An Analytical Account of the First Christian Report of the Martyrdom of Imam al-Husayn

The present paper is concerned with analyzing the earliest Christian account of the martyrdom of Imam al-Husayn as reported by the Byzantine ambassador to the Umayyad court of Yazid. Based on an English academic translation of the original Syriac text (published in Liverpool, UK), it shows that the crime of putting Imam al-Husayn to the sword made the Roman ambassador of the Byzantium react against it. However, as the earlier Byzantine ambassador was killed at the behest of Yazid for raising his open objection against him for committing such an utterly grave crime, it seems that the second Byzantine ambassador never showed the slightest reaction in deeds but expressed his disgust and aversion in words, all expressed in a language that the majority of Arab Umayyads were ignorant to decipher or understand