The distance from Gaza to Karbala
The distance from Gaza to Karbala
Collective, connected grief. 20th of Safar, day 322 of the genocide in Gaza.
It is said that when Hussain’s infant son Ali Asghar was pierced with an arrow bigger than his frame, his neck gushed pools of blood into Hussain’s hands. It is said that these arrows were originally used against war-elephants, rather than months-old infants. In the midst of a losing battle, cradling a tiny corpse, Hussain cried to the elements in grief: would the parched sands of Karbala take this blood, this body? The land said no, for if it took the blood of a divine innocent, it would never again bear fruit. Would the sky take Ali Asghar? The sky thundered a refusal: if it met with this blood, it would never again rain. And so Hussain walked on, the blood and body of his infant forever suspended between earth and sky, forever an echoing elegy.
The earth rejected the blood of an innocent and the sky condemned it, both in protest- it wounded them to see life extinguished in such an untimely, undignified manner. Come to me intact, said the earthworms in the grave-soil. It is not your lot to be dismembered by wild dogs, or wild men.
I will take your ashes, said the wind, but you must honour them first.
I will carry your arrows and missiles, but I would rather carry pollen, sea-salt smells and lovers’ whispers.
A baby boy shivers uncontrollably in a stark white hospital, the air around him electrified with the looming terror/memory of invasion or airstrike. He is too stunned to cry, at an age when a human can only communicate through crying. His dark eyes are open wide in shock, his body grey with rubble-dust, blood streaked, and a strip of white tape across his tiny trembling belly. He is so small that he makes my arms hurt when I see him in; I have the strange urge to coo to a photo on my phone screen. His tremble is contagious, and it reaches me as well as everyone in the comments section:
“I have a baby the same age- this broke me”
“Any updates on the baby? Is he okay?”
“All we know is that he is in South Gaza”
The distance from Karbala to Gaza is 908 km, and none at all.
What is our grief, if it isn’t collective?
We bear a strange sort of eye-witness, a digital testimony, of a highly visible and widely broadcast genocide. A genocide that has gestated for nine months[1] into a many-limbed monster, a fully-formed ghoul scratching on our collective consciousness. We birthed this immortal thing. Now we have no choice but to write it into the history books, into our tear-ducts, into our coming generations.
Nasl-kashi. That is our word for genocide. Nasl-kashi is the erasure of all the lineages that humans are connected to: biological, relational, ecological. A murder that reaches across stretches of time- backwards to attempt to erase ancestors and roots, and forward in time to limit future progeny and growth. Murders that reach horizontally to destroy webs of connection: friendships, loves, tensions, stray animals, trees, shrubs, birds, cement-walls, tent-walls.
I do not intend to recap what we all know to be truths of Gaza, heartbreaks and horrors that no words can capture, really. I might have tried if I were a poet. But for now, let us hold in our hearts every bloodied and dust-covered face, every body- or parts, every name, every absurd statistic, every headline, every story we have witnessed over the last nine months and ask: how do we live with this? How do we make sure we do not forget? How do we make space for this trauma/grief in our lives, continuously?
What is the use of 1400 years of ritualised Shi’a grief, if it cannot be mobilised for a present-day Karbala? I do not speak here simply of the Shi’a as a religious group, or a political entity. I draw instead from a spiritual and cultural legacy of South-Asian Shi’ism, syncretic and amorphous. I speak of the ritualised lament that we have perfected for over a millennium- what does Shi’a mourning and a spirit of resistance have to offer to all those in solidarity with Palestine?
This is not, of course, limited to those either practicing or raised in Shi’a life-worlds for whom the waqiya [2] of Karbala resonates viscerally. Those outside of Shi’a spheres of influence likely know little of the Battle of Karbala, its history and the collective and unending grief that it has inspired for 1400 years. To summarise the complex histories of the Battle of Karbala [4] in the briefest fashion: about 1300 years ago a small band rode from Madina to Karbala, Iraq, to protest the rule of the caliph Yazid. Amongst those labelled as dissenters and rebels was Hussain ibn Ali, the grandson of Muhammad, who refused to accept Yazid’s rule. Hussain and his party, including women and children, went to the valley of Karbala as an act of political protest and spiritual resistance. Eventually, seen as no more than threats to the caliphate, Hussain’s small minority stood in war against a large force from across the Islamic empire and was crushed. The defeat was marked by transgressions of the rules of war by Yazidi generals: depriving Hussain’s camp of water and food, murdering infants, burning down camp-shelters, mutilating bodies.
