An interesting article from the Asia Times:
Beware of Iraq's whipping boys
By Nir Rosen
BAGHDAD - Every night for the past week, 26-year-old Najim Abdul Amir, a construction worker by day, has been moonlighting as a religious drill instructor. Lining up dozens of boys under 14 years of age in the unlit lot facing the Muhsin mosque, Najim sternly observes his charges. A thin young man with a short beard, wearing training pants and a sweatshirt, he barks orders in a stentorian voice.
Najim is a mudarib, or trainer, instructing up to 60 boys in the correct performance of Shi'ite Islam's paradigmatic ritual commemorating its central, epic, narrative: the seventh-century martyrdom of Husain, the third imam, or leader of the Shi'ite community.
The Muhsin mosque is on the main road entering Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shi'ite bastion of up to 3 million inhabitants. In four days, when Muharram, the first month of the Islamic year begins, hundreds of thousands of its residents, as well as Shi'ites from throughout Iraq, numbering perhaps in the millions, will begin their descent on the shrine city of Karbala. They will be joined by Iranian pilgrims and Shi'ites throughout the world. In Lebanon, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan Shi'ites will be performing similar rituals. Celebrations will culminate and reach their emotive peak on Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram.
Najim is a volunteer and recognizes the historic importance of this year's Ashura celebration. "This will be different from every Ashura in the past," he said. "We used to observe our traditions secretly under Saddam [Hussein]. When we cooked in the streets, Ba'athists would overturn our pots."
Najim's boys wear dark clothes and military belts, where they keep their chained whips, or zanjeens. They have been given badges which they proudly display. Ahmad Sabah, 13, is Najim's top student, and radud, or cantor, leading the songs chanted in cadence. "This is the way of Islam and our traditions," he explains.
The boys line up in ranks and Ahmad begins wailing his latmiya, a lamentation. The boys beat their chests rhythmically in a ritual called latim, and whip the chains over their shoulders, on either side of their backs, shouting "ya Ali!" in honor of the martyred Husain's father, while a boy beats on a drum converted from an aluminum cooking oil can. Their mawkib, or procession, will march much of the way to Karbala, about 50 kilometers southeast of Baghdad.
Unlike most Muslims, who are Sunnis, Shi'ites believe that after the death of the Prophet Mohammed (632 AD), leadership of the Muslim umma (community of believers) should have been inherited by the family of Mohammed and his descendants, starting with Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, Ali Ibn Abu Talib. However, when Mohammed died, his best friend and father-in-law Abu Bakr became the first caliph (leader of the Muslim community). Abu Bakr ruled from 632 until 634 and was followed by Umar, who ruled from 634 until he was assassinated in 644, and then Uthman, who was caliph from 644 until he, too, was killed in 656. The tribal council eventually elected Ali to be the fourth caliph, starting in 656 until 661. Ali himself was killed five years into his caliphate.
Muawiyah, the governor of Syria and an important warrior hailing from the Umayyad family, became caliph after Ali. The Umayyads were enemies of Mohammed's Hashemite clan. Muawiyah had initially opposed Mohammed's prophesy and was one of the last Meccans to convert to Islam, finally becoming Mohammed's secretary. Muawiyah was also an enemy of Ali, blaming him for the death of Uthman.
Muawiyah reached an accord with Ali's first son, Hassan, who agreed to withdraw from politics. When the mantle of leadership was to be passed to Muawiyah's son Yazid, he was challenged by Husain, Ali's second son. Husain expected the people of Kufah in southern Iraq to support his claim, because his father's caliphate had been based there.
Husain was accompanied by 72 male supporters and their families. They set out for Kufah, but while en route Yazid persuaded the Kufan leadership to abandon Husain, who was subsequently intercepted and forced along with his entourage to camp in the desert outside the city of Karbala. Shemr Ibn Saad led Yazid's army, which surrounded Husain's camp, denying them access to the waters of the nearby Euphrates River. After a 10-day siege, on the 10th of Muharram (October 10, 680 AD), Shemr and his men slaughtered Husain and his followers. The women and children were sold into captivity. Yazid became the sixth caliph, ruling from Damascus.
Husain's followers, known as Shiat Ali (Partisans of Ali) refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Umayyads. Karbala became a pilgrimage destination for the world's Shi'ites and a center of theological study. In Twelver Shiism, the most common Shi'ite sect, Ali, his sons Hassan and Husain, as well as the nine descendants of Ali, who became leaders of the Shi'ite community, are called imams. Twelver Shi'ites believe that the first 11 imams were assassinated and the 12th imam went into occultation in a supernatural realm in 874 AD, to reappear on judgment day as the mahdi, or promised messiah. Shi'ites devote many days of the year to commemorating the martyred imams, as well as more contemporary leaders, such as the cleric Muhamad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was killed by alleged Saddam agents in 1999.
The stories are reiterated in countless sermons that move the audience to anger and tears year after year as they relive the tragedies. Ashura was traditionally construed by Shi'ites as an act of redemptive suffering on Husain's part. Annual ceremonies included passion plays and mourning ceremonies in Husainiyas, or mourning centers where Shi'ites would congregate to mark and reenact the martyrdom, often with acts of self-flagellation, including beating themselves with their fists, with chains, or most famously, by cutting their foreheads with a qama, or short sword. Tatbir, this extreme form of flagellation, is controversial among Muslim scholars, in part because of the negative image it conveys to the world. Najim reports that his mosque has received orders from radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, "no swords, it is illegal to hurt yourself".
