for money or for power. The greatest battle that falls upon us every single day is the battle over what controls your mind.
We are constantly exposed — the phone, the internet, social media. Watch one thing and suddenly the algorithm feeds you the same thing again and again, planting a single message in your mind: you need this, this will make you happy, this will give you the dopamine hit. That is not an accident. It is a system designed to take over the part of your life that matters most — your nearness to Allah.
The Sayed is not saying abandon these tools. Use them. But never let them take over the place in your life that belongs to coming closer to Allah (سبحانه وتعالى).
📱 The Heart Needs Its Updates
Think of your heart as a phone. Every so often it asks for a security update, because it is vulnerable to viruses. On the surface you look normal — "for the whole year, I look normal" — but without realising it, your nerves, your mind and your heart begin running programs that were never meant to be there. Something inside whispers, this is not good for you, but you take it on board anyway, and slowly, slowly, like an overloaded phone, you begin to run slow. Eventually you need a factory reset — to clear out the corrupted files and return to how you were made.
That reset is the majlis:
وَذَكِّرْ فَإِنَّ الذِّكْرَىٰ تَنفَعُ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ
Wa dhakkir fa-inna al-dhikrā tanfaʿu al-muʾminīn
"And remind, for indeed the reminder benefits the believers."
The dhikr clears the viruses out and plants something good inside you. So to the young person dragged here night after night, wondering what is all this for? — it is working on you, even when you cannot feel it yet.
🍲 The Recipe You Cannot Remember
A man met a friend he hadn't seen at the Husayniyya in a long while. "It's always the same story, the same majālis," the friend said — as if he had nothing left to learn. The man replied with a story: I've been married thirty years. Ask me to name one recipe my wife cooks and I couldn't tell you a single one. But did I not benefit from her cooking? Of course I did. It gave me the energy to work, to live, to do the things I love.
You may not remember every word of every majlis, but it is feeding you all the same. The real enemy is what we call in Arabic nasyān — forgetfulness — and the distractions of the dunyā that pull us away.
🕯 Why Karbala Above All
Why did Allah choose this tragedy to be remembered above every other? There is a secret to it that He alone fully knows. But consider: there is no tragedy that fell upon the Ahl al-Bayt that gathers together the worldly, the spiritual, and the family dimensions all in one — the way Karbala does.
Every kind of person was represented there. From Abdullah the infant, to al-Qasim, to Ali al-Akbar, to Abu al-Fadl, to Habib ibn Mudhahir — a man of ninety or a hundred years. Even one who was not born a Muslim, like Wahab who embraced Islam, was represented on that land. You cannot say there was no one like me at Karbala. Whatever trial you face on any given day, it is mirrored somewhere in that tragedy. That is the uniqueness of Karbala.
🧠 Memory Is Part of You
Today is the war for memory. To see how much of you lives in your memory, consider Alzheimer's — may Allah protect us all from it. A husband and wife married fifty or sixty years, and the one struck by the disease no longer remembers the other at all. The disease takes over the memory, and with it, the person.
When you lose your memory, you forget who you are — and you forget your purpose. The Qur'an warns:
وَلَا تَكُونُوا كَالَّذِينَ نَسُوا اللَّهَ فَأَنسَاهُمْ أَنفُسَهُمْ
Wa lā takūnū ka-lladhīna nasū Allāha fa-ansāhum anfusahum
"And be not like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves." (Qur'an 59:19)
He does not say they forgot their knowledge or their purpose — He says they forgot themselves. They no longer know who they are. And your purpose on this earth is to worship Allah. Lose the awareness of who you are, and you wander off the path chasing things you imagine will bring you happiness.
This is why you pray the same prayer every single day — the same prayer the Holy Prophet prayed. Not because you can't recite it word for word, but because we are forgetful people.
🩸 Every Sin Is an Act of Forgetting
People protest, how could anyone forget Husayn? How could anyone forget God? — and they miss the point.
Every time you sin, you forgot Husayn. Every time you don't pray on time, you forgot Husayn. Every time you show bad akhlāq, every time you abandon amr bil-maʿrūf wa nahy ʿan al-munkar, every time you fail to stand against injustice and oppression — you forgot Imam Husayn. If we truly never forgot, we would never sin; we would all be true muʾminīn. That is why these majālis matter so much.
🎯 The War for Your Mind
The enemies of God understand the power of repetition, so why shouldn't we use it to guard our dhikr?
