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What Is Muharram? The Full Story of the Month, Ashura, and Karbala
Muharram is the first month of the Islamic year, one of the four months in which fighting was forbidden, and the month in which the Prophet's grandson was killed on a battlefield. That is a lot for one month to hold — and it is why Sunnis spend it fasting and Shia Muslims spend it mourning. Here is the whole story, from the pre-Islamic calendar to the processions you can see today.
Two People, Same Month, Completely Different Experience
Somewhere in the world this Muharram, a Muslim will wake up before dawn, eat a small meal, and fast quietly through the tenth day. He might not mention it to anyone. By sunset it is over, and the month passes without much else.
Somewhere else, another Muslim will spend the first ten days of the same month in black. There will be gatherings every night. There will be poetry recited until people weep. On the tenth day there will be a procession through the street, and it will be the emotional centre of her entire year.
Same month. Same date. Same religion.
If you have ever wondered what is going on there — or if you have only ever seen one of those two Muharrams and assumed it was the whole thing — this article is the full explanation.
And it turns out you cannot explain either one without going all the way back. Not just to 680 CE, but to before Islam existed at all.
Three Words, So You Are Not Lost
Three words are going to come up constantly, and they get mixed up all the time. They are three completely different kinds of thing.
Muharram is a month. The first month of the Islamic year — think of it the way you think of January. It comes round every year.
Ashura is a day. The tenth day of that month. The word just means "the tenth."
Karbala is a place. A patch of flat ground in Iraq, near the Euphrates river.
And here is how they connect. In the year 680, the Prophet's grandson was killed at Karbala — on Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram.
So: Karbala is what happened. Muharram is when it happened. Ashura is the exact day.
People blur them together because after 680 the month and the event became almost impossible to separate. But Muharram was already a sacred month for centuries before any of this — which is a large part of why the killing landed the way it did.
First, Two Small Things
(SAW) appears after the Prophet Muhammad's name. It stands for sallallahu alayhi wa sallam — "sal-lal-LAA-hu a-LAY-hi wa sal-LAM" — meaning "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."
Muslims do not only write it. They say it, every time they hear his name, as a small repeated act of love. If you are not Muslim you are welcome to say it too, and there is no obligation either way — but please do not treat it as something to skip over.
(RA) does the same job for his companions and family: radiyallahu anhu or anha, "may Allah be pleased with him / with her."
How This Article Handles the Hard Parts
This piece covers something Sunnis and Shia experience very differently, so it is worth saying up front how it is written.
Each tradition is described in its own terms, from what its own scholars say, and neither is presented as the other's mistake. Where they genuinely disagree, the article says so instead of splitting the difference.
NoorIlm is written from a Sunni frame. That is not hidden here. The fiqh sections of this site follow Sunni scholarship, and this article's section on the rulings of fasting does too. The section on Shia observance is descriptive: this is what is done, and this is the reasoning given for it.
Where a claim could not be verified it was cut, not softened. That applies especially to the enormous body of popular material about Ashura, much of which classical scholars themselves identified as fabricated. You will see that come up directly.
Part One: The Month
Muharram Is Where the Year Starts
Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar. When Muslims say "Islamic New Year," they mean the first of Muharram.
But it is a very quiet new year. There is no celebration prescribed for it, no special prayer, no greeting the Prophet (SAW) taught for it. The year simply turns over.
The calendar itself is lunar, so it does not track the seasons. Twelve lunar months come to about 354 days, eleven days short of a solar year, which is why Muharram — like Ramadan — moves backwards through the Gregorian calendar by roughly eleven days annually. Over a lifetime it drifts through every season.
The Name Is the Whole Point
Muharram is not a neutral label like "January." It is an Arabic passive participle from the root h-r-m, and it means forbidden, or made sacred — the same root that gives you haram (forbidden), ihram (the pilgrim's consecrated state), and al-Masjid al-Haram (the Sacred Mosque in Makkah).
So the month is literally called "The Forbidden One."
Forbidden for what? Fighting.
The Four Sacred Months
The Quran states it plainly:
Quran“Indeed, the number of months with Allah is twelve months in the register of Allah from the day He created the heavens and the earth; of these, four are sacred. That is the correct religion, so do not wrong yourselves during them.”