Latmiya singers such as Iraq's famous Bassem al-Karbalai, as well as actors, describe in detail the thirst of Husain and his besieged followers in the heat of the desert of Karbala, and Yazid's cruelty in choosing the time of Muslim communal prayer on Friday noon to slaughter his rivals. At the Nasr cinema on Baghdad's main Saadoun street, the featured film is called Al-Husain thairan wa shahida, or Husain, a revolutionary and martyr. Adult men and women weep bitterly during the last scenes of the movie where they are reminded of the treachery and guilt of the Kufan community, who abandoned Husain to the evil Yazid. The virtues of Shi'ite leaders are contrasted to the alleged immorality of early Sunni leaders, who supposedly stole the mantle of leadership wrongly from Husain and showed no mercy to his family, even the children. The founders of the Umayyad dynasty are condemned and by implication, so are their followers, Sunni Muslims.
The self-flagellation and mutilation in Muharram are not merely individual acts of contrition. They are performed collectively and publicly by the entire community. It is these Muharram rituals more than any single belief or dogma that define the Shi'ite sense of community. Muharram and its accompanying rituals in the following month of Safar, as well as the mourning processions during the month of Ramadan to mark Ali's martyrdom, last for about two months of the year. The subliminal messages of Muharram are seared into the hearts and minds of participants, forming their worldview and sense of identity. Additionally, in a culture where saving face and concealing failure are socially important customs, the mourning rituals also have an important role in providing psychological relief and release.
According to Dr Augustus Richard Norton, a professor in the departments of political science and anthropology at Boston University, these "rituals provide a way of cementing people's political identification", and have also served as a focal point for Shi'ite political mobilization in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran.
Contemporary Shi'ite leaders refashioned Husain's martyrdom as the preeminent exemplar of heroism and sacrifice for all believers to emulate in their struggle against oppressors and as the standard by which all acts of martyrdom are analogized. The martyrdom in Karbala has intrinsic political content and symbolism that found expression throughout the history of Shi'ite oppression.
Marking Husain's martyrdom was banned in Iraq for most of the 35 years of Ba'athist rule. Last year's being the first "open" one for many years. In fact, the Ottomans already started banning Ashura ceremonies in Iraq during the 16th century. In 1974, mourning processions became angry political protests. In 1977, police officers were met with fury when they tried to interfere with processions half way between Najaf and Karbala. Angry crowds took over a police station and chanted, "Saddam, shil idak! Shab al Iraq ma yiridak!" (Saddam, remove your hand! The people of Iraq do not want you!).
In Pakistan, when Shi'ites mourn Husain and ritually curse the early caliphs revered by Sunnis, mob violence often results. Riots are endemic, and in the mid-1960s in Punjab and the 1980s in Karachi bloody internecine fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites erupted, resulting in government restrictions on the processions, which only increased the Shi'ite sense of oppression.
In November 1979, an uprising of the dispossessed Shi'ite minority in eastern Saudi Arabia (Hasa) occurred when 90,000 demonstrators carrying portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Islamic revolution, defied the Saudi government ban on Muharram processions. This led to violent clashes with the security forces stationed in the area.
Processions also carry pictures of recently martyred members of the community. A November 1980 procession in Bahrain carried the picture of a Shi'ite leader believed to have been beaten to death by the police of that Sunni state, and it is certain that processions in Iraq this year will carry pictures of Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq who was killed last August, as well as for Muhammad Sadiq Sadr and his relative Mohammed Baqr Sadr, killed by Saddam in 1980.
In October 1983, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an Israeli military convoy desecrated the Ashura commemoration in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiya. Lebanese Shi'ite leader Mufti Mohammed Mahdi Shmas al-Din issued a fatwa (authoritative interpretation of religious responsibility), calling on all Muslims to initiate "total civil opposition" to the Israeli occupation, whose oppression was easily analogized by Lebanese Shi'ites with the tyrannical Ummayad ruler Yazid. The Nabatiya incident was a milestone in the Islamic resistance to Israel, politicizing the Shi'ites of Lebanon, inflaming their passion and setting off the resistance to the Israeli occupation.
The most important politicization of the Muharram ceremonies occurred in late 1978. The Islamist faction of the Iranian opposition to the shah of Iran dominated the anti-shah protests, casting their struggle as a reenactment of the historic battle between Husain and Yazid. Khomeini appropriated the Muharram rituals to establish an Islamist government in Iran in 1979 by using Muharram rituals as an expression of the ultimate act of resistance to injustice and tyranny.
Khomeini interpreted the Karbala events politically, accusing the shah of acting as a modern Yazid, and enemy of the Shi'ites, thus sanctioning the uprising against the shah's regime. Ashura fell on December 11, 1978 and was transformed into a political weapon. Millions of people took part in nation-wide demonstrations that eventually led to the shah's abdication and Khomeini's return from exile.
In Iraq, the long-oppressed Shi'ites have high expectations. The removal of Saddam brought with it the promise of greater political representation, perhaps even domination of the country, that would surely be the consequence of democratic elections. The stalled transition to power and the prolonged occupation have made them anxious, and the themes of martyrdom and unjust usurpation of power that have run through their history haunt them once again. They are now struggling to redefine their community and compete for the power that seems within their grasp.
They also fear attacks by the amorphous and unidentified Sunni "resistance" that have already cost Iraqi civilians so dearly. Seyid Hassan Naji al-Musawi, the leader of the Muhsin mosque, voiced his fear that Wahhabi Sunni extremists might disrupt the processions. "God willing it will be peaceful," he said from his nearby home, adding, "but if you are martyred during Muharram, you go directly to heaven." |
