THE PASSION OF ASHURA

Every day is Ashura, and every land is Karbala.

-- a traditional Shia saying

Today and tomorrow, the Shia religious of Ashura reaches its climax.  This mourning celebration (the connection between those two words is profound) commemorates the Battle of Karbala, fought at the site of the present-day Iraqi city in 680 AD.  The central event of the Shia faith, this battle was at once a human catastrophe that split the Islamic ummah into two irreconcilable sects, and a divine act pre-ordained by God to provide man with a clearer concept and pathway to redemption.  As Golgotha is to Christians the pivot upon which history turns toward the salvation of mankind, Karbala is to Shi'ites a similar place of suffering and doom, where a single individual, evincing absolute obedience to God, sacrificed everything for the soul of the world.  In order to understand the Shia, one must become familiar with Karbala.

As a narrative, the story is a cross between Homeric epic and a medieval passion play, rich in religious symbolism, legendary characters and bloody combat, all based on actual historical events.   The basic facts are these:  after Mohammad died in 632 AD without leaving a male heir, a dispute broke out among his followers over who should succeed him.  Many felt that the Prophet had intended Ali to adopt the mantle, but Mohammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr outmaneuvered the younger man to become the first leader, or caliph, or the ever-expanding Muslim world.  By all accounts a quiet, pious figure, Ali waited 25 years before finally becoming caliph himself.  His short imamate was characterized by constant rebellion and conflict with Mu'awiya ibn Abu Sufyan, governor of Syria and head of the Ummayad family.  Ali was assassinated in 661 by the first of Islam's interminable extremist sects, the Khawarji.

In the power vacuum left by Ali's death, Mu'awiya--a late convert to Islam and son of one of Mohammad's bitterest enemies--claimed leadership of Islam's growing empire for the Ummayads.  By means of a lucrative pension and other enticements, he managed to persuade Ali's oldest son, Hasan, to repudiate his claim to the Caliphate and retire.  (In 669, Hasn was poisoned--by his wife, Shia historians believe, under Mu'awiyya's orders.) 

Possibly to avoid internecine strife, Hasan's brother Hussain decided to wait until Mu'awiyya's death before asserting his right.  The Ummayad chieftain obliged in 680, but his corrupt and profligate son Yezid refused to relinquish power.  Prompted to act, Hussain took up arms and marched out of Mecca.  It was a neat bit of historical symmetry, the stuff of myth and legend:  the virtuous Hashemite grandson of Mohammad set forth to save Islam from the dissolute Ummayad grandson of one of Mohammad's most inveterate foes.

Hussain's forces numbered about 72 men, women and children, including members of his own household.  They headed for the anti-Ummayad city of Kufa in southern Iraq, whose people pledged they would flock to Hussain's banner once he arrived.  But Yezid's men got there first, and through terror and bribery smothered support for the Imam.  Hussain's destruction was a foregone conclusion.  The Ummayad's four thousand men surround his little camp near a place later called Karbala (karb meaning "anguish;" bala, "vexation."), cutting it off from the waters of the Euphrates River.

Unwilling to simply overrun and slaughter so prominent a personage as Hussain, Yezid's men instead waited for ten days, depriving the Imam's followers of water while slaying his warriors one by one with arrows or single armed combat.  The stories that emerged from this brutal siege still blaze in the Shia imagination:  the defection of Yezid's commander Hur to Hussain's side.  Abbas, fighting his way with a water bag to the Euphrates, only to be overwhelmed by Yezid's men.  Hussain's teen-age son Ali Akbhar dying in his father's arm.  And, most heart-wrenching all, Hussain holding his infant son up to the enemy troops and begging them to allow him a drink of water:  the response was an arrow that lodged in the six month old's throat, killing him.

With Ali Asghar's death, Yezid's troops swarmed over Hussain, decapitating his body and throwing the women and children of the encampment into chains.  They took the Imam's head and the captives back to Damascus, where Yezid exulted over his gruesome trophies.  (Sensitive to public opinion, the Ummayad chief eventually allowed the women and children to return to Mecca.)

The death of the Prophet's grandson shocked the Islamic world, especially those of the Shi'at Ali ("Party of Ali")--or Shia.  For them, Hussain's fate was more than a quashed insurrection; it was a martyrdom.  A myth developed around the defeat:  sinless, infallible, realizing beforehand the fate that awaited him, Hussain marched to doom in Karbala, knowing that his death would expose the Ummayads' brutality and preserve forever the flame of pure Islam.  As for the Kufan's cowardice and treachery, it became a source of perpetual shame--one for which many Shia seek to atone by wailing lamentations and beating themselves with whips, cudgels and swords.

I witnessed this firsthand last year when, disguised as a Shia pilgrim, I attended the Ashura commemoration in Karbala.  There, amidst a crowd numbering in the millions, I saw mirrored replicas of Hussain's bier, black bunting depending from the facades of the mosques of Hussain and Abbas, one hundred foot long signs spelling out Hussain's name in bleeding red letters, eight-foot long white silk flags depicting bloody crossed swords...pictures of severed hands, severed heads..a fountain that sprayed geysers of blood-red liquid...men with blood-soaked bandages wrapped around their heads to staunch the bleeding from self-inflicted wounds...children whipping themselves with miniature floggers...innumerable posters of the slaughtered innocents of Hussain's household--an endless sea of fake blood and death-oriented imagery.

