Rethinking Muharram: Shi'i Muslim Minorities and the Politics of Ashura Performances
Panel 080, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 4:30 pm
Panel Description
The first ten days of the month of Muharram (known as Ashura) are often taken as an essential cultural paradigm for Shi'i Islam by academics and by Shi'i Muslims themselves. Mourning performances revolve around the story of the battle of Karbala (680 CE). In this Iraqi desert field, Husayn, Prophet Muhammad's grandson, along with his followers, died a martyr's death by the army of Umayyad caliph Yazid (who ruled from 680-683). For Shi'a, remembering Karbala has served as a basic metaphor upon which many beliefs, worldviews, and ritual performances are based. The commemorative ceremonies have been used to affirm communal solidarity and express political, ideological, and social relationships and identities in shifting historical contexts. These ritual performances are also strategic in that they seek to affirm control of a community's situation and flexibly reinvent rituals as ongoing processes to accommodate various ideas, symbols, and practices in culturally defined contexts.
This panel explores the creative ways Shi'i communities from various ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds use Muharram discourses and practices to further ethnic/nationalist goals, and to negotiate their identity in the context of shifting state-society relations. Such performances are studied here as new ways of commemorating Muharram that entail transgressive features yet remain conservative to affirm social solidarity and bring minority communities more visibility in society. In particular, we examine Shi'i Muharram rituals that do not conform to "official" models of religious action and yet promote Shi'i identity in terms of authenticity and appeal to "traditions." In certain contexts, however, Ashura may challenge colonial or state hegemony, serve as expressions of self-revival, or as a means of displaying communal identity in a multicultural state.
Panel presenters expand on Muharram practices across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Ashura commemorations in Lebanon are analyzed as texts, open for interpretation and variability. Similarly, Ashura manifestations in Iran, shortly after the "Green Revolution" contesting the disputed 2009 elections, are examined in terms of carnivaleque theatricality and use of city space. In West Africa, Senegalese Shi'a do not participate in Muharram performances typical in the Middle East, but organize conferences on religious debates inclusive of the Sufi Muslim majority. In Britain, Shi'i youth use Ashura to contest the older generation and assert themselves within larger transnational Islamic movements and British secular space. Throughout all four papers, themes of Ashura performance as local political intervention permeate, regardless of Shi'i majority, Shi'i minority, or Shi'i diaspora contexts.
Disciplines
Religious Studies/Theology
Participants
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Dr. Babak Rahimi
-- Presenter
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Dr. Samer El-Karanshawy
-- Presenter
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Dr. Kathryn Spellman Poots
-- Presenter
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Dr. Toby Matthiesen
-- Chair
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Dr. Mara Leichtman
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Chiara Formichi
-- Discussant
Presentations
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Dr. Samer El-Karanshawy
Every commemoration of Husayn is a pilgrimage. Definitive Twelver Shī‛ī texts order the believers to visit the grave of the Imām on the day he was martyred, ‛Āshurā’, the tenth of Muharram. And if they can’t be in Karbalā’ where he was martyred and his headless body buried, then they are to visit ‘from a distance,’ mourn his suffering and share the grief of the afflicted, namely the Imām’s grandfather, the Prophet. Typical of a pilgrimage, as Victor Turner tells us, the commemoration consists of reliving the founder’s (in this case Imām Husayn’s) tragedy. Empathy is the aim and narration is the prime means. Yet the ziyārāt (single: ziyāra, visit) and the narrative of the Imām’s plight in Karbalā’ (where he was killed) are both texts, i.e. they are open to interpretation and, with this, variability. In accordance with different contexts readings vary, and with them meanings and forms of performance also differ. What would be defined as the same ‘ritual’ varies in structure, content and the message it delivers; drama will always be present yet its degree will not be the same; at least this is what my research on the mourning sermons in Lebanon demonstrate. Based on examples from my fieldwork and textual research I will demonstrate the link between textuality, interpretability, and variability in commemorating Husayn. I will discuss the evolution of the narrative of Karbalā’, the ‘historical’ accounts that were never free of hagiography, and the contemporary, often politically-loaded, debates that redefined Husayn’s memory over the last decades. In addition to the textual references and material I will use examples from the mourning sermons I attended in Beirut. As this presentation will make clear, such debates with their full-fledged complexity are at heart of Imam Husayn’s memory as presently perceived.
