There are stories that stir so much in us that the harder task is not learning what happened, but learning what to do with our own hearts afterward. The story of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him), the beloved grandson of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, is exactly that kind of story. When you read of the betrayal, the loneliness, the thirst, the gruesome martyrdom at Karbala, something rises in you. Grief rises. So does anger. And the question that follows is honest and urgent: where do these emotions belong, and where is the line a believer must not cross?
This is not a chapter that adds heat to a subject already heavy with heat. It is a chapter about how to feel rightly. How a Sunni Muslim is to love al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) without limit, hate the injustice done to him without poisoning the soul, and carry both of these in a heart that stays anchored in the creed and turned toward Allah. The companions and the family of the Prophet ﷺ were people of maximum love and maximum sincerity. To honor them is not only to mourn them. It is to let their lives govern our love and our hate.
Why we come to him after so many others
The series that gave us this account began with the very first people to accept Islam, told in the order of their belief. The first family of the Prophet ﷺ was honored at the very start, their virtue and their value made plain. So a reader might wonder why al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) is reached only now, after so much else has been told. The answer is that this season turns to the young companions, the children of companions, and builds the story out from their vantage point. It happens that the first of these young ones are the beloved members of the household of the Prophet ﷺ, and we are tracing their lives.
It also happens that this telling arrives with the month of Muharram, and with Muharram comes Karbala, and with Karbala come heated emotions, hateful comments, tension. The path taken here refuses all of that. The lives of these noble and blessed people are not occasions for the spilling of bile. They are occasions to draw out lessons, to increase our faith, and to learn from Allah Himself a redefined notion of victory and success.
What victory really means
This is the first thing the death of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) teaches, and it reaches far beyond his story. We tend to measure victory by who is left standing in this world. Allah measures it differently. A person can be killed in this life while seeking out the ideals of truth and virtue for the sake of Allah, and that person is victorious. A person can stand triumphant in this world, successful and unharmed, on the path of Allah, and that person is victorious too. The deciding thing is not survival. It is whether one's life and death were given to Allah.
By that measure al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) did not lose at Karbala. By that measure those who killed him did not win. There is a way of seeing in which the murdered grandson of the Prophet ﷺ was victorious over every one of his killers, because his death was martyrdom. The righteous dead are received into Paradise. Their killers, dying unrepentant in their crime, meet a miserable ending in this life and a more miserable punishment in the next. This is not a comfort we invented to soften a wound. It is the lens Allah gives, and once you look through it, you can hold grief and hope at the same time without either one canceling the other.
It is the same lens worth turning on our own age. When we watch the people of Gaza losing their lives over years of killing, the question of who has truly won is not answered by counting the standing and the fallen. It is answered by whose life was poured out for the sake of Allah. Karbala is not a sealed event in a history book. It is a way of seeing that travels into every age of injustice and refuses to let the believer call the martyr a loser.
The first question: do we curse Yazid?
When the martyrdom of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) is told, a question comes up again and again, and it deserves a clear answer rather than a rushed one. What is the Sunni position on cursing the man in whose reign this crime occurred?
Begin with what is not in dispute. Yazid ibn Muawiyah is not a companion of the Prophet ﷺ. He is not a man of virtue. He is not someone we love. He carries a terrible record: the killing of al-Husayn, complicity in his murder that no honest reading of history can fully wash away, terror rained down upon the people of Madinah with many killed, terror brought to Makkah itself. A person who has faith does not love such a man. When Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal was told by his son that some people claimed to love Yazid, he answered with disbelief: does anyone who has faith, does anyone who loves Allah, love Yazid? How could a believer love a man with so much crime on his hands, with such a legacy of tyranny? That sets the floor of the discussion. There is no path to loving him, and no scheme of mind, however cleverly arranged, that can absolve him entirely of the blood of al-Husayn.
So why, then, is there any difference among Sunni scholars over cursing him? The difference is not about Yazid's worth. It is about the act of cursing itself, and about a principle of caution. Imam Ahmad, when asked why he did not curse Yazid, did not answer by defending the man. He answered, when have you ever seen your father curse anyone? His refraining was the refraining of a man who did not curse, not the silence of a man who admired the cursed.
