The Spirit Of Karbala

This is the revised text of a talk —'Talking about Muharram' — given at Chicago in Muharram 1998 before a group of concerned young Muslims who call themselves South Asian-American Professionals (SAMP). It is heartening to note now that it is not the only association of its kind in the United States. The horrific sectarian violence that rages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and has reached its worst form in Iraq impelled me to revise and share these remarks now.

When I accepted your kind invitation, I had nointention of going into the ‘facts’ of Muharram—the whys and wherefores ofthe martyrdom at Karbala. I did not feel any useful purpose would be served byre-hashing the political/theological issues that for centuries have engagedhistorians and rogues alike. Arguments on ‘facts’ only too often lead tosectarian conflict, particularly in South Asia. I was going to stick to thecultural and literary aspects of Muharram. However, as I began to prepare myremarks, my mind gradually changed, influenced by what was happening around me.I had not been unaware of the long-enduring tensions between the Shi’ahs andthe Sunnis in South Asia, which have resulted in recent years in some mosthorrific incidents in Pakistan. But what really triggered the shift was adifferent recent incident, as I shall explain in conclusion. The bulk of myremarks will be in two parts. In the first, I briefly offer my own narrative ofthe events that led to the tragedy at Karbala; in the second, I present the waysome important Urdu writers idealize Imam Husain, perceiving in his martyrdomthe optimum expression of human courage and virtue.

Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar,and its first day should be a day of rejoicing for Muslims. The advent ofMuharram in the pre-Islamic days marked a period of peace, bringing a temporaryclosure to internecine warfare among the tribes of Arabia. Presumably it wasalso a time for celebration and joy. But now, for devout Muslims, Muharram isthe month for a profoundly sombre engagement with what happened at Karbala—inpresent-day Iraq—on the tenth day of the 61st year of Hijra (10 October 680CE). On that day, barely fifty years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, hisbeloved grandson, Husain, was killed on the battlefield, together with severalmembers of his own family, and the killers were none other than some members ofthe Prophet’s own ummah, the community of the Faithful.

Just before the Prophet’s death in 632 CE at Madinah, the dín(religion) named Islam had been explicitly declared ‘complete’ in a divinerevelation, but the shape that the polity of the Faithful was expected to takeafter his death was left undefined. Who was to succeed the Prophet within thenewly formed and constantly expanding community of the Believers, not in hisprophetic role, for that ended with him, but as his khalífa, hisrepresentative or viceroy, in worldly affairs? The Prophet had brought togetherthe tribally divided people of Arabia into a single polity, whose binding powerlay as much in his own person as in the shared faith in Allah. Now that hisperson was going to be no more, would the faith in One God be enough to hold allthe Faithful together?

Soon after the Prophet breathed his last, and even before his body could beprepared for burial, a group of Ansars, the original people of Madinah, met andstarted discussing as to who should be the new amír,‘the commander.’They discussed names only from among themselves. When the word reached theMosque of the Prophet, Umar and Abu Bakr rushed over to the meeting place, andpresented a counter-claim as exclusive in nature. They privileged the peoplefrom Mecca as those who had been the longest in Islam, and thus closest to theProphet. Their argument won the day when Umar offered his hand in allegiance toAbu Bakr, and the leader of one of the Ansar factions followed suit. The smallad hoc gathering of a few prominent figures in Madinah ended with Abu Bakr’selevation as the first Caliph and ‘Commander’ of all Muslims. Notably absentat the meeting was Ali, the Prophet’s nephew and son-in-law, who claimed tohave been the first male to accept Islam. Soon, most of the people then presentin Madinah offered Abu Bakr their allegiance. Ali, however, did not do so, nordid a number of other people, including a prominent Ansar. The important thingfor us to note is that those who refused to sign up in Madinah—the first‘refuseniks’ in Islam—were left alone. Any dissenter elsewhere met adifferent fate. Two simultaneously-waged processes marked the first caliph’sbrief rule of two years: a highly centralized consolidation of Muslim temporalauthority, and the suppression of an assortment of political and religiousbreakaways in other places.

Abu Bakr, on his deathbed, obtained oaths of allegiance and loyalty—fromonly a select cohort of prominent people in Madinah—in favour of the person ofhis choice, who subsequently turned out to be Umar. During the second caliph’srule, the temporal authority of Madinah spread far into what earlier had beentwo powerful empires, the Byzantine and the Persian, bringing under the rule ofthe Arabs a variety of other people, who had political and social traditionsquite different from the Arabs.

Umar was assassinated. Before he died he nominated six select ‘Companionsof the Prophet,’ including Ali and Usman, to choose a person from amongthemselves. This time Ali made his claim known, but the person appointed by thegroup to make the decisive choice named Usman as the third caliph.

During Usman’s rule, Arab/Muslim armies further extended the borders of theMadinan state, but there also occurred (1) the rise to prominence of severalmembers of Usman’s own clan, and (2) an increasing rift between Damascus andKufa, the eastern and western regional centers of political power. Usman waskilled in his house by his political opponents, many of whom then sworeallegiance to Ali, who eventually also obtained the support of some otherfactions.

