“Tears choked me and I pushed them back,” one of Hussein’s daughters would remember. “I kept silent and knew that the final tribulation had come upon us.”
Tears are infectious, almost physically so. Whether in a movie house or in real life, people fight back tears of sympathy and then find that their vision has blurred and the fight has already been lost.
But for the Shia, there is no fighting back tears. On the contrary, they are encouraged. Grief and sorrow are the signs of deep faith, the overt expression not only of atonement and horror but of an abiding conviction that the tears count, that they have purpose.
In the ten days leading up to Ashura, every detail of the ordeal at Karbala fourteen hundred years ago is recalled and reenacted. The story so central to Shia Islam has been kept alive year after year, century after century, not in holy writ but by the impassioned force of memory, of repetition and reenactment.
A vast cycle of taziya, or Passion plays, is staged every year—so many of them in so many places that the Oberammergau cycle of medieval Christianity is a pale mirror by comparison. The pacing is almost stately, the dialogue more a series of speeches than give-and-take, but no Broadway or West End performance has ever had so rapt an audience. Every appearance onstage of a black-robed Yazid or Ubaydallah or Shimr is greeted by hisses and boos. The newlywed groom about to bid farewell to his still-virgin bride before going to his death is acclaimed with tears. As Hussein holds up his infant son in front of the enemy, people beat their breasts and wail softly, almost to themselves, as though if they could stifle their sobs, the tragedy would somehow be averted.
But the height of the Passion plays, the most intense point, comes not when Hussein is actually killed but at the moment he dons his white shroud. For all the terrible pathos of what has already happened, this moment—one of the least dramatic to Western eyes—is the most unbearable for the audience. It is the moment of calm in the face of death, the willing acceptance of the call to self-sacrifice.
For ten days the commemoration of Ashura has been leading to this moment. Men have gathered in husseiniya—“Hussein houses”—special halls set aside specifically for telling the story of Karbala, for tears and reflection, grief and meditation. Women have crowded into one another’s homes to build the wedding canopy for Hussein’s daughter and his nephew Qasim, then decorate it with silk ribbons and strew petals on the floor, creating a marriage bed for the union that will never be consummated. They stretch another, smaller canopy over a cradle and fill it with offerings for Hussein’s infant son: candies and toys. They implore Hussein to intercede for them and for their children in their twenty-first-century lives, to keep them safe from drugs and violence and any of life’s other temptations and dangers. And they mourn, beating their breasts and slapping their cheeks faster and faster as their chanting picks up its pace—“Hussein, Hussein, Hussein, Hussein, Hussein”—until they have no strength left.
Everything culminates on the tenth day, the day of the processions. Men and boys march by the hundreds in the villages, by the thousands and tens of thousands in the cities. Whole squadrons of men beat their chests in unison, their hands clenched into hollow fists, the better to reverberate against the rib cage. And with each step, each blow, “Oh Hussein, oh Hussein …”
The echoing thud of one man striking himself this way is sobering; the sound of thousands can be heard miles away, as loud as the tolling of a cathedral bell at Easter, and far more terrifying for the knowledge that this is the sound of flesh on flesh.
Some go further. They beat themselves not with their fists but with flails of chains, and at the end of each length of chain, a small blade. They flick the flails over the left shoulder, then over the right, again and again until their backs are bloodied. A few even use knives to slash at their foreheads so that the copious blood of a head wound flows down over their faces to mix with their tears. The sight fills even the most resolute onlooker with awe and a kind of sacred horror.
Throughout the procession, people carry posters blown up large, garlanded with flowers and with green and black silk banners—green for Islam, black for mourning. Some are the standard ones of Hussein, his keffiya falling in graceful folds to his shoulders, but others are specifically for Ashura. These show his bare head angled back, blood on his forehead and his mouth open in agony. The head seems to float in space, and in a way it does: it is speared on the point of a lance.
And at the center of each procession, a white riderless horse, Hussein’s horse, its saddle empty.
