Muharram the Month of Mourning

Salaam dear young friends, and hope you are all in the best of health. May God protect you from all calamities!

Well friends, today is the last day of the lunar hijri calendar, which means tomorrow Thursday marks the 1st of Muharram – the month of mourning and the month in which blood triumphed over swords to shatter tyranny and oppression.
For the information of readers of this column who live abroad, especially in the West, the Islamic Republic of Iran has fully prepared itself to greet Muharram.
We, the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt (Household) of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) do not welcome Muharram as the Arabs of Jahiliyya did, and as the reactionary Arab regimes of our own times do – with wine, gambling, feasts, womanizing, and all other un-Islamic frivolities, on the pretext of the start of the New Year of the Hijra calendar. We do it with black banners, with prayers, with supplications, with elegies, and with discourses that reaffirm our allegiance to the dynamic tenets of Islam.
How come, the 1st of Muharram is the new Islamic Year? Did the Prophet migrate from Mecca to Medina on this day? Does Islam allow Muslims to indulge in depravities – like the West does on Christmas and January 1 – but frown upon celebration of the Prophet’s birthday and other auspicious occasions, or mourning for the Prophet’s oppressed Ahl al-Bayt on anniversaries of their martyrdom?  
These and other questions flash across the minds of all conscientious people, irrespective of their religion, when they see the Salafists funding terrorists to shed innocent blood as their financiers dance and drink on the eve of Muharram, while calling "bid’a” or un-Islamic innovation, the expression of grief and natural beating of chests by mourners pouring tears on the calamity that befell Imam Husain (AS), his family and his steadfast companions.
The answers are obvious. The Prophet did not migrate to Medina from Mecca on the 1st of Muharram. It was on the eve of the 1st of Rabi al-Awwal that his auspicious Hijra took place. Unfortunately, the Second Caliph, although he accepted the proposal of the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali (AS), to date the Islamic calendar from the Hijra of the Prophet, stuck to the old pagan practice of starting the year on the 1st of Muharram instead of Rabi al-Awwal.
Our young friends, whether in Iran or in other lands, very well know that if it wasn’t for the sacrifice of Imam Husain (AS) at Karbala in 61 AH, including the martyrdom of his 6-month infant son, Ali Asghar (AS), in the state of acute thirst, Islam would have become extinct long ago. Thanks to the Internet, TV satellites, and other forms of modern means of communications, they have come to realize that it is the Ahl al-Bayt of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) who manifest the truth of Islam and have bequeathed humanitarian values to posterity; and not their stone-hearted foes in whose steps tread the terrorists of today, masquerading as Jihadists to deceive ignorant Muslims and to tarnish the image of Islam.
Thus, when we mourn Imam Husain (AS) and shun all festivities in Muharram, we are actually promoting humanitarian values in obedience to the commandments of God Almighty to stand firmly against all forms of oppression and deviation.
Ponder over these points dear friends, until we meet again next week on the threshold of the Day of Ashura.
everybody