Yet these violent victors were forgotten by history, their lineages fading, and those who were starved, captured, dismembered, and brutalised are remembered in Shi’a history as heroes. Hussain was a proud rebel. The Shi’a who now remember his legacy and have built a faith out of it, honing the art of practicing grief as a method of resilience and sustained memory. Karbala is remembered through storytelling, majlis (sermons), music, art, and embodied lamentation practices. Karbala’s stories are embedded with human and beyond-human experiences, suffering, ideology, and Shi’a cosmology. But most importantly, the origin of Karbala’s commemorative rituals is in resistance: political, ideological, embodied.
In the world of Karbala, the oppressed are divine beings, a minority unrecognised and mislabeled by wider society. Tyrants rule and shape power to their will, and ignorance is their most prized weapon. Justice sits quietly as unthinkable atrocities run amok- justice is dispensed at the very end of time. Dignity is the mark of the true; if you seek the truth, seek those who are impoverished beyond belief, who the world has forgotten, and who continue to resist.
I have learnt these stories at the knee of my mother. I truly learnt the contours of collective grief from Shi’a epistemology, and the practices my mother would take us to when we were young. Majalis [5] were spaces of storytelling and social mourning, textured with uninhibited emotional arousal and come-downs. Jalūs processions were the first public demonstrations that I went to, where people embellished themselves with symbols, carry relics, take up space, and publicly proclaim the stories of their shared history and pain: this is what we pledge to remember, and the memory shapes us.
I use these experiences to offer a suggestion on how to grieve and resist together as we bear witness to the genocide of the Palestinian people. What I offer is also a question, really, of how we are all to survive this, and what the aftermath will look like. Survival, after all, doesn’t mean the continuation of life. In the words of the indigenous American writer Gerald Vizenor “…survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” [6] - survival is resistance, memory is survival is resistance.
You cannot see the image of a Gazan father carrying his son’s body parts in red-soaked white bags and not think of Karbala.
You cannot read that food and water has been cut off - of unquenchable thirst- and not think of Karbala.
You cannot think of a war of wor(l)ds, of political ideologies, of moral selectiveness, of a ghareeb against a zālim[7], and not think of Karbala.
You- we- must not, however, let your grief divert only to Karbala. Karbala is a multiple, it is here and now unfolding on our screens and what we must do is carve Palestine and its likelinesses into the same plaque of collective grief as we do Karbala.
Collective Grieving
Know that many of us- those raised on ancestral stories- have witnessed the apocalypses of our worlds many times over and lived to sing songs of them. This is what we must bring in solidarity to Palestine. The grief-language of our stories is the same; let us speak to one another.
The first thing we know to be true is that grief is a gift, albeit the most difficult one. It means you have connected beyond your own personhood, and that you have learnt the art of care. You have borne witness, and this is invaluable. When you bear witness to suffering, you are made real and whole- you see your place in the world, enmeshed with that of others. The Shi’a tell each other stories of how divine spirits collect tears shed in earnest sorrow- collect them in outstretched hands, where the tear-drops are at once water and crystal, piled together and still separate little globes.
Little red hearts pile together at the bottom of an Instagram post.“I hate ‘liking’ this! It breaks my heart. Commenting for visibility”. In the post a mother weeps, beating her hands to her chest in pain, her black abaya floating like an alām [8]. Matam [9] looks like you are trying to make sure you still have a heartbeat. Her son has been killed. Another woman holds her. They look into the camera, right at you.
Grief demands space, and articulation. Your body is a vehicle of truth, especially when it feels pain for/with someone else. In Shi’a sermons, we describe pain in acute detail and then embody it with matam; in doing so, we collapse the other. Hussain’s body is my body is your body is our body- we have all taken arrows and spears. We challenge the separation between our own living breathing seething bodies and those separated by history, by time, by space, by myth. We grieve in such a way that we begin to inhabit scenes at Karbala- our throats become parched and bodies betray unbearable heat. We do not shy away from sorrow. We turn the sound of wounded animal pain into haunting war cries. Tell me, can you listen to a group of Shi’a laments with the hairs on your neck, the hairs on your arms, remaining unmoved? Can you listen to the cries of a Palestinian child with nobody left and remain unmoved?
Khalās, ya habibi [10]. Bas. Enough.
