Ashura

In early Islamic history the Shia were a political faction (the Alids or party of Ali) that supported Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the fourth Caliph, and his successors.

For Shia Muslims Ashura, “tenth”, on the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, commemorates the martyrdom of Ali’s son Hussein, a grandson of Muhammad, near Karbala in Iraq, in AD 680.

Muhammad himself had not left any sons and had not designated any successor. His cousin and son-in-law Ali claimed that he was the lawful successor because he and his wife, Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah [by Muhammad’s first, and during her lifetime only, wife Khadijah], were Muhammad’s next of kin. If Ali had succeeded in making his claim good, the Islamic Caliphate would have become the perquisite of Muhammad’s family, as the headship of the Jewish Christian community became a family affair when, after Jesus’s death, it was taken over by Jesus’s brother James, not by Jesus’s senior apostle Peter. However, the management of the Arab Muslim state was taken over, after Muhammad’s death [in 632], by an informal steering committee; in electing Muhammad’s political successors, this committee disappointed Ali three times by passing him over; when, at the third vacancy [in 656], Ali did obtain the appointment, he proved to be politically incompetent; and, after the assassination of Ali in 661, Muhammad’s political heritage was captured by Mu’awiyah I [ruled 661-680], the son of one of Muhammad’s most bitter and implacable Qurayshite opponents.

This is the origin of the Shia-Sunni division.

Mu’awiyah I’s mother was Hind, who, like Muhammad’s first wife (previously his employer), Khadijah, was a Meccan businesswoman. Hind and her son Mu’awiyah were not Muhammad’s kinsfolk, unless all Qurayshites were to be reckoned as being akin to each other. Mu’awiyah I was the most able Qurayshite of his generation. Ali was no match for him politically and Ali [in 661] and his son Hussein, Muhammad’s grandson [in 680], met with tragic deaths by violence.

Mu’awiyah I was succeeded as Caliph [680] by his son Yazid, but Ali’s son Hussein refused to accept his legitimacy, and the two fought. Hussein and his followers were massacred in battle near Karbala. Hussein was a victim of Yazid, not of Mu’awiyah.

Mu’awiyah founded a dynasty which reigned from 661 to 750 at Damascus and from 756 to 1031 in Spain. But this [Sunni] Umayyad dynasty never succeeded in winning uncontested recognition of its legitimacy.

Thus, in the political structure of the Islamic state, a breach opened immediately after Muhammad’s death, and this breach was never closed.

The replacement of the Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphate in most of its territories in 750 by the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliphate was the replacement of an ascendancy of Arab Muslim conquerors by a broader ascendancy of Muslims of any nationality, but it was not a Shia revolution.

The greatest enthusiasts for the anti-Umayyad revolution of 747-50 were devotees of Ali and of his heirs, but [...] the Alids were frustrated, as Ali himself had been during his short and unhappy tenure of the Caliphate (656-61). Abu’l-Abbas “the Butcher”, who, at Kufah in 749, succeeded in securing acceptance as Caliph in place of the last Syrian Umayyad Caliph Marwan II, was, unlike the Umayyads, a member of the family of Ali and of Ali’s cousin the Prophet Muhammad, but Abu’l-Abbas was not a descendant of Ali himself and of his wife, Fatimah; he was a descendant of Ali’s and Muhammad’s [paternal] uncle Abbas [...].

Ali’s and Hussein’s deaths gave rise to the Shia cult of martyrdom and to the Shia sense of betrayal and struggle against injustice, oppression and tyranny.

There are four holy cities of Shia Islam in Iraq: Karbala, Kufa, Samarra and Najaf. Baghdad itself is not predominantly Shiite.

In Shia Islam, Ashura is made up of mourning rituals and passion plays re-enacting the martyrdom of Hussein. Men and women parade through the streets, slapping their chests and chanting. A few Shia men emulate Hussein’s suffering by flagellating themselves with chains or cutting their foreheads.

The Shias today make up about 15% of the world’s Muslim population. They are a majority of the Muslim populations of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. The only Arab country in which they are dominant politically is Iraq, since 2003. The largest Shia minorities, relative to the total Muslim population, are in Kuwait and Yemen.

For non-Shia Muslims, Ashura commemorates the day Noah left the Ark and the day that Moses was saved from the Egyptians by God.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Ashura, Karbala, 2003