The Sheites seek to hide their Treachery
There have been attempts by certain writers to absolve the Shîah from the crime of deserting Hussain. Some find an excuse for them in Ibn Ziyâds blockade of Kûfah. S. H. M. Jafri writes in his book The Origins and Early Developments of Shiah Islam:
it should be noted again that the blockade of all the roads coming into Kûfa and its vicinity made it almost impossible for the majority of those Shîîs of Kûfa who were in hiding, and also for those residing in other cities like Basra.
This explanation of their desertion does not seem plausible when one considers the large number (18 000) of those who had taken the bayah at the hands of Muslim ibn Aqîl. Ibn Ziyâd, as we have seen, entered Kûfah with only 17 men. Even the force that he dispatched to engage the party of Sayyidunâ Hussain at Karbalâ consisted of only 4000 men.
Furthermore, that force was not recruited specifically for Karbalâ; it was only passing through Kûfah on its way to fight the Daylamites. It is not at all credible to assume that Ibn Ziyâd was able to cow the Kûfans into submission with forces such as these, whom they outnumbered by far. It was rather their own treacherousness and fickleness that led them to abandon Sayyidunâ Hussain. This can be clearly seen in the manner they deserted Muslim ibn Aqîl.
There is also the tendency of claiming that those who deserted Sayyidunâ Hussain were not of the Shîah. Jafri writes:
of those who invited Hussain to Kûfa, and then those 18,000 who paid homage to his envoy Muslim b. Aqîl, not all were Shîîs in the religious sense of the term, but were rather supporters of the house of Alî for political reasons - a distinction which must be kept clearly in mind in order to understand the early history of Shîî Islam.
Jafri' s motive in excluding the deserters of Sayyidunâ Hussain from the ranks of the religious (as opposed to the political) supporters of the house of Sayyidunâ Alî is quite transparent. He is clearly embarrassed by the fact that it was the Shîah themselves who abandoned their Imâm and his family after inviting him to lead them in revolt. What leads us to reject this distinction between religious and political supporters is the fact that Sayyidunâ Hussain himself, on more than one occasion, referred to the Kûfans as his Shîah.
There are also the numerous references to the people of Kûfah as the followers (albeit capricious followers) of his father and brother. And were we to assume that many, or even most of them were not Shîah in the religious sense, the question which next presents itself is: Where were the real Shîah when their Imâm required their help?
Were they only that handful who emerged from Kûfah? It is strange that while there is so much reluctance on the part of the Shîah to accept the deserters of Kûfah as their own, they are quite proud and eager to identify themselves with the movement of the Tawwâbûn *. The speeches made at the inception of the movement of the Tawwâbûn very clearly prove that they were the same people who invited Sayyidunâ Hussain and then deserted him.
Their very name is indicative of their guilt in this regard. The attempt by the Shîah to absolve themselves from the crime of deserting Sayyidunâ Hussain is therefore at best nothing more than pathetic.
note
Four years after the martyrdom of Hazrat Hussein (ra) the Shîah of Kûfah attempted to make amends for their desertion of the family of Rasûlullâh . There emerged a group of Kûfans calling themselves the Tawwâbûn (Penitents) who made it their duty to wreak vengeance upon the killers of Hussain. On their way to Syria in pursuit of Ibn Ziyâd they passed by Karbalâ, the site of Sayyidunâ Hussain' s grave, where they raised a great hue and cry, and spent the night lamenting the tragedy which they allowed to happen four years earlier. Had they only displayed that same spirit of compassion for Hussain when he was so much in need of it the history of Islâm might have taken a different course.
