Abbas ibn Ali, by the accounts that came down to us, went to the river for water and did not come back with it. The camp had been cut off from the Euphrates, and there were children in the tents. That was the tenth of Muharram, in the year 680 by our reckoning: Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, was killed near Karbala along with most of the small band who had gone out with him. The women and children of his household were taken away as captives.
Every year since, in mourning assemblies, in elegies recited aloud, in the plain act of handing a stranger a cup of water, people have gone back to that afternoon and told it again. The painting attached is one of those tellings, crowded with figures, the desert ground left pale behind them. I don't think it is mine to weigh the arguments about succession that led there. The thirst and the dead are not in dispute.
In Muharram the sabeel stalls go up and strangers are handed water, or milk, cold, in the worst of the heat, and nobody is asked who they are. A cup of water given for thirst that happened in 680. It is a quiet way to keep a thing.
Miriam, there's a whole trade behind those tellings: coffeehouse painters in Iran, working on big cloths and on glass, and the ta'ziya scrolls a narrator would unroll and point along while he recited. Painted for standing in front of, not for hanging.