The Quran does not name the four there. The Prophet (SAW) did, in a sermon during the Farewell Pilgrimage, and it is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari:
Hadith“Time has come round to its state on the day Allah created the heavens and the earth. The year is twelve months, four of which are sacred: three consecutive — Dhul-Qa'dah, Dhul-Hijjah and Muharram — and Rajab of Mudar, which comes between Jumada and Sha'ban.”
Three of them run back to back: Dhul-Qa'dah, Dhul-Hijjah, Muharram — months eleven, twelve and one. Rajab, month seven, sits on its own on the other side of the year.
Why That Mattered So Much in Arabia
This is the part that gets skipped, and without it none of the rest lands properly.
Pre-Islamic Arabia had no state. No police, no courts with enforcement power, no standing authority above the tribe. Security came from your tribe's willingness to avenge you, which meant feuds could run for generations, and travel outside your own territory was genuinely dangerous.
The sacred months were the workaround. For four months a year, by an ancient and near-universally respected convention, fighting stopped. Blood feuds paused. Caravans moved. The great fairs happened. Pilgrims travelled to Makkah and back unharmed.
Look at the placement again and you can see the design. Dhul-Qa'dah — travel to the pilgrimage. Dhul-Hijjah — the pilgrimage itself. Muharram — travel home safely afterwards.
That was the entire security architecture of the Arabian year, and it worked because everyone honoured it.
Which is exactly what makes the later part of this article so difficult.
The Loophole, and Its Abolition
Of course people found a way around it.
The workaround was called nasi', and it meant declaring that this year, the sacred month has been moved. You want to keep a war going through Muharram? Announce that Muharram is not sacred this year, and Safar is instead. You have kept four sacred months on paper. You have kept none of them in practice.
The Quran calls this out with unusual force:
Quran“Indeed, the postponing of restriction within sacred months is an increase in disbelief by which those who have disbelieved are led further astray. They make it lawful one year and unlawful another year, to correspond to the number made unlawful by Allah — and thus make lawful what Allah has made unlawful.”
Now go back and read the first line of that hadith again: "Time has come round to its state on the day Allah created the heavens and the earth."
That is the Prophet (SAW) announcing that the manipulation is finished. The calendar has been reset to its true position. The sacred months are where they belong and they stay there.
Why the Year Starts Here
Here is a detail most Muslims do not know.
The Islamic era counts from the hijrah — the Prophet's migration from Makkah to Madinah. Sahih al-Bukhari records the reasoning explicitly:
Hadith“The companions did not date from the day the Prophet was sent as a Messenger, nor from the day of his death, but from the day of his arrival at Madinah.”
The system was formally instituted under the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), around 17 AH / 638 CE — six years after the Prophet's death, when a growing administration needed a way to date documents.
But notice the oddity. The Prophet arrived in Madinah in Rabi' al-Awwal, the third month. Yet year one begins at Muharram, two months earlier.
The era was reset around a new event. The year was left starting where the Arabs had always started it. Nobody rebuilt the calendar from scratch when they did not have to — a small, very characteristic piece of early Islamic pragmatism.
"The Month of Allah"
One more thing about the month before we get to the tenth day.
The Prophet (SAW) gave Muharram a title he gave no other month:
Hadith“The most excellent fast after Ramadan is the fast of Allah's month, al-Muharram. And the most excellent prayer after what is prescribed is the prayer during the night.”
Shahrullah — the month of Allah. Every month belongs to Allah, so the phrase is doing something: it is singling this one out.
And note what the hadith actually recommends. Fasting in Muharram, generally — not only on one day. Extra voluntary fasting anywhere in the month falls under this.
Part Two: Ashura, the Tenth Day
The Name
Ashura comes from ashara, the Arabic word for ten. It is simply "the tenth" — the tenth of Muharram.
For Sunni Muslims it is the single most significant day of the month, and it is significant for a reason that has nothing to do with Karbala. Its history has layers, and they are worth taking one at a time, because each layer changed what the day meant.
Layer One: It Was Already Being Fasted Before Islam
Start with the fact almost nobody expects.
The Quraysh — the pagan tribe of Makkah, the Prophet's own tribe, the people who would later persecute him — already fasted the tenth of Muharram before Islam. A'ishah (RA) narrates it in Sahih al-Bukhari:
Hadith“Quraysh used to fast the day of Ashura in the days of ignorance, and the Messenger of Allah ordered it to be fasted, until the fasting of Ramadan was prescribed. Then the Messenger of Allah said: whoever wishes may fast it, and whoever wishes may leave it.”