The barely five years of Ali’s rule were filled with turmoil. He had to dobattle with those who felt he had failed to seek sufficient revenge from theassassins of the third caliph, and then also with those who felt he had not beenresolute enough against his opponents’ demands. While Ali moved from Madinahto Kufa in Iraq, where lay most of his support, Mu’awiyah, the governor inDamascus, not only expanded his power into Egypt but also set himself up as arival caliph. Thus for some months, there were two Muslim caliphs, eachseparately acknowledged by factions within the Faithfuls.

Ali too died at an assassin’s hands. Some of Ali’s supporters wanted hiseldest son Hasan to make a claim, but Hasan withdrew in favour of Mu’awiyah,received a generous annuity in return, and retired to live in luxury in Madinah,where he died of poisoning.

That brings us to the year 661 AD, barely thirty years since the Prophet’sdeath. And a pause for some retrospection would be useful. During those years,three Muslim caliphs were assassinated—two by Muslims themselves, and one by aChristian slave—and countless other Muslims had died violent deaths at thehands of other Muslims. Meanwhile the Muslim/Arab state had ceaselessly spreadover the entire Arabian Peninsula, across the Nile delta in the west, to theborders of Anatolia and Armenia in the north, and all the way to the easternborders of present day Iran in the east. In merely three decades it had becomean imperial power of a size that dwarfed all previous imperial powers in humanhistory.

The preceding narrative was not to cast aspersion onextraordinary individuals. They had acted in the spirit of their times, andquite often for what they saw as a selfless cause. What I wished to bring toyour attention is the trajectory—as I see it—taken by the consequence oftheir actions: the emergence of a despotic polity, in which no systemicallowance was made to accommodate political dissension or opposition. It was apolity wherein a litany—‘Obey God, obey the Prophet, and obey those who holdcommand over you’—became the governing principle.

Later, a vast majority of Muslims down the centuries began to refer to thereign of the first four caliphs as the period of the rashidun, the'rightly-guided' caliphs. That descriptive phrase, to my mind, was a usefuldevice. It saved Muslims from making rigidly factional decisions about the fourelder statesmen, about one being exclusively right compared to another. And assuch, it also served them as a psychological crutch, a way for their collectiveself to protect itself from being overwhelmed by a specific past that shouldhave been anything but so bloodstained. That so many of the elders, all‘Companions of the Prophet,’ disagreed, fought, and killed each other overissues related to temporal power had to be somehow reconciled with the naturalurge of the larger community to get on with life more peaceably. And so thefirst four caliphs and their actions were declared to be ‘rightly guided’ byGod, who alone judged what they did and who alone knew why they did it. It wasnot for the posterity to say who was right and who was wrong. That they weredeclared to be ‘rightly guided’ also implied, I would assert, that they werenot necessarily always ‘rightly guiding.’ In other words, the Muslims’natural desire to honor those elders did not inevitably require regarding thetime of those elders as ‘the best of days,’ and a model for all times.Perniciously, that exactly is what happened, and only because it was also thetime when an Arab imperium emerged. The period of the temporal rise of theArabs—a people—came to be known as the exemplary years of Islam—a faith.

Returning to our historical narrative, Mu’awiyah, the parallel caliph, notonly further expanded the Arab empire, but by nominating his son Yazid as hisrightful successor he also set the precedent for hereditary rule in Islam. Thecaliphate that began as the exclusive privilege of the people of a particularplace and tribe now became more narrowly confined to just one family.

Mu’awiyah, during his life, made sure of Yazid’s succession by obtainingdeclarations of allegiance to Yazid from various parts of the empire. However,at his death, some resistance to Yazid’s claim appeared in both Madinah andKufa. The resistance eventually consolidated itself around the person of Husain,son of Ali, who left Madinah for Kufa, expecting support from the former alliesof his father. Yazid’s forces, however, easily put an end to Husain’s Kufansupport while the latter was still on the way. Thus it was that with only asmall number of supporters Husain had to face a far larger imperial force atKarbala. When his opponents demanded that he should immediately surrender, andformally swear allegiance to Yazid, Husain countered with three options. Heasked that they should allow him to return to Madinah and a life of quietude,let him proceed to some frontier of the Islamic/Arab Empire and fight there forIslam’s cause, or, as the last resort, take him to Yazid so that he could putthe matter directly before him. Some say that Husain’s opponents refused tobudge from their position and launched an attack, while other traditions claimthat some members of his own party, seeking to avenge the murder at Kufa of oneof their kinsmen, precipitated the battle. In any case, the end was swift.Husain and those of his companions who took part in the battle were killed; thesurviving women and children, and the sick were first taken to Damascus, andthen sent back to Madinah. The dynastic rule launched by Mu’awiyah and Yazidcontinued for several decades, only to be replaced by an endless series ofdynastic rules and a more imperious caliphate—all now forgotten except by thespecialists. On the other hand, the deaths of Husain and his companions aremourned every year by millions of people worldwide, and their lives are stillregarded exemplary by many more.