Other great scholars of the same school gave a different and considered reason for holding back the curse. The crime is terrible. Yet the door it could open is dangerous. We know from the example of those who repented late in life, even after grave sins, that a person's final state can change. The principle these scholars reached for was a principle of safety: we do not know with certainty that the man did not repent before he died, and a curse named upon an individual is a heavy and final thing. Better, they said, to refrain. Not out of love for him. Not out of any softness toward the murder of al-Husayn. Only out of caution before the unseen.
And it must be said plainly that there was no unanimity even here. Among the same scholars of the school of Imam Ahmad, there were those who held cursing Yazid to be permissible and wrote at length defending it. Others, surveying the long historical record, gave what amounts to a conditional curse: if he did not repent, if nothing at the end of his life changed, then let the curse fall. The point worth carrying out of all of this is simple. You do not have to whitewash the crime, and you do not have to pronounce the curse, to stand squarely inside how Sunni scholars handled this. The majority refrained. Some cursed. But none absolved him, and none used the discussion of restraint to belittle or downplay the murder of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him). Hate has its boundaries. The crime keeps its full weight.
The second matter: how far do we love Husayn?
If hating Yazid is governed by caution, loving al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) has no such ceiling. This love is part of our faith.
Consider what a Sunni Muslim does in every prayer. At the end of the salah we send peace and blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ and upon his family. To utter those words five times a day and yet feel nothing for al-Husayn would be a strange deficiency, the kind that calls the whole state of one's heart into question. The Prophet ﷺ told us that Allah loves those who love his family, and he commanded the ummah to love them as we love him ﷺ, which is to say, to love them for his sake and for the sake of Allah. There is no contradiction buried in that, because Allah loves what the Prophet ﷺ loves, and the Prophet ﷺ loves what Allah loves. The two loves run in the same direction.
Strip away the martyrdom entirely and the love would still stand. Picture only what the books of history record of ordinary days: the Prophet ﷺ lifting this child, kissing him, holding him, the plain joy the boy brought into his grandfather's life. Remember who his grandfather was, who his mother Fatimah and his father Ali were (may Allah be pleased with them). That alone would be reason enough to feel a deep attachment to al-Husayn. But the martyrdom is also there, the terrible crime committed against him in the very history of this ummah, and so the heart is pulled in every direction at once. We love him. We say it without embarrassment. We attach ourselves to him.
The fear that some carry is that such love, pressed too far in the reading of Karbala, might spill past the boundaries of creed. So they ask whether we should dim the story down, soften it, hold it at a careful distance so that grief does not curdle into something forbidden. The answer is not to dim the love. It is to keep it pointed where it belongs. We venerate al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) as a pious human being, beloved and honored, a member of the household of the Prophet ﷺ whom Allah and His Messenger loved. That love is safe precisely because it knows what he is: a servant of Allah we are blessed to love, not a deity, not a partner in worship. Kept there, the love can be as deep as the heart can make it, and the deeper it runs the better.
Commemoration, and the example of Uhud
The third matter is how this memory should be held, and here the example of the Prophet ﷺ himself is the surest guide.
There is the day of Ashura, with its own established virtues. When the Prophet ﷺ came to Madinah and found the people fasting in connection with the deliverance of Musa (peace be upon him) from his enemy, he affirmed that fast. So we fast, and there is real virtue in the day. At the same time, the martyrdom of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) disturbs us, stirs us, troubles the soul. The genuine question is how to hold both: the fast tied to the deliverance of Musa, the virtue of the day, and alongside it the painful sacrifice at Karbala, without forcing one to silence the other, and without crossing from honoring the righteous into a devotional commemoration of death.
For this, look at how the Prophet ﷺ and the companions carried their own deepest grief. Uhud was a shattering loss. They lived for years afterward. Yet there was no annual ceremony of mourning for Uhud, no yearly commemoration of the martyrs of that day, no devotional anniversary built around the killing of Hamzah (may Allah be pleased with him). And still Uhud was vividly present in their memory and in their hearts. It surfaced as life unfolded. Companions would suddenly weep while eating a meal, because they would look down at their food and their clothing and remember the day when there was not even enough cloth to cover the body of Hamzah after he was martyred. The memory moved them deeply. It was carried, honored, woven into how they understood every later trial. It was simply not turned into an annual devotional rite.
That is the balance offered to us. We do not hold devotional commemorations of death, not for the passing of the Prophet ﷺ whom we love above all, not for the tragedy of Uhud, not for any of the great wounds of our history. But we keep these tragedies in living memory, and we let them speak to the present. None of this minimizes Karbala. The martyrdom of al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) is not a small thing. It is among the greatest tragedies ever to strike this ummah. By Allah, we love him, and we draw near to him, and we keep the memory burning, while keeping it inside the bounds the Prophet ﷺ himself observed.