That single narration contains two separate layers, so hold the second half for a moment.
Why the Quraysh fasted it is not stated with certainty in the sources, and this article is not going to guess. What matters is that the day already existed as a day of fasting, in Makkah, before revelation.
Layer Two: Madinah, and Musa
Then the Prophet (SAW) migrated to Madinah, and found a Jewish community there fasting the same day. Ibn Abbas (RA) narrates what happened:
Hadith“The Prophet came to Madinah and saw the Jews fasting on the day of Ashura. He asked them about it. They said: this is a good day, the day on which Allah rescued the Children of Israel from their enemy, so Musa fasted it. The Prophet said: we have more claim over Musa than you. So he fasted it, and ordered that it be fasted.”
The event being commemorated is the one the Quran describes:
Quran“And We took the Children of Israel across the sea, and Pharaoh and his soldiers pursued them in tyranny and enmity until, when drowning overtook him, he said: I believe that there is no deity except that in whom the Children of Israel believe, and I am of the Muslims.”
Pause on the Prophet's reply, because it is one of the most quietly radical sentences in the hadith literature.
"We have more claim over Musa than you."
He is not distancing Islam from Musa. He is claiming him. In the Islamic understanding, Musa (Moses) was a Muslim prophet preaching the same fundamental message, and the Muslims are his rightful heirs. So a day marking Musa's deliverance is not a foreign holiday to be avoided. It is theirs.
Then he fasted it. And ordered others to.
Layer Three: From Obligatory to Optional
Go back to A'ishah's narration. When Ramadan was prescribed as an obligation, the ruling on Ashura changed: "whoever wishes may fast it, and whoever wishes may leave it."
So Ashura went from being commanded to being recommended but voluntary — which is exactly where it sits today.
That transition matters practically. Nobody sins by not fasting Ashura. It is an opportunity, not a duty. If you are ill, travelling, or simply cannot, there is nothing owed.
Layer Four: The Ninth Day, and a Plan He Never Saw
The last layer is the most poignant thing in the whole subject.
Ibn Abbas (RA) narrates that when the Prophet (SAW) fasted Ashura and instructed the Muslims to fast it, his companions pointed out something:
Hadith“Messenger of Allah, it is a day which the Jews and Christians hold in high esteem. He said: when the next year comes, if Allah wills, we will fast the ninth. But the Messenger of Allah died before the next year came.”
He intended to add the ninth day, so that Muslim practice would be recognisably its own — sharing the honour given to the day, without the practice being identical.
And he did not live to do it.
That last line — he died before the next year came — is why Sunni Muslims today fast the ninth alongside the tenth. They are completing an intention he stated and never got to carry out. It is a small thing that carries a lot.
What You Actually Get
The reward is reported by Abu Qatada (RA) in Sahih Muslim. The Prophet (SAW) was asked about fasting the day of Ashura, and said:
Hadith“It expiates the sins of the preceding year.”
One day, a year of sins. That is an extraordinary offer and it deserves two pieces of honesty attached to it, both of which are standard in Sunni scholarship rather than caveats invented here.
It refers to minor sins. The classical position is that major sins require actual repentance — you do not clear them by fasting a day.
It does not cover what you owe other people. Rights owed to human beings — money taken, harm done, reputations damaged — are not settled between you and Allah alone. Those you have to make right with the person.
With those in place, the offer is still remarkable. One day.
How to Actually Fast It
Practically, for a Sunni Muslim:
The best practice is the ninth and the tenth together. This is the majority recommendation, and it acts on the intention in the hadith above.
If you can only fast one day, fast the tenth. The tenth is the day the reward is attached to.
Some scholars permit the tenth and eleventh as an alternative pairing if the ninth was missed.
It is a normal voluntary fast: from dawn (fajr) to sunset (maghrib), with the intention formed in the heart. Nothing else is required. There is no special prayer for Ashura, no prescribed extra ritual, nothing to memorise.
What Has No Basis at All
Now the part that is genuinely useful, because there is more folklore attached to Ashura than to almost any other day in the calendar.
