Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ is the most widely recited Shīʿī ziyāra to Imam al-Ḥusayn (a.s.), but its final passages—the disavowal of the oppressors and the hundred curses—have long been contested. The oldest extant manuscript of Shaykh al-Ṭūsī's (d. 460/1067) Miṣbāḥ al-mutahajjid, transcribed by al-Naqqāsh al-Rāzī in 502/1108, omits them, and a small group of early copies follows suit. Were these passages a later interpolation, or were they removed?

Drawing on a systematic examination of numerous manuscripts, historical sources, and related evidence, this study argues that the final passages are integral to the original text, and that they were obscured for centuries by taqiyya—the principled discretion exercised by Shīʿī scribes and scholars under hostile political conditions, particularly before the Safavid period. Tracing this practice through the work of Ibn Qūlawayh (d. 386/978), Shaykh al-Ṭūsī, al-Tamīmī al-Sabzawārī (alive in 540/1145), and ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 726/1325), the author offers the first sustained study of taqiyya in the textual transmission of Ziyārat ʿĀshūrāʾ—a careful answer to a question that has been raised on the historical authenticity of this liturgical text in recent decades, and a contribution to the wider history of how Shīʿī devotional literature was preserved, copied, and quietly defended.

Sayyid Mahdi Mahmoudi is a researcher in Shīʿī manuscript studies and the textual history of Imāmī devotional literature, with a particular interest in the transmission, editing, and preservation of classical Shīʿī works.