Mahdawiyyah, Part 29 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 13· The House Beside the Grave, Part 5 We have spent four weeks on graves — where they are, why one was hidden, why a man moved to one. We have never once asked the obvious question. What is actually happening when a person stands at a grave? Ask most people and you get a shrug and something kind about closure, or remembering, or peace of mind. All of which is about you. And when you open our own books, the very first line of the chapter turns the question round and answers it the other way. إِنَّهُمْ يَأْنَسُونَ بِكُمْ فَإِذَا غِبْتُمْ عَنْهُمُ اسْتَوْحَشُوا — they take comfort in you; and when you are absent from them, they are left desolate. Eight words. Not the visit is good for your character. Not it is a healthy way to grieve. Both may be true and neither is what he said. He said: they take comfort in you. And the second word — istawhashu, desolation — is taken so seriously by this tradition that there is a prayer named after it, in the law books, for the first night in the grave. It has three names, and the third is the one to keep: the gift prayer. You are not there, you cannot be there, it is the middle of the night and there is nothing left you can do with your hands — so you stand up in your own house, pray two units, and send it. Then the evening does something it has been building towards for five weeks. It goes to the back of Kufa — where the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, looked at a piece of open ground and asked for it, years before it was his; where he came back from Siffin and stood on it and said what he saw; and where our books say the souls of the believers gather. Three moments. Three independent books. One man, one piece of ground. We do not explain that. We just arrive at it. And then the last third, which is why this session exists at all. The question underneath it Every single member of the House has an address. One of them does not. You can stand at Najaf. You can stand at Karbala, Kazimayn, Samarra, Tus, and at the flattened yard in Madinah. There is nowhere on this earth you can stand and say of the Imam of our Age: he is here, and I have come. So what do you do with a person you cannot visit — and what does that ask of you, on a Thursday, in a cemetery in this country? What the evening covers Two men thought this needed a chapter of its own. Before a word of the content: al-Kulayni and Ibn Qulawayh both stopped and gave visiting the graves a heading. Somebody sat down and gathered what was said about it. That is not custom being tolerated — it is a subject. He went every Thursday. The Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, went out to al-Baqi' every Thursday evening with a crowd of his companions — and what he said to them when he got there is the hardest sentence in the session. His daughter, peace be upon her, went twice a week. Her son went. And a prayer book you may have on a shelf at home tells you, eight hundred years later, to go on a Thursday. Two books give this prayer, and they do not give the same one. One says the Verse of the Throne and the Chapter of Ordainment. The other says the Chapter of Sincerity and the Chapter of Rivalry. So we stop and ask the obvious question — what is that about? — and the answer turns out to be the most useful twenty minutes in the evening: what a jurist actually does with a pile of reports, why the correctness of a ruling rests on him and not on you, and who stands behind him. That last one is answered in a letter, by the Imam of our Age, in one sentence. A man in living memory who would shame most of us. The border into Iraq was shut, so he hid inside a concealed crate on a tea lorry and was smuggled across in it. Kazimayn, then Karbala — and then he set out for Najaf on foot, the whole way. Recorded by a teacher of ours about a family he knew. The tower, and the man with no name on anything. Come, let us build a tower, and let us make ourselves a name. The Qur'an has that story twice, and the second time the building comes down from underneath rather than from above. Against which: the one member of this House for whom no mason has ever been paid to cut a name. And the answer the evening gives is not consolation. It is an instruction.

In this session

• Sermon: Why People Go?📖 Read
• Maqtal: The Stone With No Name▶ Watch📖 Read
• Nohe/Nasheed: Where Is Your Brother?▶ Watch📖 Read
• Ziyarah: Ziyārat Āl-e Yāsīn (The Visitation/Salutation of the Family of Yāsīn▶ Watch📖 Read