A grave, and a transgression answered with transgression
There is a small story worth pausing on, because it shows what goes wrong when emotion is let off its leash. It was told by a father in his eighties, a man who had watched a great deal of history pass before his eyes, who remembered some people coming to the grave of Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) and insulting Abu Bakr and Umar (may Allah be pleased with them). That is, on its own, egregious and disgusting. But then another group, hearing the insult, answered it by insulting in return, with words so vile they could not even be repeated.
Sit with what happened there. A transgression was met with a transgression. Two wrongs, and in the exchange a great deal was lost on both sides. This is the danger that has always shadowed Karbala and everything around it: that love and grief, righteous in themselves, get spent as fuel for cursing, division, and sin. The cure is not to feel less. It is to govern what we feel. To channel love and hate in a way that is spiritually productive, that stays within the boundaries, and that lifts us toward Allah rather than dragging us into the gutter of mutual abuse. That is the whole project of a Sunni heart between love and hate: not to numb the emotions, but to discipline them until they serve the soul.
What loving Husayn and hating Yazid asks of our faith
It would be easy to read all of this as a lesson in balance, a tidy intellectual settlement, and walk away merely informed. That would waste it. The real question this whole matter puts to you is about the state of your own heart before Allah, and what your love and your hate are actually for.
Begin with love, because it is the larger thing. You are asked to love al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) and the household of the Prophet ﷺ, and to love them for the sake of Allah and for the sake of His Messenger. This is the secret the discussion turns on. Love that is truly for Allah is safe, fruitful, and unlimited, because it is pointed at Him. Love that drifts loose from Allah, that becomes about a faction or an identity or a grievance, curdles. So examine your own loves. The people you admire, the causes you weep for, the loyalties you carry: are they tethered to Allah, loved because He loves what is good, or have they become little idols of feeling, loved for their own sake? Tie your love back to Allah, and it can be as deep as the sea. Cut it loose from Him, and even love of the righteous can lead a person astray.
Then there is hate, and here the lesson is harder and more humbling. You are allowed, even required, to hate injustice and to refuse to love a tyrant. But notice how the scholars governed their own hatred: with caution, with restraint, with a refusal to let righteous anger spill into cursing and sin. They hated the crime and would not minimize it, yet many held their tongues from cursing the criminal, out of fear before the unseen judgment of Allah. There is a discipline in that which most of us lack entirely. Our age makes hatred cheap and loud. The believer is asked to make it rare, measured, and clean. Ask whether your anger at wrongdoing draws you nearer to Allah and keeps you just, or whether it has become a license to transgress, to insult, to answer one sin with another. The grave of Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) and the ugly words traded over it are a warning written for us.
And take from al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him) the redefinition of victory, because you will need it. Most lives do not end in worldly triumph. Most good deeds go unrewarded by the world. Sooner or later you will give something for the sake of Allah and see no return for it, or stand for the truth and watch it cost you. In those moments the world will whisper that you have lost. Karbala answers that whisper forever. The one who is killed seeking the truth for Allah is victorious. The one who suffers for His sake has not been defeated. What looks like loss in the eyes of people may be, in the record of Allah, the very thing that wins. Let that settle the fear that doing right will leave you with nothing, and let it free you to act.
So carry one concrete thing out of this into an ordinary day. Send your peace and blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ and his family in your next prayer with a heart that means it, and feel, even briefly, your love for al-Husayn (may Allah be pleased with him). Refuse one moment of cheap hatred, hold your tongue from one insult you could justify, and keep your anger clean and for Allah alone. And the next time you do good and the world ignores it, remember that your Lord does not measure as the world measures. May Allah be pleased with al-Husayn, and with the household of the Prophet ﷺ, send His peace and blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ and his family, allow us to connect to their spirit of sacrifice and carry it in our own lives, and guide us to the righteousness that causes Him to be with us.
This chapter follows Dr. Omar Suleiman's discussion of loving al-Husayn (RA) and the Sunni perspective on Yazid, Karbala, and Ashura in his series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The transcript cites no specific Qur'anic verse, so none is quoted here; the themes of victory, martyrdom, and the love of the Prophet's household are presented in prose. Where the histories carry more than one report, the most widely transmitted has been followed.