09 Two lives, one question
Some six and a half centuries apart, two men stood before the power of their age and would not bow. Christians and Muslims understand them differently, and this chapter honours that difference. It sets their stories side by side — not to rank them, but because both ask the same question.
The question beneath both stories
People often arrive at this subject with a different question: who was greater? This chapter will not answer it. For a Christian, Jesus is the Son of God; for a Muslim, he is one of the greatest prophets, and Hussein is the grandson of the last one. Neither faith would accept a contest, and neither should we.
What we can do is notice something remarkable. When you read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last days next to the earliest Arabic accounts of Hussein’s, the same human moments keep appearing: the crowd that cheers and then vanishes, the night of prayer, the friends sent away to safety, the thirst, the mercy shown to enemies, the women who stayed to the end. The two stories rhyme. That rhyme is worth listening to.
Respect first
Many Western readers are surprised to learn that Jesus — ‘Isa in Arabic — is part of Islam. Muslims honour him as one of the greatest prophets, in the line of Abraham and Moses, and the Qur’an gives him a title it gives to no one else: al-Masih, the Messiah. A Muslim who says his name will usually add “peace be upon him”.
The Qur’an tells of his birth to the virgin Mary, who asks the angel how she can have a son “when no man has touched me”. Mary is the only woman the Qur’an calls by name, she is named in it more often than in the whole New Testament, and its nineteenth chapter is called Maryam — Mary — after her.
Hussein grew up hearing Jesus spoken of in the same spirit. His father, Ali, holding up the prophets as models of a life free of the world, said of him: “He used a stone for his pillow and wore rough cloth. Hunger was his relish and the moon his lamp by night… He had no wealth to distract him and no greed to humble him. His feet were his mount, and his hands his servants.”
Christians believe that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, and rose from the dead on the third day. The Qur’an states that “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him” — it was only made to appear so — and that God raised him up to Himself. Many Muslims also believe he will return before the end of time. This page does not try to settle that difference. The parallels below follow the Gospel accounts as Christians read them, because those are the accounts that have shaped how most of the world imagines Jesus’ last days.
Jerusalem, c. 30 CE · Karbala, 680 CE
A hill outside the walls of Jerusalem. A riverbank plain in southern Iraq. Drag across to move from one to the other.
Jerusalem · c. 30 CE
A teacher from Galilee, arrested at night, tried before the Roman governor and executed outside the city, as Rome executed rebels and slaves.
Karbala · 680 CE
The Prophet’s grandson, surrounded on a plain by the Euphrates, cut off from water and killed with his family and companions by an army sent in the ruler’s name.
Eight moments that rhyme
One side follows the Gospels, quoted in the King James Version; the other, the earliest Arabic chronicles of Karbala and the tradition that grew from them. Every line is marked with where it comes from.
Jesus
He lived in a land occupied by Rome. The Gospels describe him arrested on the initiative of the high priest’s council, which ran the Temple under Roman oversight, and handed to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Asked whether he claimed to be a king, he answered with a different idea of power.
“My kingdom is not of this world.”
Hussein
He lived under the Umayyad state, which ruled from Damascus over lands stretching from Egypt to Khurasan. When Yazid inherited the throne in 680, he ordered his governor in Medina to take Hussein’s oath of allegiance “firmly, without leniency”. Hussein refused, and left the city by night.
“Someone like me does not pledge allegiance to someone like him.”
Jesus
When he rode into Jerusalem, the crowds spread their garments on the road and cried, “Hosanna to the son of David.” Within the week a crowd before Pilate was shouting something else, and on the night of his arrest his own disciples “all forsook him, and fled”.
“But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him.”
Hussein
The people of Kufa sent him letter after letter: come, we have no leader but you. Thousands pledged themselves to his envoy, Muslim ibn Aqil. When a new governor arrived with threats and money, they melted away, and Muslim was executed alone. On the road, the poet al-Farazdaq warned Hussein what he had seen in Iraq.
“Their hearts are with you; their swords are against you.”
Jesus
In the garden of Gethsemane, knowing what was coming, he told his friends, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,” and asked them to keep watch with him. They fell asleep. He went on praying alone.
“Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
Hussein
On the evening of the ninth of Muharram the army began to advance on his tents. Hussein sent his brother Abbas to ask for a single night’s delay — not to escape, and not to negotiate, but to pray. He and his companions spent their last night in worship.
“So that we may pray to our Lord tonight, recite His Book and ask His forgiveness.”
Jesus
When the soldiers came for him with lanterns and torches, he stepped forward and identified himself — and asked only one thing of them: that the men with him be allowed to go free.
