Ali al-Asghar ibn Husayn

Abd-Allah ibn al-Husayn, also known as Ali al-Asghar, was the youngest son of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and the third Shia Imam. A young child, likely an infant, he was killed in the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, alongside his father, family members, and a small number of supporters, all of whom were massacred by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid, who first surrounded them for some days and cut off their access to the nearby river Euphrates. Abd-Allah is commemorated in Shia Islam as the quintessence symbol of the innocent victim. Birth and background Abd-Allah was the youngest son of Husayn ibn Ali, the third Shia Imam. His mother Rubab was the first wife of Husayn and the daughter of Imra' al-Qais ibn Adi, a chief of the Banu Kalb tribe. Husayn's , Abu Abd-Allah, probably refers to this son. His birthdate is not known with certainty, but he was a young child in the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, likely an infant. Late Shia sources commonly refer to Abd-Allah as Ali al-Asghar, as early as the Twelver jurist Ibn Shahrashub in his biographical . This might be a reference to the tradition in which Husayn expressed his wish to name all his sons Ali after his father Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shia Imam and the fourth caliph. Husayn indeed had two more sons named Ali, namely, Ali al-Akbar and Ali ibn al-Husayn Zayn al-Abidin. There are further confusions as some Shia and Sunni authors variously refer to one of these two sons as Ali al-Asghar. Among them are the polymath Abu Hanifa Dinawari and the fifteenth-century historian Hasan ibn Muhammad Qomi, the author of .