Make memory objects. The Shi’a make relics, and replicas, and prepare their spaces with mourning materials. I embroider watermelons into fabric surfaces, like my ancestors embroidered Ya Hussain, Ya Ali and the Zulfiqar sword [11] into black flags, and mourning shrouds. We should learn to embroider tatreez. Even our colours are the same: black, red and green. I think of a black-and-green keffiyeh I saw on the Day of Ashura [12], cradled in the hands of a Shi’a mourner.
Allow pain to become the catalyst for connection and community. Grief is the antithesis to loneliness, because nobody can claim a monopoly on it. Grief is embedded within survival instincts: a primordial response to living and dying. And grief is not limited to human bodies: it threads through our water bodies, through plant limbs, through animal souls, through dust particles both suspended and settled.
The Shi’a listen to the animals and the environment, understanding them as part of our emotional world. When a speaker in a majlis says that the river Furat thrashes in agony as a martyr in Karbala falls, we nod as we cry. Of course, the river cries. Of course, the sky wept blood. We tell the story of Hussain’s loyal battle companion Zuljanah carrying his body from the battleground to women and children waiting in tents, so they may bid him goodbye. We draw this in art: Zuljanah the white horse in battle armour, weeping over his dead master, a tear trickling down the elegant bridge of his nose. Even animals understand that death demands dignity; that a body must return to its loved ones for farewell. Even the river- and sky - and sea refuses to drown this truth.
I have to think of a small child feeding hungry kittens in Gaza, both moving precariously amidst rubble. I have to think of rain in Gaza, and the rivers and the sea.
Our grief is allowed a cosmic, revolutionary, shattering scale. It must take a revolutionary scale, as a testimony to Palestine. Do not just mourn the dead. Mourn and honour the dying, and those left behind who must- somehow- live on. Mourn the memory, and let the past-memory guide your future-past. Sustain the memory through thoughtfully curated practices that include both personal and collective ones. Do not be ashamed or suppressed or alone in your grief. Find solidarity in it- hold gatherings at your homes, hold collective vigils, speak to your children, weep openly, chant loud, and flood the streets.
Labbaik Ya Hussain has always been about azadi [14]. Free Palestine, always.
Notes for the reader:
- Half the writing is in my footnotes, as I write text and subtext in parallel, deliberately. The footnotes also serve as glossary.
- I do not italicise Urdu and Arabic words on purpose. Since they are not foreign to me, they need no special treatment. I provide translations to make the meaning accessible.
- I am writing in a way that may seem deliberately confusing- that is because it is, and I ask your patience as a reader. I am practicing slipstream- which is the most natural way I like to write.
- For an interesting take by a Shi’a scholar on the connections between Palestine and Karbala, consider Ammar Nakshawani’s majlis.
Footnotes
[1] I write this on 19th July 2024, 12th Muharram 1446AH (After-Hijra)
[2] Event/story
[4] For that, an excellent resource is 1. Wikipedia (surprisingly astute at the moment on the Battle of Karbala), 2. Dabashi, H. (2011). Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest. Harvard University Press.
[5] Majlis (singular), majalis (plural): space of gathering, congregation. In this case: Shi’a majlis-e-aza, or mourning gatherings/sermons.
[6] Vizenor, G. (1998) Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence
[7] Urdu - Ghareeb: poor, but in this care disparaged/disadvantages. Zālim: tyrant.
[8] Standard/ flag
[9] Matam, latmiyyah: beating the chest (or other body parts) in mourning; also a stylised form of embodied mourning in Shi’ism
[10] “Enough, my dear”. May Muhammad Bhar rest in peace. Inna lillaheh wa inna ilaehey rajeun. My heart is broken open for you.
[11] Zulfiqar: the name of Ali ibn Abu Talib’s double-tipped sword, and a symbol often invoked in Shi’a aesthetics.
[12] A day of immense historical/spiritual significance for many Muslims. Also the date of the battle of Karbala.
[14] Labbaik Ya Hussain: “I am here, o Hussain”- a cry used in Shi’a practices, merging the past with the present and answering a question asked by Hussain ibn Ali millennium ago, “Is there anyone to help me?”
-Azadi: Freedom.
[15] Sourced from Instagram @telephonepyar
As a Palestinian descendent of Imam Hussain, this was incredibly moving on so many levels. Thank you for penning it as a witness to the grief of Karbala and of Gaza.