Almost without fail on the occasion of the Ashura commemorations Shi'a Muslims living in the United Kingdom (and probably elsewhere in Europe and North America) quibble over the forms and content of rituals and customs that mark the first ten days of Muharram.
In these endless and oftentimes meaningless discussions the ritual of self-flagellation (Arabic: tatbir; Persian/Urdu: Qama zani, or Talwar zani) usually occupies centre stage.
I don't care much for the Islamic juridical discussions on the permissibility, or impermissibility, of the practice. There's legal merit to both sides of the debate, and it is true that in contemporary times one would hardly struggle to find significant and estimable Shi'i jurists that have ruled for or against the practice.
Should you engage in self-flagellation? That's your choice, presumably after considering the viewpoint of the jurist you chose to follow. Put simply: Ask your marji' al-taqlid.
So what exactly is the purpose of this post/rant?
In the following I will briefly outline the historical development of the main Muharram rituals and devotional acts of piety, including an impressionistic attempt to trace the origins of self-flagellation, or tatbir.
Husayn b. ʿAli was killed, tragically and in horrific circumstances, in the year 680 AD. Almost immediately after the Battle of Karbala the death of Husayn became a religious symbol of suffering and martyrdom among his followers and loyalist in the nascent proto-Shiʿi communities. In the centuries that followed, Shiʿi communities established powerful symbolisms and acts of devotional piety to keep the memory of Husayn alive. Although Husayn died on the plains of Karbala in 680 AD his memory lives on...
In renewing the memory of Husayn’s martyrdom every year, the Shiʿi community renews its bond with the twelve imams and in doing so they reinvigorate that spiritual bond, known as walaya and wilaya, without which eternal salvation would not be possible.
The symbol of Husayn’s tragic death touches upon the cosmic problem of religious suffering. The problem for Shiʿi Muslims is not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, and how to make the physical pain, personal loss, or worldly defeat sufferable. The Shiʿis came to regard Husayn as the Master of Martyrs (sayyid al-shuhadaʾ). For Shiʿi Muslims, Husayn died so that Islam could be preserved. Today, the death of Husayn is marked as an ideal to inspire all subsequent generations of Muslims to strive to protect the lofty ideals of justice, morality, standing up to tyranny, and speak truth to power, among many other cosmological and spiritual qualities, which I may address in a future post.
Over the course of many centuries the memory of Husayn refused to faint away as Shiʿi Muslims developed five major rituals that kept the Battle of Karbala an emulated reality intimately embedded in the religious psyche of the community of faithful.
These rituals included:
1. The memorial services (majalis al-taʿziya).
2. The visitation of Husayn’s tomb in Karbala, particularly on the Tenth Day (ʿAshura) and the Fortieth Day after the battle. These came to be known as ziyarat ʿashura and ziyarat al-arbaʿin.
3. The Public mourning processions, or requiems (al-mawakib al-husayniyya, or al-ʿazaʾiyya).
4. The representation of the Battle of Karbala in the form of a play (Arabic and Persian: shabih).
5. The act of self-flagellation, or self-mutilation (tatbir, or qama zani).
As for (1): The memorial services began almost immediately after the Battle of Karbala. Sufficient amount of historical reports confirm to us that Husayn’s family especially his womenfolk held mourning sessions to mark his death.
The Umayyad dynasty ruled from the year 661 to 750 AD. In the decades after 680, the mourning sessions commemorating Husayn’s death were held in secret and in the homes of the Imams and their followers.
After 750, when the ʿAbbasids came to power, the mourning sessions commemorating Karbala came into public display. By the 800s AD special mourning gatherings were held in Baghdad, Aleppo, and Cairo, in designated spaces known as Husayniyyahs.
A number of historical accounts recall expressions of piety practiced by Shiʿis that include wailing and lamentation. We also hear of poetry recitals and chants of grief remembering the death of Husayn and the suffering of the Twelve Imams.
As for (2): In the first decades following Husayn’s death, the visitation of his burial site in Karbala was performed by the Imams and their close followers. In the 800s the Imams institutionalised the visitation of Husayn (ziyarat al-husayn) with traditions (of historical soundness) going back to the sixth Imam, Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, who died in 765 AD. It is telling that in 850 AD the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil instituted a state ban on all visitations to Husayn’s grave, fearing the growing numbers of pilgrims.
By the 1500s when Iran and parts of Iraq were ruled by the Shiʿi dynasty of the Safavids, visitations to Karbala became well-established and important to Shiʿi identity.
