On the tenth of Muḥarram, in the 61st year of the hijra (October 10, 680), a grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad perished as a martyr on the banks of the Euphrates, amidst the arid plain of Karbalāʾ in southern Iraq. The death of al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī at the hands of Umayyad forces is an upsetting memory, chiefly for Shiites but more broadly for the Islamic community as a whole. This battle, frequently regarded by modern specialists as a relatively “minor” episode—often reduced, in fact, to a police operation directed against a rebel refusing to acknowledge caliphal authority—involved the death of a few dozen people (the sources most commonly speak of 70 or 72 victims), who were massacred by a significantly larger caliphal army. It rapidly became, however, a central event of early Islam and a foundational stone in the effort at articulating a narrative of the primordial Islamic past. As such, it generated highly ritualized annual commemorations to this day. Indeed, the central place of ʿĀshūrāʾ offers an obvious reminder of the importance and actuality of al-Ḥusayn’s memory for Muslims, as it includes most famously a reenactment of his martyrdom at Karbalāʾ in the form of taʿziya plays, as well as a variety of rituals, perhaps best exemplified by the (much-debated) practice of flagellation. But if the episode was intensely remembered and commemorated by a large number of Muslims, Karbalāʾ could also represent a challenge to other groups who endeavored to erase its memory. From this perspective, Karbalāʾ is clearly an Islamic lieu de mémoire to borrow from Pierre Nora’s terminology, that is, a site of memory sometimes contested precisely because of its actuality and ever-changing present-day relevance. It is therefore quite paradoxical that although this episode exemplifies the drama par excellence of early Islam, it has been so little studied by modern scholars, even if its modern developments have attracted more attention. This paper thus aims to investigate the conditions of historical knowledge of the Karbalāʾ episode and to trace its narrative crystallization during the first centuries of Islam. How was it remembered by some and forgotten by others? How was its memory constructed? In short, how was the historiographical vulgate of such a central event elaborated? As the most traumatic episode of nascent Islam, al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom required the greatest historiographical effort and thus the details of the construction of its memory deserve scrutiny.

The battle of Dhū Qār looms large in Muslim memories of pre-Islamic history. The early seventh century clash between warriors from the Arabian Bakr ibn Wāʾil tribal group and a Sasanian frontier force casts an especially portentous shadow into Islamic times since it is remembered as the first ‘Arab’ victory against ‘Persians’ and hence a foreshadowing of the Islamic Conquest of Iraq one generation later. Modern scholars note that classical-era Muslim writers inflated Dhū Qār’s significance when they viewed the pre-Islamic battle from the perspective of hindsight in post-conquest Iraq where the relative merits of ‘Arab’ vs. ‘Persian’ were disputed, but even deeper questions surround Dhū Qār’s legacy in Muslim memories which I investigate in this paper. I start by questioning the very ‘Arabness’ of the battle. The presence of self-styled ‘Arabs’ in post-conquest Iraq starkly contrasts the virtual absence of ‘Arabs’ in the pre-Islamic historical record: it appears that the early centuries of Islam were a fertile period for Arab ethnogenesis when various disparate pre-Islamic Arabian groups which later converted to Islam and participated in the Conquests were retrospectively amalgamated into a cohesive ‘Arab’ ethnos. Early Islamic history-telling thus involved the creation of an ‘Arab past’ to narrate a myth of origins for the post-conquest society, and Dhū Qār was a key landmark in that process. Poetry and anecdotes which coalesced around the story of Dhū Qār between the eighth and tenth centuries reveal the battle’s changing significations over time and indicate its status as a significant ‘lieu de mémoire’ in early Islam’s cultural memory. Like Pierre Nora identified contested memories surrounding diverse lieux de mémoire in modern-era constructions of the French national consciousness, the varied memories of Dhū Qār relate to shifting constructions of post-conquest Iraqi identities. Poets and narrators re-told and re-remembered the battle, gradually transforming it from a tribal conflict to a pivotal moment in Arab ‘collective memory’ and pendant piece to Islam’s greatest victory, Muḥammad’s battle at Badr. My diachronic textual analysis offers a window into the complex process by which Arab-Muslim identity was forged and illustrates how Muslims used the past to articulate the nexus of ‘Arab’ and ‘Islam’ in their ever-changing presents.

From every vantage point, Jerusalem’s Bāb al-Raḥma (Gate of Mercy) is dwarfed by the hauts lieux de mémoire on the Temple Mount— the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqṣā Mosque. In fact, since its construction as a monumental entrance to Jerusalem’s sacred enclosure, the Bāb al-Raḥma has rested at the periphery in terms of form, function, and memory. A deeper look into the form and ornamentation of the original Marwānid monument, however, as well as an examination of the textual traditions and pilgrimage practices related to the site, produces fascinating insight into how monuments on the margins of hauts lieux de mémoire are sacralized, memorialized, and forgotten. Textual and material evidence concerning the Bāb al-Raḥma, including tafsīr, faḍā’il treatises, adab collections, and travel accounts, reveal that between the late 1st/7th and 8th/14th centuries, the Gate of Mercy underwent at least five phases of construction as a sacred lieu de mémoire. The first phase involved the use of architectural form and decorative motifs to position the gate vis-à-vis the Dome of the Rock. Second came a highly contested period of textual elaboration in the 4th/10th century, when Muslim exegetes struggled to locate the gate in Qu’ranic scripture. Third, Muslim memory transposed the gate into a mythical past that emphasized sanctification through prophetic association. In addition, the site was eschatologically “remembered” as part of an imminent future— although polemical traditions concerning a final battle between the Mahdī, the Sufyānī, and the Kalb proved transitory. Finally, devotional and pilgrimage practices, such as those recorded by al-Wāsiṭī, ibn al-Murajjā, and Nāṣir-i Khusraw, enshrined the site as a lieu de mémoire and a lieu de sentiment. These final three phases occurred concomitantly, with mythic embellishments and records of pilgrimages to the site appearing in sources as early as the 5th/11th century and gaining strength with al-Ghazālī’s stay at the gate’s zāwiyya. Therefore, while the Bāb al-Raḥma’s peripheral position made the monument highly sensitive to historical vagaries, it serves as a vivid example of the vibrant but precarious life of a monument on the edge of the sacred. Like the house of Umm Hānī in Mecca and the Jannat al-Baqī’ in Medina, the Bāb al-Raḥma and other monuments on the margins thus provide a rich field for exploring the expansion and contraction of both sacred space and sacred memory.