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Dr. Babak Rahimi
This paper is an ethnographic and theoretical study of the Shia mourning rituals of Muharram performed during Ashura (27, December) of 2009 in Tehran. The 2009 Ashura ceremonies, performed months after the disputed presidential elections when Iran’s major cities erupted in the most intense street demonstrations, represent an example of politicized Muharram ceremonies, commemorative rituals performed for the martyrdom of the Prophet’s beloved grandson, Husayn, in 680 C.E. The paper, however, argues that the political dimension of 2009 Ashura demonstrations emerged not as a manifestation of formalized politics, but carnivalesque theatricality with a cluster of significances, manifesting dissent through various masquerade practices that mark a breakdown lived spaces and ultimately reconfigure urban space-- however temporary. The centrality of the city space in this study is highlighted with the unfolding of 2009 Ashura protests from the morning period, when the demonstrations began, to nighttime in distinct urban neighborhoods or collective sites, followed by a temporary collapse of order through symbols and performances of mourning mixed with laughter and jest. The first part of the paper is an exploration of the Ashura carnivalesque that correlates with a theoretical consideration of the politics of carnival demonstrations, somewhat followed by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and his World, but also providing an ethnography of distinct carnivalesque practices such as cursing, misrule, vulgar slogans, and grotesque behaviors through which mourning becomes a form of political humor performed on the street level. In the second part, the study argues that politicized Ashura canrivalesque should be contextualized within non-political Ashura canrivalesque ceremonies concurrently performed around the urban areas where street demonstrations take place. While in the first part the temporal dimension is emphasized, the second part considers the spatial framework through which political rituals become meaningful in an urban context. The final part of the paper critically reconsiders the concept of “Karbala paradigm” and argues for an alternative conception of Shia mourning rituals--at least in its Iranian manifestation-- and, more importantly, politicized ritual action.
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Dr. Mara Leichtman
Scholars have written extensively about Ashura practices in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan, where the mourning period is marked by passion plays reenacting the story of
the battle of Karbala, including self-flagellation. Over the past decade, Senegalese converts to Shi‘i Islam have begun to commemorate Ashura in their own way. They
insist that these Arab or Iranian practices are not essential to Shi‘i Islam, stressing in contrast their Senegalese or African Shi‘i identity. Converts in Dakar have organized public debates which cater to a Senegalese Sunni Muslim audience. In Senegal, Ashura overlaps with Tamkharit, a festive occasion with pre-Islamic origins. Some believe Tamkharit celebrates the Muslim New Year and is linked to other Qur’anic events. Senegalese Shi‘a hope that through educating the Senegalese population about Ashura they will sensitize them to the sadness of this date and avoid conflict. Conferences and television and radio appearances discuss whether Ashura is a celebration or a day of mourning and play up the closeness that African Sufis also feel towards the family of the Prophet.
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Dr. Kathryn Spellman Poots
The paper focuses on the ways in which British Shi’is, mainly between the ages 18-30, have been reworking and performing Muharram rituals in the UK. Based on ethnographic and web based research it aims to demonstrate how Muharram events have become important competitive and communicative spaces for young British Shiis who come from a wide range of ethno-national backgrounds. The research closely examines the interface between embodied Muharram ritual practices and the proliferation of new types of charity events, lecture series and public relation campaigns organized by the younger generations during the month of Muharram. It will look closely at the dialogue, debates and forms of sociability that have evolved in these new spaces in relation to codes of behaviour and issues of lifestyle posited by the older generations. Taking into account the internal religious and social differences within the British Shi’I community, it will show how these spaces are used to negotiate daily life in Britain’s secular society and discuss the rise of sectarian politics and violence in locations around the world. The paper will also explore the extent to which different religious interpretations and rulings of Shi’i religious leaders (marja taqulids) in Iran and Iraq inform and legitimise Muharram events in the UK. The paper intends to address questions such as: What constitutes and marks a wider British Shia communal identity? Who decides? How are diasporic identities (such as Pakistani, Iranian, Iraqi and East African) contested and reshaped through new discourses and practices of religious ritual? The paper makes a wider argument that young British Shi’is are increasingly seeing themselves as part of an emerging, cross-ethnic British Shi’i community with diasporic and transnational dimensions. Taking a generational and gendered approach, the research is situated in sociology/anthropology of ethnicity and religion, and migration and diasporic studies.