“If therefore ye seek me, let these go their way.”
Hussein
That same last night he gathered his companions and told them plainly that the enemy wanted no one but him. He released them from any obligation and urged them to slip away in the darkness. They refused, one after another.
هَذَا اللَّيْلُ قَدْ غَشِيَكُمْ فَاتَّخِذُوهُ جَمَلًا
“The night has covered you; take it as a camel and go.”
Jesus
Near the end, on the cross, he spoke two words that every human being understands. A sponge soaked in vinegar was lifted to his mouth on a stalk of hyssop.
“I thirst.”
Hussein
From the seventh of Muharram, on orders from Kufa, cavalry guarded the banks of the Euphrates to keep Hussein’s camp from the water. For three days the camp — small children included — was cut off from a river it could almost see. A single night sortie led by Abbas brought back only a few water-skins.
Jesus
He taught his followers to love their enemies. When one of them cut off the ear of a servant who had come to arrest him, the Gospel of Luke says Jesus touched the ear and healed it. And from the cross he prayed for the men who had put him there.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Hussein
When al-Hurr arrived with a thousand horsemen sent to trap him, the riders and their horses were exhausted with thirst. Hussein ordered his men to give water to all of them. On the morning of the battle al-Hurr rode over to Hussein’s side and asked whether there could be repentance for a man like him. Hussein welcomed him. Al-Hurr died defending him.
Jesus
When most of the disciples had scattered, the women did not. They stood at the cross until the end, and in the Gospel of John it is Mary Magdalene who comes first to the tomb.
“Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.”
Hussein
When the fighting was over, the women and children of the household survived — and were marched as captives to Kufa and Damascus. Hussein’s sister Zaynab became their voice. Before the governor of Kufa, who gloated that God had disgraced her family, she answered that disgrace belongs to the corrupt, and the liar is someone other than us.
Jesus
For Christians, the story does not end at the cross. The women find the tomb empty; the frightened men who fled become apostles who carry his message across the Roman world — the same empire that had executed him.
“He is not here: for he is risen, as he said.”
Hussein
In Damascus, standing before Yazid himself, Zaynab is remembered as delivering a sermon telling him that whatever he did, he could never erase their memory. Within weeks, tradition says, the first pilgrim — an elderly companion of the Prophet — came to weep at the grave. Within five years, men who had failed Hussein were gathering there in repentance.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
At Karbala the words ran the other way too. Told on the last night that they were free to go, Hussein’s companion Zuhayr ibn al-Qayn is reported to have answered that he would gladly be killed and brought back to life a thousand times, if it would protect Hussein and the young men of his family. al-Tabari
Honest differences
A comparison that only lists similarities flatters both stories and respects neither. These are the differences that matter most to the people who hold them sacred.
Jesus, in Christian faith
The divine Son of God, fully God and fully human. (In Islam, by contrast, Jesus is a human prophet, not divine.)
Hussein, in Muslim faith
A human being: the grandson of a prophet. For Shi‘a Muslims he is the third Imam, a divinely guided leader — but never divine and never a prophet. Muslims believe Muhammad was the last prophet.
Jesus, in Christian faith
Atonement. Christian theology teaches that Jesus’ death and resurrection reconcile humanity to God and bring forgiveness of sin — something only he could do.
Hussein, in Muslim faith
A stand for the reform of his grandfather’s community, and a model of witness — the literal meaning of shahid, “martyr”. Shi‘i devotion also asks for his intercession and sees meaning in his suffering, which the scholar Mahmoud Ayoub called “redemptive suffering” — but not atonement in the Christian sense.
Jesus, in Christian faith
When a disciple drew a sword at his arrest, Jesus stopped him. He offered no armed resistance.
“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
Hussein, in Muslim faith
He travelled with armed companions and fought when attacked. But he repeatedly asked to be allowed to leave, refused to strike first, and stopped a companion from shooting the enemy commander before the battle began. Exactly what terms he offered is disputed.
Jesus, in Christian faith
Resurrection on the third day, and ascension. For Muslims, Jesus was raised to God without dying on the cross. In both faiths, his story does not end in a grave.
Hussein, in Muslim faith
He was killed, and his body was buried at Karbala, where his shrine stands today. Muslims believe the martyrs are “alive with their Lord”, but no one claims he rose again. His story continued through the people who survived him.
Medina, around 631
The first time Hussein appears in a story about Christians, he is a small boy of about five. A delegation of Christian leaders from Najran, in southern Arabia, came to Medina to discuss with the Prophet the question that still divides the two faiths: who Jesus was.
