Sep 13, 2026 · 39 min · 20 segments
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Jiang XueqinHost
a plain in the Iraqi desert called Karbala, and a man named Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, standing at the head of 72 fighters facing an Umayyad army of somewhere between 4,000 and 30,000 soldiers, 72 versus 30,000, that is not a battle, that is a scheduled execution.
And Hussein heard all of it, weighed all of it, and rode to Karbala anyway, because in his own words, death with dignity was preferable to a life of submission to unjust authority.
The movement that grew from his martyrdom, Shia Islam, became one of the most powerful political forces in the Middle East for the next 13 centuries.
It is the single largest annual pilgrimage concentrated in one location on the face of this earth.
The man who lost in 680 CE is more powerful today than the armies that killed him.
Now I want to bring in Mu'tazza Mu'tahari, one of the founding intellectual architects of the Islamic Republic, a primary theorist who built the philosophical framework of the revolution.
He described the mechanism of martyrdom in a way that every Western strategic analyst should be required to read.
a plain in the Iraqi desert called Karbala, and a man named Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, standing at the head of 72 fighters facing an Umayyad army of somewhere between 4,000 and 30,000 soldiers, 72 versus 30,000, that is not a battle, that is a scheduled execution.
And Hussein heard all of it, weighed all of it, and rode to Karbala anyway, because in his own words, death with dignity was preferable to a life of submission to unjust authority.
The movement that grew from his martyrdom, Shia Islam, became one of the most powerful political forces in the Middle East for the next 13 centuries.
It is the single largest annual pilgrimage concentrated in one location on the face of this earth.
The man who lost in 680 CE is more powerful today than the armies that killed him.
Now I want to bring in Mu'tazza Mu'tahari, one of the founding intellectual architects of the Islamic Republic, a primary theorist who built the philosophical framework of the revolution.
He described the mechanism of martyrdom in a way that every Western strategic analyst should be required to read.
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