Via Dolorosa and The Road to Karbala

On Jesus and Hussain, Yesterday and Today

Good Friday arrives this year amidst unrelenting grief. It finds us mid-genocide in the homeland of Jesus himself, as bombs scar the soil his feet once blessed, slaughtering the faithful who dare still remember him. Tragically, this reality has become a familiar one. But in this shadowed moment, two paths converge anew. Over the past month, countless souls around the world have been introduced to another saint — a man who, like Jesus, looked empire directly in the eye, and dared to reject it. A man whose story now echoes across centuries and borders in the face of a new battle.

As this Easter weekend calls upon worshippers to remember Jesus (peace be upon him), so too do millions hold the affectionate remembrance of Imam Hussain ع, whose name is lovingly sung in elegies echoing across the ashen skies of Iran and Lebanon. I speak to friends in these countries who find comfort amidst bombardment in his remembrance. Meanwhile, the churches around my neighborhood prepare for Easter. Between these two poles, the two saints have occupied much of my mind lately: their beginnings, their ends, their faith, their fire. These thoughts, coupled with the grief of watching the world do what it does, have given way to a lingering truth. Some roads are walked not once, but endlessly. The Via Dolorosa and the road to Karbala are not merely ancient cartographies of sorrow, but living paths. Paths that are perhaps more alive today than ever, stained fresh with the blood of today’s truth-bearers in Gaza’s rubble, in Lebanon’s grief, and in Iran’s resilience.

What follows, then, is a meditation of sorts, as I dwell on the memory of and parallels between these blessed saints, and watch alongside the world as their true inheritors bear an ancient burden.

I feel it necessary to acknowledge first, though, that as a Muslim, I hold fast to the Islamic belief that Jesus ع was not crucified, but ascended to God. That said, I reference elements of the Christian narrative of the Passion here not as a statement of my own belief but with the idea that my Christian readers may relate. More than that, I do so for the sake of recognizing a fundamental truth: at heart, people of honest faith, who love the One, True, Just God, carry within them the same spirit. Let us embrace that truth, opening our hearts and minds to see that the Via Dolorosa and the road to Karbala are but one road, walked in different centuries, under different skies, by the same devotion. May we have the courage to walk it, too.

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In the metaphysical realm, every path is uniquely its own. But if there was ever a point where two might meet for a moment — briefly and beautifully touching, earth on earth, soul to soul — I would imagine it would be where the Via Dolorosa meets the road to Karbala.

The Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Sorrow,” traces the route Jesus took through Jerusalem as he, in the Christian narrative, journeyed toward the site where was to be crucified. Parallel to it winds the road to Karbala, where Imam Hussain’s small caravan of 72 was intercepted by the tyrant Yazid’s forces in 680 CE, forced to camp on hot, barren plains before being mercilessly slaughtered on Ashura, all for refusing to pledge allegiance to a tyrant. Both are pilgrimages of last resort, both end in what the cowardly call defeat. But defeat is a word invented by those who view this life as all there is. For knowers of truth, these trails aren’t relics of history, but living arteries of resistance, refreshed by today’s martyrs the world over.

What makes their stories so devastatingly beautiful is that neither saint walked their path of suffering as victims. Rather, their defiance in the face of empire cemented their posture as revolutionaries who understood that the scaffold, the cross, and the battlefield are not endings, but beginnings. And the revolutionary, as history so often reminds us, is always the victor. Not because he survives, but because he has declared to the oppressor that a life without dignity is not a life worth living — and in abandoning the earthly, they are rewarded with the everlasting. Via Dolorosa and the road to Karbala are not just geographic, then, but metaphysical.

Another parallel that captures this strikingly is the image of each saint carrying his own death. Jesus carried his cross, Hussain carried his burial shroud. One is the instrument of execution; the other, the garment of preparation. Both speak to the same consciousness: a soul so completely surrendered to God that death ceases to be something that happens to you and becomes something you give. The ignorant will call this passivity. The faithful know this is the highest form of agency a human being can exercise. The willingness to walk, eyes open, toward annihilation — all to fulfill a task bestowed upon them by God, and honor the truth. Hussain, after all, had to carry the weight of Islam’s existence, and Jesus the verification of divine mercy. In submitting to this, they embody what Kierkegaard referred to as ‘the knight of faith.’

“Remember me when the truth becomes alone, alone and sad.” - Imam Hussain

Both saints were also, in their final hours, achingly solitary. Jesus prayed alone in Gethsemane as his disciples slept, just as Hussain offered his afternoon prayer alone on the sands of Karbala, his companions fallen. This estrangement of the truth-bearer is not incidental in either narrative, but structural. A corrupt world cannot abide the uncorrupted; it will isolate them before it annihilates them. When the moment of Hussain’s martyrdom is recounted in sermons every Ashura, it is precisely the emphasis on his loneliness that brings out the most intense woe. Beyond the isolation imposed by the enemy, another added layer of grief is how betrayed both men were. Jesus was notoriously betrayed by Judas; Hussain was betrayed by the people of Kufa who had offered him sanctuary, only to yield eventually to Umayyad threats. It was not only the outwardly villainous who delivered their death certificates, but those in proximity to them.

