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The Unbearable Affirmation and Isolation of Muharram
Muharram is a time of inspiration as well as loneliness. A time of healing as well as loss. These are the paradoxes I know I can always count on even though my participation in its collective observances looks different each year. Muharram and the remembrance of the massacre of Imam Hussain and his family continue to teach me lessons that I will carry with me as long as I live. Its messages of service, courage, and justice are worn into my soul as if well-trodden paths on a dirt road — an honor I owe to being exposed to these observances annually from the time I was in my mother's womb.
Muharram is the first month in the Islamic calendar and a month of mourning traditionally observed by Shia Muslims. The mourning period culminates in Ashura, on the 10th of Muharram, which marks the day the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, Hussain ibn Ali, was brutally killed along with 71 family members and supporters. They had been cut off from their water supply — the Euphrates River — for three days, before being slaughtered one by one by a several thousand strong army of the Umayyad Empire. The reason? Hussain refused to give his allegiance to Yazid ibn Muawiyah, a corrupt ruler whose method of diplomacy favored violently silencing dissent. Hussain was an impediment to securing his unpopular rule. His commitment to liberation and the freedom struggle was a balm to the people who were desperate for a more egalitarian society. After Yazid's forces diverted Hussain and his family to the desert plains of Karbala, in modern-day Iraq, he and many of his family members and friends were massacred, including his six-month old son. The survivors of the dead, mostly women and children, were taken as prisoners to Syria, the capital of the empire. The heads of the martyrs were paraded on spears — a warning to all those contemplating resistance. Ever since, the Shia people have come together each Muharram to reflect on this tragedy. We sit in community to grieve, recite poetry, hear sermons, and lamentations on the person who never stopped speaking truth to power even when he stood alone before an army of thousands.
I call it my social justice holiday when describing it to those who are unfamiliar. But holiday isn’t quite the right word. It’s not a time for celebration, though I draw gratitude from the opportunity to be still every year and reflect on this moment in history. Each person who grew up in the Shia tradition has a unique experience with the observances of Muharram and specifically, the gatherings, or majlis, in remembrance held in earnest during the first ten days of the month. These are my experiences as a Pakistani daughter of immigrants growing up in Texas, and my experiences alone. I do not write this reflection in an effort to usurp anyone's narrative by telling their Muharram story. We each must tell our own if we feel moved to do so.
My mother and grandmother often said that the virtue of the women’s majlis is that it teaches you utne batne ka tharika. This directly translates from Urdu to “the way to stand and sit.” The phrase is used to refer to how to understand the etiquette of being in community with others in a majlis, but it is also a tool to teach girls how to be women. Often held in the living room of someone’s home with the furniture pushed to the walls and pristine white sheets spread out for ample floor seating, the rules of engagement proliferate silently among the crowd. The young ones learn by watching. If you look around the room, you see aunties dressed head to toe in black, the color of mourning. They line the walls first. A seat with one's back against the wall is a premium space reserved for older, but not yet elderly women during the majlis — the moms and spritely grandmothers whose knees are still doing them favors. Their children sit in front of them and what they lack in a wall at their back, they make up for by reclining into their mothers' laps. The elderly women sit in chairs, hoping to lock eyes with a younger woman to make the motion of bringing an invisible cup of chai to their lips, a humble request for it to manifest into a real one.