Why do Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Adidas and Nike spend billions to advertise products you already know? Psychologists call it the mere exposure effect: expose a human being to something over and over, and when the moment of choice comes, that is what they reach for. In the experiment, the products shown two or three times were chosen over those shown only once. We are exactly the same — what you are exposed to is what you will choose.
Sit in an environment that speaks of Husayn, of repentance, of heaven and hell, and your mind runs straight to that story. Sit instead in an environment of music and things that displease Allah, and that is what overtakes the memory of the Ahl al-Bayt. Hear something often enough and you know it by heart whether you wanted to or not — that is how powerful your memory is. These companies know it, and they say openly: control the mind, and we tell you what to drink, how to dress, where to go, what is supposed to make you happy.
Against all of that, Allah gives us the dhikr that keeps us on the ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm — and it is none other than the remembrance of Muhammad wa Āl Muhammad.
أَلَا بِذِكْرِ اللَّهِ تَطْمَئِنُّ الْقُلُوبُ
Alā bi-dhikri Allāhi taṭmaʾinnu al-qulūb
"Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest." (Qur'an 13:28)
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اذْكُرُوا اللَّهَ ذِكْرًا كَثِيرًا
Yā ayyuhā alladhīna āmanū udhkurū Allāha dhikran kathīrā
"O you who believe, remember Allah with much remembrance." (Qur'an 33:41)
Even Zakariyya, in the midst of his test, was asked only this: remember Me night and day. Stay that close, and you will never lose your purpose.
🌑 The Cure for the Tightened Chest
One of the gravest problems in society today is the rise of anxiety and depression. The Qur'an named the cause long ago:
وَمَنْ أَعْرَضَ عَن ذِكْرِي فَإِنَّ لَهُ مَعِيشَةً ضَنكًا
Wa man aʿraḍa ʿan dhikrī fa-inna lahu maʿīshatan ḍankā
"And whoever turns away from My remembrance, indeed he will have a constricted life." (Qur'an 20:124)
That ḍank — that tightness — is exactly what the anxious describe: a constriction in the breath, in the chest. Allah has already given the cure. And so He gives us Muharram: a reset of your identity, of who you really are. Every day we should come to these gatherings and learn how to connect with the Ahl al-Bayt.
💧 Drip by Drip on the Rock
Someone might say a single majlis moved them deeply — and that is a beautiful thing. But what truly keeps the dhikr alive is istiqāma: consistency.
Pour a bucket of water over a dusty rock and it washes clean for a moment. But let a single drop fall on that same rock — drip, drip, drip — over a long time, and it carves a groove right into the stone. Go to any waterfall and look where the water has been falling: see the channel it has cut. Hearts are not rocks, but sometimes hardness settles over the heart — from what we look at, from what we eat, from the maʿṣiya, the sin, that hardens it. The words and the stories of the majlis are that gentle, persistent drip — and over time they wear through the hardness and open the heart.
🩸 The Three Tears
We each have three kinds of tears. The basal tear keeps the eye protected. The reflex tear is the one that comes when you cut an onion or smoke stings your eye — protection from irritation. But the third is the one that matters most: the emotional tear, drawn straight from the heart.
The scientists say the emotional tear is chemically different from the other two — it carries proteins and hormones, something that releases stress, things not found in the other tears. So when you weep over Imam al-Husayn (عليه السلام) — or even push yourself to cry — that emotional tear has an effect on you, not only in this world but in the hereafter. As we have in the narrations from Imam Jaʿfar al-Sadiq (عليه السلام), every eye will weep on the Day of Judgment except the eye that wept over Aba Abdillah al-Husayn.
And remember the rock. Every majlis in Muharram is a drip. Every story of Abu al-Fadl al-Abbas is a drip. Every time you remember the patience of Zaynab, the courage of Ali al-Akbar — drip, drip, drip upon the heart, until it is soothed and made soft.
🐦 What the Animals Teach Us
Even the animals teach us never to forget. The Qur'an mentions the crow — the ghurāb — and many of us see it here in Australia. Harm a crow and it never forgets: not for a day, not for a month, not for a year. When it sees that person again, it warns the other crows of the threat. And more astonishing still — the crow's young, who never saw the harm and were never told of it, inherit the knowledge of who the threat is.
So Allah teaches us through the crow: these enemies are a threat to you and to the religion, and their threat passes down through the generations. Within us is the same inheritance — the wilāya of Muhammad wa Āl Muhammad, carried in the very milk a believing mother drank. From it we know tawallī and tabarrī — whom to follow, and whom to turn away from.