As for (3): Public processions of mourning came into appearance in Baghdad as early as the 900s. The political climate at the time facilitated the growth of public displays of Shiʿi identity especially since Iraq and Iran fell under the political dominance of the Shiʿi Buyid dynasty from 945-1055 AD.
The historical sources paint a vivid picture of the open displays of Shiʿi piety as the following account by Ibn al-Athir, a Sunni historian who died in 1233 AD, shows:
On the day of ʿAshura, Muʿizz al-Dawla [he was the Buyid ruler] forced the people to close the bazaars, to suspend their business, to mourn, and to place rounded domes covered with wool [in the markets]. Wailing women, their cloths torn, walked in the streets, slapping their faces and lamenting Husayn.
The act of face-slapping and chest beating are described as “latm” in Arabic parlance.
As for (4): It was after the emergence of the Safavids in Iran in the 1500s that the new ritual of the shabih, or representation of the Battle of Karbala, emerged. It took the form of a passion play similar to modern theatre. Iranians invested in their artistic development of the shabih passion plays with unrivalled creativity. Even Iranian monarchs, both Safavid and Qajar, are said to have attended public passion plays.
The ritual may have possibly found its way into Arab Shiʿi lands in the nineteenth century, in Iraq and Lebanon. We have detailed accounts of European travellers who witnessed first hand the passions plays in the streets of Iranian cities such as Shiraz and Tehran but very few in Iraq and Lebanon.
As for (5): Arguably the most controversial and violent acts of the Muharram rituals is the act flagellation and self-mutilation. It is quite difficult to pinpoint the exact period in history when tatbir or qama-zani first appeared and gained popularity among the Shiʿas.
The use of knives and other instruments added a violent, bloody dimension to Ashura. Deliberate blood-letting is poignant and evokes a sense of timelessness and entry into the past suffering witnessed by Imam Husayn.
True, the flagellants seek to reenact Imam Husayn’s martyrdom by shedding their own blood, they also find solace in keeping true the Husayn dictum:
We will never surrender to humiliation!
Rather than face disgrace through defeat, the flagellants shed their own blood to symbolise their preparedness for self-sacrifice, death, and suffering. Unperturbed, the flagellants strike their heads repeatedly to soak the body with blood.
A brief but far from conclusive exploration of the historical sources would suggest the following development of flagellation in Shiʿi culture:
1. Azeri Turks in the region of Azerbaijan seemed to have been the first to institute the act of self-flagellation in Shiʿi culture. Accounts going back to the 1600s show Shiʿas in Turkish-speaking regions of north and northwestern Iran were known to strike their heads with swords and sharp instruments to shed blood in commemoration of Imam Husayn.
Here is one account from an Ottoman source that reports Muharram rituals in Tabriz, Iran, in 1640:
…At this moment some hundred men mingle in the crowd with razors, with which they cut the arms and breasts of all loving believers, who desire to shed their blood on this day in remembrance of the blood shed by the imam [Husayn]; they make such deep incisions and scars, that the ground appears as if it was blooming with tulips.
2. The practice of tatbir remained confined to the regions populated by Shiʿa Turks in northern Iran until the 1800s. In the nineteenth century self-flagellation in the Month of Muharram seems to have found supporters among the Shiʿas of Iraq and India.
3. The rest of Iran, particularly the southern regions, were encouraged to the culture of self-flagellation sometime around the earlier decades of the 1800s. A cleric and preacher by the name of Shaykh Mulla Agha ʿAbid al-Darbendi, who died in 1869, is the probably the first Shiʿi preacher to encourage the ritual in public and from the pulpit.
Al-Darbendi urged people to experience pain and suffering through self-flagellation. The Iraqi clergy in Najaf and Karbala did not take well to the practice of self-flagellation, however, when it first made appearance in Iraq in the 1800s.
4. It seems likely that the Qizilbash, the private army of the Safavid dynasty that ruled Iran from 1501 to 1722, were the first to introduce extreme forms of blood-letting in Shiʿi culture. The Qizilbash were ethnically Turk with idiosyncratic and mixed doctrinal beliefs stemming from eastern Christianity (particularly Christian Armenians of eastern Anatolia) and Iranian religiosities coupled with popular Sufism and folk Shiʿism. It is possible, then, that self-flagellation found its way into Shiʿi culture through Armenian Christian converts to Shiʿism who lived in Turkish-speaking regions in northern Iran, sometime around the 1500s and 1600s.