More fundamentally, both saints were — in their blood and their belief — living, breathing declarations of divine truth. They were defined by their courage, yes, but also their unwavering compassion, devotion to goodness, and commitment to justice. In the Islamic tradition, Jesus is the Word and Spirit of God. Imam Hussain, as the bearer of wilayah, was the prophetic inheritance made flesh — he of whom the Prophet ﷺ said with boundless love: "Hussain is from me, and I am from Hussain." To move against either was to move against the very light of God on earth. In their blood, both men carried forth the legacies of their righteous ancestors. Most obviously, the roots of their holy origins began with their venerated mothers. You cannot speak of Hussain without Sayeda Fatima al-Zahra, just as you cannot speak of Jesus without Mary (peace be upon them all). In Islam, both Mary and Fatima are named as the greatest women of all creation. They are uniquely beloved to God for their righteousness, their purity, their iron-spined strength. They honored what it means to have children who serve God, even if death is the price. Thus, through their own proximity to the Divine, they laid the groundwork for their sons to accept the paths they took. When the time came, Mary stood at the foot of the cross, and Fatima, though already departed from this world, is reported in narrations to have been present on Ashura in spirit, grieving over the mutilated body of Hussain. In life and death, they were mirrors of each other. Mary, too, is believed to have ascended to Heaven, just as Jesus was. Fatima, too, was denied her rights and owed respect before her death. And just as both mothers were persecuted by their societies, they had to bear witness to their sons experiencing the same. But beyond this sorrow lies a greater beauty, too. Together, mother and son form the complete picture of divine love and the pain it requires in an unjust world. Each pair walk paths of extraordinary devotion and divine mission; Mary and Fatima are the light in darkness, Jesus and Hussain are the shadows cast by standing against tyrants. The mothers sorrowed sanctuaries, the sons martyrs of mercy. They constitute, together, the full spectrum of spiritual resistance.

Saints are beyond comparison in their holy stature, yes, but the parallels between yesterday’s oppression and today’s has never been more abundantly clear. The similarities are not merely poetic — they are, if anything, an enraging indictment. Our current moment forces all to bear witness to the clear divide between truth and falsehood. One is either with Christ or with his killers; with Yazid or with Hussain. There is no middle ground, no matter how one may attempt to twist it through the gross language of ‘neutrality’. The name of the empire may have changed, but the oppressor’s very essence, and even blueprint, has not. What led to the shedding of pure blood then has led to the same now. Today, the lovers of Christ in Jerusalem and its surrounding grounds are subjected to the brutality of another bloodthirsty, Godless empire. The lovers of Hussain, too, are subjected to evil at the same hands, only a border away from Karbala’s holy earth. The same arrogance, the same dehumanization, the same theological justifications drape themselves over these illegal wars, only more than a millennium later.

In Karbala, Yazid’s army cut off access to water from the Euphrates, so Hussain’s camp spent three days languishing in thirst before their slaughter. Children wept under the desert sun, only to then have their water-bearer, Abbas, Hussain’s loyal brother, slaughtered as he went to retrieve some. Today, the open-air prison that is Gaza remains starved of the same mercy, with tiny bodies running after empty water trucks as the world stands idly by. In Karbala, women and children were taken captive as their tents were set ablaze, thrown into the prisons of Damascus and killed. Today, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian children are pulled from rubble, their names read like a litany the world pretends not to hear.

“Death with dignity is better than a life of humiliation.”

There is one final injustice that empire always reserves for those it cannot truly defeat: mockery. Jesus and Hussain both were mocked and taunted cruelly before the oppressors dealt their final blow. Today’s innocent souls are spared no mercy either, be it at the hands of soldiers, politicians, or media — their deaths are not sufficient, their blood must be mocked, too. How treacherous and unforgiving is the repetition of history.

But it also reminds us: nobody lights a candle for Pilate. Nobody weeps for Yazid. Their names, where they survive at all, survive only as synonyms for cowardice and cruelty — footnotes in stories that were never theirs to begin with. It is Hussain who is wept for across continents every Ashura, it is Jesus whose name fills cathedrals every Easter morning. Such is the promise of a Just God, written into the very fabric of history: that those who stand for truth are not merely remembered — they live. And those who raise their hands against the light are, in the end, consumed by their own darkness. Today’s oppressors — the child-killing war-wagers — live on, yes, but we must find comfort in the truth that they too will meet their ugly end soon. They can mock and deceive and light the world on fire, but they will be dealt with eventually. And who better to avenge the fallen than those promised to return to us: the great grandson of Imam Hussain — Imam Mahdi — and Jesus, son of Mary.

And so, just as their masters were, so too are today’s truth-bearers victorious. They exemplify daily, on empty stomachs and scorched tongues, what it means to reflect the brilliance and bravery of Hussain. Hussain, who died thirsty and alone, but said “Far from us is humiliation.” In their courage, steadfastness, and faith, they remind us that the light of truth will never die, even if only a few recognize it lives. The Promise of God ensures that it will rise, recur, and reappear in the next generation, in the next resistance, in the next mother who watches her son walk toward the checkpoint and prays not for his safety, but for his courage — because she has learned, from the greatest mothers who ever lived, that some prayers are bigger than safety. The tragedy is that such bravehearted spirits constitute the few. And we, the many, the billions, have somehow convinced ourselves that remembrance of and love for these men lives in the heart alone — that it can be honored without being tested in action. That weeping for Hussain absolves us of the obligation to stand where he stood. That crossing ourselves on Good Friday is sufficient tribute to a man who carried a cross through a city that wanted him dead. It is not, never has been, and never could be sufficient. And so we must recognize something essential: the road is still open. The Via Dolorosa does not end in a museum, the road to Karbala is not a thing of the past. They are walked every day by the mothers who refuse to be silent, the journalists who film their own city’s destruction, the aid workers who stay when every instinct says flee, the young men who stand at checkpoints without weapons and do not lower their eyes. These are the true lovers of Jesus and Hussain. Not the ones who know the details of their stories best, but the ones who live them most faithfully.

The masses ask what it means to truly live. Today’s truth bearers need not ask. They know: the answer lies beneath the weight of the cross, and glimmers beneath the sun of Karbala.

Glory be to the beloveds of God, and those who live like them. Bloodsoaked feet on a beautiful path, they light our shadowed world. May we muster the courage to do the same.

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