The sun rose inexorably on the morning of the tenth of Muharram, October 10, in the year 680. As it gained height and heat, the last of the seventy-two warriors in Hussein’s encampment went out one by one to meet their deaths. By the time the sun was high in the sky, only Hussein himself remained.
He said farewell to the women of his family, mounted his white stallion—Lahik, the Pursuer, he was called—and rode out from the tents to confront his destiny. As he charged into the enemy lines, the archers fired, volley after volley. Arrows studded the horse’s flanks, yet still he kept charging. Astride him, Hussein struck out left and right with his sword and for a few moments, it hardly seemed to matter that he was only one man against four thousand. “By God I have never seen his like before or since,” one of Shimr’s men would remember. “The foot soldiers retreated from him as goats retreat from an advancing wolf.”
But it could not last. “Why are you waiting?” Shimr yelled at his troops. “You sons of men who urinate at both ends! Kill him, or may your mothers be bereaved of you!” An arrow struck home in Hussein’s shoulder, the force of it throwing him to the ground, and they finally crowded in on him.
By the time they were done, there were thirty-three knife and sword wounds on his body. Even that was not enough. As though trying to hide the evidence, they spurred their horses over his corpse again and again, trampling the grandson of the Prophet, the last of the five People of the Cloak, into the dust of Karbala.
At that moment, what the Sunnis consider history became sacred history for the Shia, and the aura of sacredness would permeate the memories of what happened next. There is no mention in the earliest accounts of Hussein’s three-year-old daughter Sukayna roaming the battlefield; no mention either of tears streaming from the eyes of his white horse or of the sudden appearance of two white doves. But who can hold that against the millions of Shia for whom Ashura is what defines them? Details accrue around a story of such depth and magnitude, in the Passion of Hussein as in the Passion of Christ.
Eventually, those who remembered would tell how Lahik, that noblest of all Arab stallions, bowed down and dipped his forehead in his master’s blood, then went back to the women’s tent, tears streaming from his eyes, and beat his head on the ground in mourning. They would tell how two doves flew down and dipped their wings in Hussein’s blood, then flew south, first to Medina and then to Mecca, so that when people there saw them, they knew what had happened, and the wailing of grief began. They would tell how the three-year-old Sukayna wandered out onto the battlefield in search of her father, crying out for him piteously, surrounded by blood-soaked corpses.
With time, it made no difference if Abbas had really fought on with only one arm, or if the horse really did cry, or if the doves really did fly down as though from heaven. Faith and need said they did. The stories have become as true as the most incontrovertible fact, if not more so, because they have such depth of meaning. As with the death of Christ, the death of Hussein soars beyond history into metahistory. It enters the realm of faith and inspiration, of passion both emotional and religious.
Shimr’s men hacked off Hussein’s head, along with those of all seventy-two of his warriors. They slung most of the severed heads in sacks across their horses’ necks, each one proof of the kill, a guarantee of a cash reward from Ubaydallah back in Kufa. But Hussein’s head was singled out. Shimr ordered it speared on a lance and carried like a trophy in front of his army. As the Quran had been desecrated at Siffin,
so now was Hussein’s head at Karbala.
Shimr did not bury the seventy-two headless corpses; instead, he ordered them left behind in the desert for hyenas and wolves to feed on. He had the women and children put in chains and led them on the long trek to Kufa, stumbling behind the head of Hussein. When they reached the governor’s palace, Ubaydallah laughed with pleasure as Shimr tossed the severed trophy onto the floor in front of him. He even poked at the head with his cane, sending it rolling over the stone tiles. At the sight, one elderly companion of the Prophet was so appalled that he could contain himself no longer, no matter the danger. “Take your cane away, by God!” he erupted. “How often have I seen the Messenger of God kiss that face you now desecrate!” And in tears, the old man limped out of the assembly hall before the soldiers could stop him, to speak his mind one last time.
“A slave has given power to a slave and has made the people his inheritance,” he told the people outside. “You, Arabs, are the slaves after today. You killed the son of Fatima when the bastard governor ordered you. You have accepted shame and humiliation. Let destruction come to those who accept humiliation.”