The debate did not resolve. Then, the Qur’an records, the Prophet was told to propose something extraordinary: that both sides bring their own families, stand together, and ask God to judge between them. The Arabic word for this solemn appeal is mubahala.
According to a hadith in Sahih Muslim, when the verse came down the Prophet called the four people closest to him — his daughter Fatima, his cousin Ali, and his two grandsons, Hasan and Hussein — and said: “O God, these are my family.” The companion who remembered it, Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas, counted it among three things he had heard the Prophet say of Ali — any one of which, he said, was dearer to him than the finest red camels.
The Christians of Najran consulted among themselves and declined the challenge. The meeting ended instead in a treaty. In return for an annual tribute, the Najran Christians were promised the protection of their lives, lands, property and churches, and an assurance that no bishop, monk or priest would be removed from his office.
Christians in Hussein’s story
Christians appear again and again around Karbala — in devotional tradition, in the historical record, and in modern life. Some of these stories are well attested; others are cherished legends. We mark which is which.
Before Karbala
A Shi‘i tradition says that Jesus once crossed the land of Karbala with his disciples, stopped, and wept — telling them that the son of a prophet yet to come would be killed there.
Tradition al-Saduq (10th c.)
On the day
Later accounts tell of Wahb, a young Christian who embraced Islam with his mother and died at Karbala. The early record has a related, plainer story: Abdullah ibn Umayr al-Kalbi of Kufa, who came with his wife, Umm Wahb. After he fell she went out to sit beside his body, and was killed there — the one woman known to have died at Karbala.
After the battle
A tradition tells of an envoy from the Byzantine emperor who was present when Hussein’s head was brought before Yazid in Damascus, and who protested aloud. Christians, he said, made pilgrimage to a relic of the donkey Jesus had ridden — how could Muslims do this to the grandson of their own Prophet?
Tradition later accounts of Karbala
A modern voice
The Christian Arab writer Antoine Bara wrote a whole book on Hussein from a Christian point of view, reading Karbala alongside the Gospels and arguing that Hussein belongs to the conscience of all people, not only Muslims.
Today
Each year, at Arba‘een, millions walk to Karbala. Iraqi Christians — and Christian visitors from abroad — have been reported walking alongside the pilgrims or serving them food and water at the roadside.
A word of caution
Moving tributes to Hussein attributed to Christian writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle circulate widely online. We have not found them in any of those writers’ works, so we do not quote them here.
Wherever you are standing
The night of prayer, the friends who scatter, the cup that is not taken away — Karbala may feel strangely familiar. You do not need to set aside anything you believe to be moved by it. Christian writers and poets in the Arab world have honoured Hussein without ever ceasing to be Christians.
You might read the Najran story above as a model: two communities who disagreed about the deepest things, and still left with a promise of protection. And you may find that a Muslim friend is glad to hear what the cross means to you, just as you might be glad to hear what Karbala means to them.
The Qur’an asks you to honour Jesus and his mother. Reading the Gospel accounts of his last days — knowing that you understand their ending differently — can deepen that honour, and help you see why the cross means so much to your Christian neighbours.
The Prophet himself met Christians in Medina, disagreed with them openly, and protected their churches. Karbala is not a weapon for winning arguments with anyone. If it is anything, it is an invitation to the same courage and the same mercy.
Set the theology aside for a moment and two human beings remain, each of whom could have saved his life with a small concession — a nod to power, a quiet compromise — and would not make it. That is a choice ordinary people still face at work, in families and in public life.
You can admire courage without sharing anyone’s creed. Start with the question, and let the stories keep you company while you think about it. Chapter 12 puts the question to you directly.
Christians and Muslims will go on understanding these two deaths differently, and they should be free to. But on one thing their stories agree: there are truths a person may not sell, even for their own life. What remains is a question for you.
Pause & reflect
What would you refuse to surrender?
Both men spent their last night in prayer. Neither treated faith as something to be traded for safety; for both it was the ground they stood on. Whatever your faith, the question is whether it would hold your weight on the hardest night.
Rome could crucify and Damascus could besiege, but neither could make these men say what they did not believe. Conscience is often the quietest thing we own — and the one thing no one can take unless we hand it over. The principles Hussein stood for →
At the very end, both men were still trying to protect others: Jesus asking the soldiers to free his disciples, Hussein urging his companions into the safety of the night. Loyalty to people can be its own form of truth. Meet the people who stayed →
A careful answer before the high priest, an oath given to Yazid — either might have bought them time. Neither man paid for it with a lie. Most of us will never face that price, but we pay smaller versions of it every week. Why Hussein refused →