You will find claims circulating that Ashura is the day Adam was forgiven, the day the Ark came to rest, the day Ibrahim was saved from the fire, the day Yusuf was reunited with Ya'qub — a long list of prophetic events all stacked onto one date.
Classical Sunni scholars identified these as fabricated. Ibn Taymiyyah and the Hanbali hadith scholar Ibn Rajab both examined the reports and concluded that the narrations singling out Ashura for these virtues, and for practices like applying kohl, dyeing with henna, and taking a special bath, are mawdu' — forged.
Ibn Taymiyyah made the same judgement about the practices themselves: cooking special dishes for the day, wearing new clothes, special bathing, extra prayers particular to Ashura. His argument is a simple one, and it is the standard Sunni argument. The Prophet (SAW) did not do these things. Neither did the caliphs after him. Neither did the founders of the four schools of law.
Which leaves exactly one recommended act for the day, and it is the one that is actually established: fast it.
That is a slightly deflating answer, and it is the honest one.
Part Three: Karbala
Now the other Muharram.
Everything above happened during the Prophet's lifetime or before it. What follows happened fifty years after his death, and it changed what this month means for a very large number of Muslims.
61 AH
Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, ruling from Damascus, designated his son Yazid as his heir in 676 CE. That was the first hereditary succession in Islamic history, and it was a break with everything the previous fifty years had done — a subject the caliphs article covers in full.
Mu'awiya died in April 680. Yazid demanded pledges of allegiance.
Husayn ibn Ali (RA) refused.
He was the Prophet's grandson: son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatimah (RA), the Prophet's daughter. He had been a child in the Prophet's household. There are people alive in 680 who remember watching the Prophet (SAW) carry him.
He left Madinah for Makkah.
The Letters
Letters started arriving from Kufa in Iraq — reportedly a great many — inviting him to come and lead them against Yazid.
He sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil ahead to see whether the support was real. At first it appeared to be; large numbers pledged allegiance.
Then Yazid appointed Ubaydullah ibn Ziyad as governor of Kufa, and Ibn Ziyad broke the movement with a combination of threats and money. Muslim ibn Aqil was pushed into a premature rising, abandoned by nearly everyone who had pledged to him, and executed.
The news reached Husayn when he was already on the road.
He Left the Pilgrimage Unfinished
Husayn left Makkah in September 680 with a small party — a few dozen men, plus his family, women and children among them.
He left before completing the Hajj, converting his pilgrimage to the shorter umrah, reportedly because he feared being assassinated inside the sanctuary itself.
Read that once more. He judged that the safest place in the world for a Muslim was no longer safe for him. That is the temperature of the moment.
Driven Onto Open Ground
Near al-Qadisiyya his party was intercepted by around a thousand cavalry under al-Hurr ibn Yazid.
Husayn showed them the letters from Kufa. It changed nothing. He was prevented from entering Kufa and prevented from turning back, and was shepherded onto flat open country by the Euphrates.
He arrived at a place called Karbala on 2 Muharram 61 AH — 2 October 680.
In the days that followed, access to the river was cut off. There were children in that camp.
The Tenth
The battle took place on 10 Muharram 61 AH, which converts to 10 October 680 CE.
The Umayyad force was commanded by Umar ibn Sa'd under Ibn Ziyad's authority. The reports have Umar ibn Sa'd reluctant, and Shimr ibn Dhi'l-Jawshan pressing for the assault and forcing the issue.
Husayn's party was annihilated. He was killed and beheaded, and his head was taken to Kufa and then to Yazid's court in Damascus.
About the numbers. The traditional figure for Husayn's party is 72 fighting men, and that number is stable across the sources. But notice that the same figure is given as the number killed — which suggests it is a memorised list of named martyrs rather than a headcount. The Umayyad force is commonly reported at 4,000, and in some Shia sources far higher. These figures cannot be verified. What is not in dispute is that the disparity was total.
Historians do not even agree on how long it lasted. Henri Lammens argued it was over within an hour; Madelung and Wellhausen hold that the fighting ran from morning to evening.
The Survivors
Husayn's son Ali ibn al-Husayn survived because he was too ill to fight. He was twenty-three — not a child, which is the most commonly misstated detail about him. He is known as Zayn al-Abidin, and in Shia reckoning he is the fourth Imam. The entire subsequent line runs through one sick young man.
