Ashura will be different this year - This year, the minbar carries a greater responsibility

As Muharram draws nearer, many of us are preparing in the ways we always do. Black clothes are being taken out, banners are being raised, programmes are being organised, and hearts are slowly entering the grief of Aba Abdillah (AS). Yet beneath all of this preparation, there is another feeling present this year... a feeling that this Muharram arrives carrying a weight unlike what we have known before. The hearts of believers have witnessed too much in recent months to enter Muharram as though the world beyond the walls of our centres has remained unchanged.

For this reason, many of us come into Muharram carrying a sincere hope and expectation from those who will sit upon the minbar. We look toward our scholars, our lecturers, our reciters, and the voices entrusted with speaking in the name of Karbala, with the hope that they will address the condition of the Ummah with clarity, wisdom, courage, and honesty. We hope they will help us understand what we are living through, not separate from Karbala, but through Karbala itself... because the school of Imam al-Husayn (AS) has always taught us how to read our times.

The purpose of the minbar has always been greater than narration alone. The minbar was never built merely to repeat history as memory. Its purpose is to preserve the living message of the Ahlulbayt (AS) inside every generation. It exists to awaken hearts, to shape minds, to correct deviation, to expose falsehood, to nurture conviction, and to prepare a community to stand with truth no matter the cost. If Karbala remains only in the past, then we have reduced it. Karbala was meant to become a lens through which we recognise truth whenever it rises, and falsehood whenever it reveals itself.

This year especially, many people need more than emotional mourning. They need tabyeen. They need understanding. They need language that explains what oppression looks like when it appears dressed in diplomacy, media narratives, power, and false moral claims. They need help understanding what silence means in times of massacre, what responsibility means in times of confusion, and what loyalty to the oppressed demands when the cost of speaking becomes heavy. These are not political side conversations separate from Muharram. These questions sit at the very heart of what Karbala asks from every believer.

There are subjects that deeply need to be spoken about from the minbar this Muharram: the Qur’anic duty of standing with the oppressed; the meaning of dignity in the path of Imam al-Husayn (AS); the spiritual danger of normalising oppression through silence; the psychology of Kufa and why so many recognised truth yet failed to defend it; the disease of loving comfort more than sacrifice; the responsibility of the believer in an age of propaganda; the meaning of active Intidhaar; the role of youth in carrying the burden of truth; and how the school of the Ahlulbayt (AS) trains people to become people of basirah before they become people of action.

The youth especially are watching closely. Many of them are carrying questions they have never voiced publicly. Many are trying to understand the brutality they have witnessed with their own eyes, and many are searching for a religious language that speaks honestly to what they feel in their hearts. If the minbar addresses them sincerely, it can anchor them for life. If it avoids the weight of their questions, others will answer in its place. This is why the responsibility of the scholar in our time is immense... because he is speaking to a generation wounded by what it has seen and searching for meaning inside that pain.