The old man’s anger and dismay struck deep into the collective conscience. The Prophet was dead not fifty years, yet here the men of his family had been massacred, and the women humiliated. As the news spread throughout Islam, a sense of bitter shame spread with it, and a new name came into being for the family of Muhammad: Bayt al-Ahzan, the House of Sorrow.
Yet this ignominious death in the desert, like that ignominious death on the cross six centuries earlier, would prove to be not the end but only the beginning.
chapter 14
WOLVES AND HYENAS DID NOT DEVOUR THE CORPSES AS SHIMR had planned. Once he had led away his captives, farmers ventured out from a nearby village, buried the seventy-two headless bodies, and marked the graves. Just four years later, pilgrims—the precursors of the millions who now arrive each year—began to arrive on the anniversary of the massacre, and it was they who named the gravesite Karbala, “the place of trial and tribulation.”
Hussein’s head would have many resting places, its presence spreading along with the story of what had happened. Most say it is buried by the east wall of the Grand Mosque in Damascus, but some have it in a shrine near the main entry to the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, while yet others maintain that it was spirited away to Azerbaijan for safekeeping. Some even say it was returned to Karbala. But far more important than the physical remains, what survived was the story, and it was the survivors who told it—the women and the girls, and one boy.
Ali Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s adolescent son, never took part in the fighting. He could not rise from his bedding in the women’s tent. Struck by severe fever, he had tossed and turned helplessly as his friends, his kin, and finally his father went out to meet their deaths. So when Shimr and his men came bursting into the women’s tent and caught sight of him, the sick boy was an easy and obvious target, and he too would certainly have been killed were it not for his aunt, Hussein’s sister Zaynab.
“Do not let Satan take away your courage,” Hussein had told her on that final night, and now she displayed that courage. She hurled herself over her nephew and defied Shimr to run her through with his sword. “If you kill him, then you kill me with him,” she declared.
Not even Shimr, it seemed, could kill the granddaughter of the Prophet in cold blood. Instead, he gave the order to take the boy captive along with the women. But Zaynab would do more than keep alive Hussein’s one remaining son; she would keep alive the memory of Karbala itself. Her words of grief as she was being led away in chains, her clothing torn and head bare, would haunt Islam through the centuries.
“Oh Muhammad, Muhammad, may the angels of heaven bless you!” she wailed. “Here is Hussein in the open, stained with blood and his limbs torn off. Oh Muhammad! Your daughters are prisoners, your progeny are killed, and the east wind blows dust over them.”
Nobody in Iraq needed to be told what that east wind brought with it. That was the wind of blinding dust storms, the very breath of trial and tribulation.
Even Shimr’s men repented when they heard her, or so at least some of them would claim. “By God, she made every friend and every foe weep,” one said later. But if the soldiers did indeed weep, they still obeyed orders. Ubaydallah had the captives publicly humiliated by parading them through Kufa and, only once that was done, sent them on to the Caliph Yazid in Damascus, along with the severed heads.
Some say it was not Ubaydallah but Yazid himself who then poked at Hussein’s head with a cane and laughed gleefully as it rolled on the floor at his feet. But most say he angrily cursed Shimr and Ubaydallah for their “excess of zeal,” his conscience roused by the fact that Zaynab was there to call him to account.
No matter the chains, the torn clothing, the dust and blisters of the long desert march from Kufa, she stood proudly in front of the Umayyad Caliph and publicly shamed him. “You, your father, and your grandfather submitted to the faith of my father, Ali, the faith of my brother Hussein, the faith of my grandfather Muhammad,” she told him. “Yet you have vilified them unjustly and oppressed the very faith you profess.”
At this, Yazid himself broke down in tears. “If I had been there, Hussein, you would not have been killed,” he swore, and gave orders for the captives to be treated as honored guests in his own household. On the fortieth day after Karbala—the day the Shia commemorate as Arbain, or “forty”—he gave the women and girls and the one surviving son his assurance of protection and had them escorted back to Medina.