Husayn's sister Zaynab (RA) also survived. Taken captive with the other women and children to Kufa and then to Damascus, she is remembered for the public speeches she delivered in both cities — speeches that turned a crushing military defeat into a moral indictment that has never stopped being repeated.
Her role in transmitting what happened is not a footnote. It is a substantial part of why Karbala became what it became rather than fading into the list of seventh-century massacres.
Now Put It Back In the Month
Here is the thing this article has been building toward, and it is the reason Karbala and Muharram cannot be told apart from each other.
Go back to the beginning.
Muharram is one of the four months in which fighting is forbidden. It is the month whose entire function, for centuries before Islam and confirmed by revelation after it, was that people could travel and not be attacked. It is the month whose name literally means forbidden. The Quran's instruction about these months is "do not wrong yourselves during them."
The killing at Karbala took place on the tenth day of that month.
Against the grandson of the Prophet (SAW). Against a party that included his family. After cutting off their water. Carried out by an army of Muslims, on the orders of a Muslim governor, in the name of a Muslim caliph.
Every protection the system had — the sacred month, the sanctity of the Prophet's household, the prohibition on Muslim killing Muslim — failed simultaneously.
That is why this did not stay a political event. It could not.
What Is Actually in the Sunni Collections
There is no hadith in Bukhari or Muslim that foretells Karbala. Reports of that kind exist elsewhere and their gradings are contested, so this article leaves them alone.
What is in the Sunni collections is the Prophet's love for these two grandsons, recorded plainly. Al-Tirmidhi narrates, in a report he himself graded hasan sahih:
Hadith“Al-Hasan and Al-Husayn are the masters of the youth of the people of Paradise.”
And then there is the aftermath, in Bukhari, which is more powerful than any prophecy would have been.
A man from Iraq came to Abdullah ibn Umar (RA) with a small technical question — whether killing a fly invalidates the state of ihram. Ibn Umar's answer was not about flies:
Hadith“The people of Iraq ask about killing a fly, when they have killed the son of the daughter of the Messenger of Allah. And the Prophet said: they are my two sweet basils in this world.”
A companion of the Prophet, still alive, being asked about ritual minutiae by people from the city that had invited Husayn and then abandoned him. You can hear exactly what he thinks of the question.
One thing worth stating plainly, because it is widely assumed otherwise: Sunni scholarship condemns the killing of Husayn. It is treated as an atrocity across Sunni literature. The internal Sunni argument is much narrower than people expect — it is about whether Yazid may be individually cursed by name, not about whether Karbala was a crime. That argument is laid out in detail in the history of Shia Islam piece.
Part Four: Why One Month Produces Two Different Observances
So now we can answer the question the article opened with.
Sunni Muharram
For most Sunni Muslims, Muharram is a quiet month with one high point.
The new year passes without ceremony. Extra voluntary fasting through the month is encouraged. On the ninth and tenth, many fast. And that is essentially the shape of it.
Karbala is known, taught, and grieved — but it is not ritualised. There is no prescribed annual observance for it in Sunni practice, because Sunni jurisprudence does not recognise the establishment of new recurring religious observances that the Prophet (SAW) and his companions did not establish.
The scriptural anchor most often cited is this one, narrated by Ibn Mas'ud (RA):
Hadith“He is not one of us who slaps the cheeks, tears the garments, and calls with the call of Jahiliyyah.”
Jahiliyyah means the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, and the reference is to a specific pre-Islamic mourning style — the ritualised, performed, public lamentation of the professional mourner. On the Sunni reading, that hadith rules out the forms, whatever the grief behind them.
Shia Muharram
For Shia Muslims, Muharram is the emotional centre of the religious year, and the first ten days are its most intense stretch.
The core institution is the majalis — nightly gatherings in which a speaker narrates the events of Karbala in detail, elegies are recited, and the congregation weeps. Black is worn. In many places there are street processions on Ashura, and in South Asia and elsewhere the tradition of ta'ziya — carrying replicas of Husayn's shrine.
Forty days after Ashura comes Arba'in, the fortieth day, marked by a mass pilgrimage on foot to Husayn's shrine in Karbala. It is now among the largest annual gatherings of human beings anywhere on earth: reported at around two million in 2003, and at well over twenty million in recent years. (Those figures come from Iraqi official estimates rather than independent audit, so treat the precision loosely — the order of magnitude is not in question.)
