Edward G. Browne describes his perception of mourning for Imam Hussain (a.s.) as follows:

“…a reminder of the blood-stained field of Kerbela, where the grandson of the Apostle of God fell at length, tortured by thirst and surrounded by the bodies of his murdered kinsman, has been at any time since then sufficient to evoke, even in the most lukewarm and heedless, the deepest emotion, the most frantic grief, and an exaltation of spirit before which pain, danger, and death shrink to unconsidered trifles.

Yearly, on the tenth day of Muharram the tragedy is rehearsed in Persia, in India, in Turkey, in Egypt, wherever a Shi’ite community or colony exists; and who has been a spectator, though of alien faith, of these ta’ziyas without experiencing within himself something of what they mean to those whose religious feeling finds in them its supreme expression? As I write it all comes back: the wailing chant, the sobbing multitudes, the white raiment red with blood from self-inflicted wounds, the intoxication of grief and sympathy.”

Edward G. Browne

[A Literary History of Persia, London, 1919, p.227]

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