Perhaps he had remembered what some say was Muawiya’s dying caution to him: “If you defeat Hussein, pardon him, for he has a great claim.” If so, it was too late. Reviled by the Shia, Yazid would hardly be better treated in memory by the Sunnis. Few would grieve when he died only three years after Karbala, just as his forces were poised to take the city of Mecca, which had risen up in rebellion under the son of Aisha’s ill-fated brother-in-law Zubayr. Fewer still would grieve when his sickly thirteen-year-old son died just six months after that. And it is probably safe to say that none grieved for his second cousin Marwan, who then proclaimed himself Caliph. The man who had played such a devious role behind the scenes throughout Othman’s and Ali’s caliphates finally achieved the power he had coveted for so long, but only briefly; within the year he would be smothered to death by his own wife.
All the while, “the Karbala factor,” as it would come to be called, was rapidly gaining strength. The story told by the seventh-century survivors would not only endure but would grow in power to find renewed life in the twentieth century.
“Religion is an amazing phenomenon that plays contradictory roles in people’s lives,” said Ali Shariati, the charismatic lecturer who helped lay the intellectual foundation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. “It can destroy or revitalize, put to sleep or awaken, enslave or emancipate, teach docility or teach revolt.”
Khomeini understood him perfectly. Like Shariati, the Ayatollah grasped that Karbala was an enormously loaded symbol, a deep well of emotional, social, and political significance, seemingly infinitely adaptable to time and circumstance. Under the regime of the Shah, with political dissent banned under pain of imprisonment, torture, and execution, religion could become the umbrella language of protest and resistance. The Karbala story was the perfect vehicle for this. Its themes broke through the usual social and economic dividing lines to resonate with clerics and secular intellectuals, liberals and conservatives, urban Marxists and tradition-bound villagers alike.
“Let the blood-stained banners of Ashura be raised wherever possible as a sign of the coming day when the oppressed shall avenge themselves on the oppressors,” Khomeini wrote from exile in France in November 1978, and on Ashura itself, which fell on December 11 that year, the traditional processions were transformed into a powerful political weapon. Under intense pressure, the Shah lifted martial law for just two days, and millions of Iranians responded to Khomeini’s call
and marched in the streets, alternating the ritual cry of “Death to Yazid!” with a new one: “Death to the Shah!”
Forty days later, on Arbain, Khomeini again called on the Karbala factor, comparing those killed in the streets by the Shah’s troops with those killed by Yazid’s troops fourteen hundred years earlier. “It is as if the blood of our martyrs were the continuation of the blood of the martyrs of Karbala,” he wrote. “It is our religious and national duty to organize great marches on this day.” Despite the reimposition of martial law, the Karbala story again became the means of mass mobilization, and again the Shah’s troops opened fire, creating yet more martyrs. By the end of the month the Shah had fled into exile.
The revolution had succeeded, but with what many would see as a vengeance. Within two months the Islamic Republic was declared, and Khomeini announced himself the Supreme Leader. Liberal Muslims and secular intellectuals now discovered the other side of the religious fervor they had helped foment. Revolution gave way to theocracy; freedom and justice, to Islamic dictatorship. Thousands of secular and liberal activists who had helped bring about the revolution were imprisoned and executed. Women disappeared behind head-to-toe veils, and even the young chador-clad women who had toted submachine guns in the streets of Teheran, calling themselves “the commandos of Zaynab,” were quickly assigned to more traditional duties. Many of Shariati’s teachings were soon declared un-Islamic, and his image, once featured alongside Khomeini on everything from posters to postage stamps, disappeared from view.
The Karbala story was still used, though in a far more deliberately manipulative way. In the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, thousands of Iranian boys were given headbands inscribed with the word “Karbala,” then sent off to become human minesweepers. Wave after wave of them ran headlong into Iraqi minefields to be blown up to clear the way for Iranian troops, each of them in the desperate faith that he was heading for a martyr’s paradise. Frontline troops were inspired to sacrifice by visits from singers and chanters of Karbala lamentations, the most famed of whom was known as “Khomeini’s Nightingale.” Khomeini had swept into power with the help of the Karbala factor, then taken control of it, taming it into the docility and obedience Shariati had warned of.
After the Prophet Page 19