Why It Takes This Form
The reasoning, in the tradition's own terms:
Karbala is not one event among many in Shia Islam. Husayn is the third Imam — in Twelver belief, a divinely designated leader from the Prophet's family. His killing is not simply a historical atrocity; it is the moment at which the rightful leadership of the community was destroyed by the community itself.
Mourning him is therefore understood as an act of loyalty and a renewal of allegiance, not merely as remembering something sad. The annual grief is a position taken.
The verse most often placed underneath that is one both traditions honour, and read with different weight:
Quran“Say: I do not ask you for any payment, but only good will through kinship.”
Sunni and Shia commentators both read the kinship here as the Prophet's own family. Where they differ is in how much follows from it — and for Shia Islam, what follows is a great deal.
On the scriptural side, the argument made is that grief itself is nowhere condemned. The Quran describes Ya'qub (Jacob), a prophet, grieving for his lost son to the point of physical harm:
Quran“And he turned away from them and said: Oh, my sorrow over Yusuf. And his eyes became white from grief, for he was a suppressor of it.”
And there is a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari that both traditions cite, describing the Prophet (SAW) weeping as his infant son Ibrahim died in his arms. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf (RA) said, "Even you, Messenger of Allah?"
Hadith“O Ibn Awf, this is mercy. The eyes shed tears and the heart grieves, and we do not say except what pleases our Lord. And indeed, we are grieved by your parting, O Ibrahim.”
That hadith is genuinely important here, and Sunni scholars cite it too — in the other direction. Their reading is that it draws the line precisely: tears and grief are mercy; what is forbidden is what the tongue and hands do beyond that. Same text, and the disagreement is about where exactly it puts the boundary.
About Self-Flagellation
This needs saying carefully, because it is the image most non-Muslims associate with Muharram and it is badly misunderstood in both directions.
The practice of drawing blood — tatbir, also called qama zani — is contested inside Shia Islam, not merely criticised from outside it.
Oliver Scharbrodt's study of the dispute in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2022) traces the argument. Reformist opposition goes back at least to Sayyid Muhsin al-Amin in the early twentieth century, who held it damaged Shia Islam and was therefore forbidden. In 1994, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa prohibiting it outright, describing it as "an illegitimate, fabricated, and wrong practice." Other senior authorities have declined to ban it outright while insisting that reviving the memory of Husayn must not involve harming the body or bringing the faith into disrepute. Scharbrodt's own finding is that most senior clerics remain either sympathetic to the practice or indifferent to the argument.
Two things follow, and both matter.
Most Shia Muslims do not do this. The overwhelming majority of Muharram observance is gatherings, recitation, poetry, grief and charity — and in many countries, organised blood donation drives that deliberately reframe the older practice.
And the argument about it is an internal one. It is not Sunnis objecting to a Shia practice. It is a live dispute among Shia scholars, and has been for a century.
What a Beginner Should Actually Take From the Difference
Not "one of them is doing Muharram wrong."
Here is a fairer summary. Both traditions hold that the killing of Husayn (RA) was a monstrous crime. They differ on what a community should do, annually and ritually, about a monstrous crime — and that difference traces back to a much older disagreement about who Husayn was, which is a question about the nature of leadership in Islam rather than about mourning at all.
If you want that older disagreement laid out properly, from both sides, it is here.
What to Take Away
Muharram is holding a lot at once, and now you can see all of it.
It is the first month of the year, though the year turns over quietly and with no prescribed celebration.
It is one of the four sacred months — the ancient truce months, in which fighting stopped and the roads of Arabia became safe, and whose manipulation the Quran condemned outright.
It contains Ashura, a fast with a history stretching back through Madinah and the Quraysh to Musa and the sea, voluntary since Ramadan was prescribed, and carrying the reward of a year's minor sins for a single day. The recommended practice is the ninth and the tenth — completing an intention the Prophet (SAW) stated and did not live to fulfil.
And it contains Karbala, which happened on the tenth day of the month in which killing was most forbidden, to the family of the man who had confirmed that prohibition.
Those two things sitting on the same date is not a scheduling accident that Muslims work around. It is the reason the month feels the way it does.
For one Muslim that produces a fast. For another it produces ten days of mourning. Both are looking at the same tenth of Muharram.
And the verse governing the month was always the same one: do not wrong yourselves during them.
Quran References
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