And then this staged and festishtic primitivism erupted into real life when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi sent six suicide bombers into the crowd, killing scores of pilgrims (a second attack that day, at the Shia mosque of Khadimain in Baghdad, raised the Ashura death toll to over 200).  I saw the dead and shattered bodies, the panicked crowds, the still-fervent religious pilgrims chanting Hussain's name, and felt the frightening, but perversely exhilarating sense of surrender, blood, martyrdom--and evil.  Truly, cruelty and festival are interrelated, as Nietzsche writes; so too, is the religious mindset only the thinnest of margins away from the joyous spectacle of suffering and the lure of the forbidden ecstasies of the blood.   

(I write about this in In the Red Zone; readers who want a quicker take--and also my thoughts on the Shia fetishization of Hussain's death--can link to my NRO piece written last year.  For the more political aspects of Shi'ism, go here.)

Like the effect of the Crucifixion on Christians, the human sacrifice necessitated by God to redeem mankind sears the Shia spirit and brands their soul with a faith much unlike that of the rival Sunni.  From the black flags of rebellion that fly over hillocks in far desert wastes, to the processions of men whipping themselves with heavy metal flagellants, to the real life stories of Ayatollahs murdered by Saddam--to the death of innocent Shia Iraqis, 30 of which perished today at the hands of terrorists--Shi'ism is a religion characterized by oppression, insurrection and perpetual martyrdom to a cause.  It is a convenant written with Allah in the blood of the faithful, continually renewed with offerings of fresh martyrdom.  Whether the Shia's obsession with violent passion, their fetishization of death, will translate into a stable democracy, with all the mundane compromises such government involves, remains to be seen. 

Fourteen centuries ago, Hussain laid down his life to keep the true light of Islam burning in the world.  Today, Iraqis--most of them Shia--are dying for a different, more worldly, sort of redemption:  freedom, democracy and an end to the seemingly endless karbala of their history. 

Comments

[Passing By]

It is interesting how many non-Muslims tend to interpret Shiite belief and rituals from the rumours and perspectives of the ones that hate them the most (i.e., the Sunnites). My friend Shiites don't mourn and flagellate themselves as remorse for not helping Imam Husain as Sunnites claim. They do it to sympathise with the suffering of their Imam, his companions and children who died fighting the worst tyrant of the time and the womenfolk who were taken captive after their death. The battle of Husain lives on as long as there are terrorists and tyrants. Those who behead innocent people today follow the tradition of those who beheaded Husain and his companions.

[Comment]

What split the Muslim nations into two was not the murder of Husain. The murder was the result. The split occurred when the first and second Caliph Abu Bakr and Umar denied the caliphate of Ali and killed his wife Fatima (the daughter of Muhammad).

[Dignity]

I quote from the article, "Unwilling to simply overrun and slaughter so prominent a personage as Hussain, Yezid's men instead waited for ten days, depriving the Imam's followers of water while slaying his warriors one by one with arrows or single armed combat."

This is contradictory to all historical records of the event. The killing of Husain and all his followers took place on the day of Ashura from morning till midday. It is the ritualistic mourning that is carried out for ten days before Ashura. The reason Husain and his followers were not slaughtered on the first day they arrived in Karbala was only due to the fact that Yazid's main army had not arrived for battle and the battalion that was already there refused to kill him. In fact the commander of that battalion, one by the name of Hurr, joined Husain and was killed fighting to defend him.

[Shia]

Thanks to the above posters for exposing the lies in the article written by steven vincent.

Steven, my friend, you have a tragically wrong view about shia and azadari.

Thanks for trying though.

[N Z SHAH]

When the judgement is weak,the prejudice is strong. This is all I will say for the most vulgar summarisation of such a sacred event. It proves the sheer shallowness of thought in observing and documenting. It looks like a case where the author is ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. He never defends anyone or anything if he can help it; if the job is forced on him, he tackles it by denouncing someone or something. I wish the ill-informed author had taken the trouble of searching facts before plunging. Because when a writer writes about a historic event, complete responsibility of RECORDING AUTHENTICALLY lies with him. Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of his likes. Where facts are few, experts are many! This is an old problem but one should not forget that facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be peoples wishes or inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence!!!
Unfortunately the recipe for perpetual ignorance is to be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge. There is no greater mistake than a hasty conclusion. You can rarely see things from the point of view of realism because you look at the facts through the screen of an impression or an interest which distorts your view; and then there are age old cultural prejudices....
I believe we should take things as we find them: and not attempt to distort them into what they are not. We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must ONLY use them!!!
He should have realised that there is a vast difference between judging a certain situation from the eye of a mere observer and documenting the real cause leading to a particular event.

[Siraat-E-Mustaquim]

Well, the Sunni propaganda machine is in full swing. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to dispute so called "historias" like this joker Steven Vincent. The problem here is the basic fact that white people believe their version of the truth is that-the truth. Vincent sounds like a high school kid writing an essay for a class project-there is simply no intellect in the posting for anyone to seriously discount this moron.

So I say, Vincent, dude, you need to get a "real" edumacation, idiot!

[Puma Shoes]

Yes, I agree to this blog that the parent should educate their kids at the early stage of their life. So that they can easily adapt themselves when they are ready to go to school. It must be not the high end one, but at least a kid can do anything to it to learn basics.

[Sayed ahsanali]

Live like ali(a.s),die like husain(a.s)