* * *

What is there in that brief and tragic stand taken byHusain at Karbala that has so gripped the hearts and minds of countlessgenerations of Muslims? There are of course those who are known as the Shi’ahs,the partisans of Ali, who believe that Ali had been the Prophet’s chosensuccessor, and who also believe in the concept of Imamate, which they considerto be exclusive to the male descendents of Ali through Husain. For them, ofcourse, Husain is and should be a luminescent figure. But why should it be truealso for the non-Shi’ahs, particularly after so many centuries, and even afterso much sectarian accretion around the events? I find some answers in theimaginative literature I know most about, for literature arises out of the powerof the metaphor, and its simple words often stand for complexities of thoughtsand actions that most of us may find almost ineffable.

Muhammad Ali (d. 1931), a prominent leader of the anti-colonial movement inIndia and the most important leader of the so-called Khilafat Movement in theTwenties, is also famous for a couplet which he wrote while he was a politicalprisoner. It has since become proverbial in Urdu.

qatl-i husain asl meñ marg-i yazíd hai
islám zinda hotá hai har karbalá ke bád

Husain’s murder is in fact Yazid’s [own] death;
[For] Islam comes alive again after every Karbala.

What was the Islam that Husain symbolized for theIndian poet/politician? Here we can do no better than to seek guidance from agreater poet, Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), from a section in his poem, Rumúz-iBekhudí, ‘The Mysteries of Selflessness.’ The section is titled,‘Concerning Muslim Freedom [hurriya], and the Secret of the Tragedy ofKarbala.’ After briefly setting up an opposition between Passion andReason—one bold, the other crafty, one empyrean in flight, the otherearthbound—the poet goes on to declare:

‘I would speak
Of that great leader of all men who love
Truly the Lord, that upright cypress-tree
Of the Apostle’s garden, Ali’s son,
Whose father led the sacrificial feast
That he might prove a mighty offering;
And for that prince of the best race of men
The Last of the Apostles gave his back
To ride upon, a camel passing fair. .........

Moses and Pharaoh, Shabbir and Yazid—
From Life [hayát] spring these conflicting potencies;
Truth lives in Shabbir’s strength; Untruth is that
Fierce, final anguish of regretful death.
And when Caliphate first snapped its thread
From the Koran, in Freedom’s throat was poured
A fatal poison; like a rain-charged cloud
The effulgence of the best of peoples rose
Out of the West, to spill on Karbala,
And in that soil, that desert was before,
Sowed, as he died, a field of tulip blood.
There, till the Resurrection, tyranny
Was evermore cut off; a garden fair immortalizes where his lifeblood surged.’

Iqbal then goes on to call Husain ‘the edifice of La Ilaha, of faithin God’s pure Unity,’ echoing a quatrain ascribed to Mu’inuddin Chishti ofAjmer (d. 1325), the pivotal sufi saint of South Asia. Had Husain been pursuinga selfish goal, Iqbal continues, he would not have provisioned himself the wayhe did—his sword was for the glory of the Faith, and he unsheathed it only todefend the Law. The poet concludes by saying:

‘Though Damascus’ might, Baghdad’s splendour
and Granada’s majesty have all vanished, all lost to mind,
Yet still vibrate the strings Husain struck within our soul,
for still ever new our faith abides in his cry: Allahu Akbar.’

For Iqbal, Husain epitomizes the original mission of Islam, which, as he putsit, was ‘to found Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood among all Mankind.’Those who oppose these goals belong to Yazid’s ranks, while those who striveto bring them about stand tall beside Husain.

Munshi Prem Chand (d. 1936), a Hindu, is considered oneof the foremost writers of prose fiction in both Hindi and Urdu. His only play, Karbala,was written during the time when after the collapse of the Khilafat Movement inIndia much communal enmity had erupted between Hindus and Muslims. Using thelore and legend of a very small Hindu community known as the Mohyals (also oftencalled the ‘Husaini Brahmins’), he placed a group of Hindu warriors insouthern Hejaz, who, upon hearing the news of Husain’s opposition to thedespotic rule of Yazid, rush to Karbala and die fighting on Husain’s behalf.The Hindu party, led by Raja Sahas Rai, arrives at the battlefield just whenHusain and his few remaining companions begin their obligatory afternoonprayers. The Hindus immediately take up defensive positions, and shield thepraying Muslims from their enemy’s arrows. After the prayers, Husain speaks:

Husain: ‘My dear friends who share my grief, these prayers will ever be remembered in Islam’s history. We couldn’t have completed them without these brave servants of God standing behind us to protect us from the arrows of the enemy. O Worshippers of Truth, we greet you. Though you’re not of the Believers [momin], your religion must be true and God-given if its followers are such defenders of Truth and Justice, and if they think so little of their own lives in order to support the persecuted. Such a religion will always remain in this world, and its light will spread worldwide together with the glory of Islam.’

Sahas Rai: ‘Hazrat, we thank you for the blessings you have just cast upon us. I too pray to Almighty God that whenever Islam needs our blood there should be plenty of my people to bare their breasts for its cause. Please give us now your permission to go into the battlefield, and lay down our lives for the cause of Truth.’

Husain: ‘No, my friends.