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Reliving Karbala This page intentionally left blank Reliving Karbala Martyrdom in South Asian Memory syed akbar hyder 1 2006 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright ᭧ 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hyder, Syed Akbar. Reliving Karbala : martyrdom in South Asian memory / Syed Akbar Hyder. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-537302-8 1. Shia—India. 2. Karbala, Battle of, Karbala, Iraq, 680. 3. Shia—Customs and practices. 4. Martyrdom. I. Title. BP192.7.I4H95 2006 297.8'2'0954—dc22 2005015099 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To the memory of Ammi and Pappa For Puneet, Hussain, and Raza This page intentionally left blank Preface Merı¯tamı¯r men˜muzfimar hai ik sfiu¯rat kfihara¯bı¯kı¯ hayu¯la¯ barq-e kfihirman ka¯hai kfihu¯n-e garm dahqa¯n˜ka¯ Hidden in my construction is an expression of ruin— The source of the harvest-destroying lightning is the farmer’s hot blood Mirza Ghalib Karbala is not only a part of my academic heritage; it is also part of my personal world. I am a product of a milieu in which the remem- brance of Karbala, the seventh-century battle between the younger grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Husain, and the political au- thority of that time, Yazid, consoled mourners during funerals and brought sobriety to weddings, buoyed arguments of socioreligious reform during heated discussions, and loomed large in the literary, visual, and aural aesthetics to which my family subscribed. While holding the status of the master narrative of martyrdom, its invoca- tions also appeared in a potpourri of forms that fulfilled mundane needs and desires that had no seeming relationship with spirituality or metaphysics. Like many others who grow up in a world where Karbala holds similar currency, I too had my favorite characters from the Karbala story. One of them was Hurr, a general from Ya- zid’s army who defected to Husain’s camp just hours before the ac- tual battle began. Out of all the stock characters from the Karbala story, Hurr seemed to be the most realistic: his faith wavered and he made mistakes; he pondered his actions in terms of gains and losses in this life and in the hereafter; he broke forth from the power structures of his time. In keeping with the spirit of his name, he was “free” and liberated in an existential sense. So fascinated viii preface was I with Hurr that I decided to take him up when embarking on my graduate studies. I sought to gauge Hurr’s legacy by tracing it through various cultural traditions of the Near Eastern and South Asian worlds, concentrating especially on the genre of Urdu elegies. However, after beginning my doctoral studies at Harvard, I was convinced by the late Annemarie Schimmel to broaden my research project from a study of Hurr to a larger study of Karbala’s legacy, not just for Muslims but also for non-Muslims. When I started working on this project a decade ago, few Westerners out- side academic circles knew what Karbala meant. Since then, however, fueled by the United States’ military involvement in Iraq, the mass media have duly propelled Karbala into headlines that are often marred by reductive assump- tions, without appreciating its presence not just in Iraq, but in other parts of Asia and Africa as well. So when thousands of people in South Asia demon- strated against the United States’ military campaigns in areas surrounding Karbala and Najaf, many people in the West missed the symbolic significance of these cities to regions beyond the Middle East. This book, among other objectives, seeks to engage the strait-jacketed man- ner in which Muslim societies are represented in the western world, not just through the mass media and government propaganda but also with the assis- tance of many institutions of higher education. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States and July 7, 2005, in London, the reified image of the Islam-martyrdom-violence nexus has gained more cur- rency than ever before; and such images do not augur well for any thoughtful or honest assessment of the cosmopolitan cultures and histories of Muslim peoples’, nor have these images propelled discussions regarding power rela- tions, alienation, and disenfranchisement forward. Moreover, a discussion of Islam in the West is disproportionately shaped by the assumption that the Middle East (with fewer than 40 percent of the total Muslim population) is an exclusively representative sample of Islam. I break decisively from the ranks of those who imagine the location of Muslim societies along a single “perim- eter,”1 and refute any unified readings of Islam by exploring the multifaceted developments and readings of Karbala and its symbolic status vis-a´-vis the idea of martyrdom. Rather than locating my discussion exclusively at the node of the trite mantra of “Islam has many faces,” I emphasize moments of tension and fissures, along with instances of collaboration and appropriation. Osten- sibly about Karbala and martyrdom, this book makes a broad appeal to those who wish to explore how religions, like human beings, live their lives through temporal and contextual changes, doubts and certainties, concords and aporias. It is my hope that this study, by setting forth a paradigm for reading an event from seventh-century Iraq, will help students and scholars of religion, culture, and literature open a window on some of the dynamic interpretive strategies that shape the social milieus in which more than a billion people live. The formal research for parts of this book began in May 1993 and drew to a close in March 2005. During this time, I had the good fortune of benefiting from innumerable consultants, critics, friends, family members, and teachers based in India, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the preface ix United Kingdom, and the United States. One of the most difficult tasks in conducting this study was selecting the material that I would include in the book. Many whom I consulted wanted me to write a book that would alter the state of the Muslim community for the better; they felt that I should not ex- amine popular and controversial aspects of religion when writing about Kar- bala. Rather, they envisioned my study as a work that might be considered authoritative among the well-read practioners of Islam. In fact, a religious au- thority told me that I should not even mention a certain South Asian Muslim neighborhood, lest I embarrass Muslims around the world: “What they do is not true Islam; that is not what the Quran says; that is not what Karbala is all about. You know, Islam is the best religion with the worst followers, even George Bernard Shaw said this. Even if you talk about those un-Islamic things, you should categorically say what those people do is not Islam.” The religious and literary authorities who spoke with me had little appreciation for the man- ner in which Karbala is perceived by laypeople. They wanted me to concentrate exclusively on written texts of history, philosophy, and aesthetics. While they did not hesitate to blame and criticize others for depicting Islam as an invari- ably violent and intolerant force, ironically, they rejected readings of Islam which were at odds with their own understanding. Many of their discourses were more exclusivist than pluralistic. Although it is obvious to me that such attitudes are an expression of concern that Islam has been misunderstood in the West for a very long time, and a belief that a singularly neat reading of this religion would vindicate its worth, I could not do justice to this project without mentioning those “embarrassing” moments of history and cultural practices that afford us telling insights into how religions manifest themselves in flesh, beyond their scripted existence. Moreover, I could not assign thousands of people the role of stray or insignificant devotees, simply because they live re- ligion that is not rooted in authoritative texts. Regardless of whether or not I heeded advice and warnings, I am most indebted to all those who allowed me entry into their worlds of devotion, mysticism, criticism, and humor. Previous incarnations of parts of this book have appeared in Cultural Dy- namics (“Iqbal and Karbala: Re-Reading the Episteme of Martyrdom for a Po- etics of Appropriation”), Volume 13, no. 3, pp. 339–362, Sage Publications, 2001; Sufi Illuminations (“Revisiting Wine and the Goblet in South Asian Martyrdom and Mysticism”), Volume 3, no. 1, pp. 14–33; The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi’i Islam (“Sayyadeh Zaynab: The Conqueror of Damascus and Beyond”), ed. Kamran Scot Aghaie, 2005, Austin: University of Texas Press; and A Wilderness of Possibilities (“To You Your Cremation, To Me My Burial: The Ideals of Inter-Communal Har- mony in Premchand’s Karbala”), eds.