🐘 The Elephant That Held a Majlis
There is another animal that holds a majlis over its dead — the elephant. When one of them dies, the others gather around the bones, touching them, mourning over the one they loved.
This recalls the story of Lawrence Anthony in South Africa. A group of wild elephants were to be killed; he begged for their lives and took them in, and over years he spoke to them, even sang to them, until they came to love him. When Lawrence Anthony died in 2012, no one told the elephants — yet they walked twelve hours to his house and circled it for two days. And every year, on the anniversary of his death, they return to remember him.
Lawrence Anthony was an ordinary man who was kind to animals. How much more, then, Imam al-Husayn — the divine one, the seed of Rasulullah, whose name is written upon the throne? How many lives has he saved? People lost hope in those wild elephants and said let us kill them instead; one man said no, let me be good to them and earn their trust. So it is with Imam al-Husayn: when people have lost all hope, his door is always open — come to my divine salvation.
🔥 The Log Taken From the Fire
Why do all of this? So that we do not fall victim to the Alzheimer's of the nerves — worse even than the Alzheimer's of the body. My relationship with Imam al-Husayn, with the majālis, is part of my ʿaqīda, part of what makes me who I am. Distance myself from it and I lose the fire, I lose the touch.
A man noticed that someone who once came often to the majālis had stopped. So he visited him one winter's night. The man opened the door — there was a wood fire burning inside. The visitor sat beside it and said nothing. He took one log out of the fire and set it to the side, and waited, watching, as the flame on that single log slowly died. Then he picked up the same log and placed it back among the others, said yallah, salām ʿalaykum, and rose to leave. As he walked out he glanced back — and the man was weeping. "Shaykhna," he said, "I'll see you at the mosque next week." He understood.
Each one of us carries that fire — the call of Husayn, the call of the muʾminīn, always burning in the heart. But step away from the majālis and the flame begins to die. Come back, and slowly, slowly, the fire reignites in the heart.
📖 We Are Built for Stories
The eulogies and the stories of the companions of the Ahl al-Bayt are nutrients for the soul. The Qur'an speaks of aḥsan al-qaṣaṣ — the best of stories — because of what scientists call narrative thinking. When you leave this majlis, you will remember the stories more than anything else. You may forget the ḥadīth I quoted, but you will remember the stories — because the best of all psychologists is Allah (سبحانه وتعالى); He knows how you think. That is why the Qur'an returns to its stories again and again, and why Ashura and Muharram return to theirs. The story is what we are programmed to remember.
🌙 If You Were to Cry
On nights like this, with the sighting of the moon, the sadness of the lovers of the Ahl al-Bayt is freshly stirred — not because they ever forgot Imam al-Husayn, but because the grief returns anew.
When Ibn Shabīb walked in upon Imam al-Ridha (عليه السلام) and found him in a state of sorrow and asked what was wrong, the Imam said:
يَا ابْنَ شَبِيبٍ، إِنْ كُنْتَ بَاكِيًا لِشَيْءٍ فَابْكِ لِلْحُسَيْنِ بْنِ عَلِيٍّ
Yā ibna Shabīb, in kunta bākiyan li-shayʾin fa-bki lil-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī
"O son of Shabīb, if you would weep over anything, then weep over al-Husayn ibn Ali" — slaughtered like a ram on the sands of Karbala, over whom the heavens and the earth wept.
And it is related that Imam Zayn al-Abidin (عليه السلام) once passed a man in the market about to slaughter a sheep. He asked, "O servant of God, did you treat this animal well?" The man replied, "Of course, O son of the Messenger of Allah — this is the sunnah of your grandfather." The Imam said: "No, O servant of God — my father, Aba Abdillah al-Husayn, was not treated as you have treated this animal. On the day of Ashura I heard my father call out in the burning sun, O my grandfather, I am thirsty. Even this animal is given water, while my father was denied it on the day of Ashura."
Yet to console this very grief, the Holy Prophet told Fatima al-Zahra (عليها السلام) that Allah would create a Shia — a people like her — who would weep over the tragedy of Aba Abdillah al-Husayn.
إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ
Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn
"Indeed we belong to Allah, and to Him we shall return."
We ask Allah (سبحانه وتعالى) to hasten the reappearance of Imam al-Hujja (عليه السلام); not to take us from this world except that He is pleased with us; to keep us firm upon the wilāya; to cure our sick and have mercy on our departed.