The martyrdom of the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hussein during the battle of Karbala in the year 680, just 48 years after the Prophet’s death, marks a watershed moment in Islamic history and hagiography. Although subsequent commemorations and mourning ceremonies of this event tend to be associated with Shiʿi Muslims, the Persian poetic tradition shows that a unique and productive philosophy of this event has been archived in poetic form that is in turn transferred into public and private performance. In the process, a unique poetic interpretation and interrogation of history occurs, wherein historically cemented binaries are broken, and the past is brought into the present through the potency of poetry and its permeations of public and private sites of religious observances. This chapter will commence by perusing classical instances of this phenomenon in Persian poetry and reach a finality by observing the presence of such poetry in the case of Afghanistan.