Muharram

In the mid-90s, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and the Iranian Ayatollah Khamene’i both banned bloody forms of self-flagellation such as tatbir (cutting the forehead with a sword), calling them backward and un-Islamic. They argued that Shi‘a Muslims ought to imitate Husayn by actively fighting against oppressors rather than passively mourning Husayn’s martyrdom. This prohibition has not been unanimously applied in all Muslim
countries, including Syria, where such practices persisted until the Arab Spring (when virtually all Shi‘a Muslims left the shrine-town where these practices were performed). By closely reading the linguistic, conceptual, and juridical discourses that circulated in Syria in order to justify this position, the paper shows that the performers of tatbir conceived of these rituals in revolutionary, rather than reactionary, terms. By examining the performance and reception of flagellation processions in terms of differing modalities of affect, the paper opens up spaces for rethinking ‘revolution’ and ‘redemption’ in contemporary Twelver Shi‘ism.

The present study aimed at understanding the practices of Shi‘a Muharram rituals in a Punjabi village. Shi‘a Muharram rituals have a greater significance on the lives of villagers in Jhang. Present paper is divided into three major sections. First section addresses the historical background of the village and main ethnic groups while second section highlights the convergence of inhabitants from Sunni Islam to Shi‘a Islam. The last section focuses on the emergence, evolution and performance of Muharram rituals. The month of Muharram is awaited by Shi‘a devotees to commemorate it with full devotion and reverence. In the locale, Muharram rituals were considered as moral obligation; since most of the villagers, men and women devotedly mourn to demonstrate their affections and commitments towards Imam Hussain, his family, and fellow companions who sacrificed their life for the sake of Islam at Karbala.

Tehran Bazaar has been the most influential marketplace in Iran, over the last two hundred years, since Tehran became the capital of the country. The Bazaar has been a significant socio-political agent in Iranian society. Nevertheless, less attention has been given to its internal atmosphere, where the bazaaris, have tried to conserve their traditions and preserve their heritage. One of these heritages are “hey'ats”, religious formations for holding mourning sessions in Muharram month, as a ritual in Shi'a Islam. "Hey'ats" give the guilds a sense of collective identity, they represent them, and also build a shared heritage for them. The Drapers' Guild was the first guild in Tehran Bazaar, founding a hey'at. They founded this hey'at in 1883 and named it “the Drapers' Hey'at”. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Drapers faced difficulties preserving their heritage. They were forced to displace the Mirza Mousa Mosque in the Bazaar. The Mosque was their center for holding religious sessions and was publicly known as “the Drapers' Mosque”. Since they were attached to the Mosque, their displacement was perceived a loss of heritage. Later, they decided to build a new home, "the Drapers' Hosseinieh". They decided to implement the interior design of their lost Mosque in the new place. This strategy enabled them overcome “the traumatic experience of displacement and heritage loss.” Also, to safeguard their new place, they legally registered their hey'at as an institution, and they wrote a constitution for it. The attempts for modernization, led them to develop beneficiary activities, as well. In this research, a qualitative approach is applied, benefiting from multiple methodologies, including; ethnography, secondary sources, and visual methods. The researcher has attempted to outline the story of the Drapers in preserving their heritage. This study hopefully would be useful for similar traditional organizations, showing how continuity and heritage preservation are possible to achieve for communities having experienced a troubled past.
Der Basar in Teheran gilt seit zweihundert Jahren als der einflussreichste Markt im Iran und ist ebenfalls ein wichtiger soziopolitischer Wirkungsort der iranischen Gesellschaft. Bisher wurde jedoch nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit auf die innere Atmosphäre des Ortes gerichtet, in welchem die bazaaris ihre Traditionen und ihr gemeinsames Erbe pflegen. Teil dieses Erbes sind sogenannte Hey’ats, religiöse Zusammenkünfte, bei denen als Teil der schiitischen Tradition gemeinsam während des Muharram Monats getrauert wird. Diese Hey’ats stehen repräsentativ für die Gilden und verleihen den Gildenangehörigen einen Sinn kollektiver Identität und eines gemeinsamen Erbes. Die Tuchmacher Gilde war die erste des Teheran Basars, die Hey’at praktizierte. 1883 gründeten die Mitglieder gemeinsam das „Tuchmacher-Hey’at“. Nach der Islamischen Revolution im Jahr 1979 wurden die Tuchmacher jedoch zunehmend mit Schwierigkeiten bei der Erhaltung ihres Erbes konfrontiert. So musste die Mirza Mousa Moschee, welche das Zentrum der religiösen Zusammenkünfte bildete und in der Öffentlichkeit als „Tuchmacher-Moschee“ bekannt geworden war, aufgelöst werden. Der Verlust dieses Ortes wurde als Erbe-Verlust empfunden. Später baute die Gilde einen neuen Ort, die „Tuchmacher Hosseinieh“, welche innenarchitektonisch der Mirza Mousa Moschee angeglichen wurde. Diese Strategie half den Gildenangehörigen, über den „traumatischen Verlust und die Entwurzelung des Erbes“ hinweg zu kommen. Darüber hinaus wurde das neue Hey’at als offizielle Institution registriert und mit einer Satzung ausgestattet. Auch Modernisierungsbemühungen stellten sich als hilfreich heraus. In dieser Arbeit werden qualitative Methoden benutzt wie beispielswiese Ethnografie, Sekundärliteratur und Visuelle Methoden. Der Autor hat sich mit dieser Arbeit zum Ziel gesetzt, die Geschichte gemeinschaftlicher Bemühungen zur Erhaltung des Erbes darzustellen, in der Hoffnung, dass diese Studie hilfreich für die Erforschung ähnlicher traditioneller Organisationen ist. Die Arbeit zeigt die Möglichkeit der Kontinuität der Erbe-Erhaltung und Pflege einer Gemeinschaft trotz problembeladener Vergangenheit.

Contemporary “humanist” approaches to violence take (post-Enlightenment) Man to be essentially reasonable and pacific. Its etiology is sought in the perpetrator’s succumbing to animal nature and/or in the victim’s defiance of (internalized former) oppression. Religious fanaticism underpins millennial conflicts because the underlying worldviews and consequent claims are intractable to Reason. Reinterpreted through its mimetic dualist structure and the universal scapegoat mechanism invested in the marriage of Lat Bhairon, martyrdom of Ghazi Miyan, and ritualization of Shia-Sunni conflict in Muharram, the 1809 Hindu-Muslim riots of Banaras demonstrate instead that religious traditions aim to contain an innate primordial violence channelized to better serve their divergent founding projects. Recovering their shared sacrificial core is the urgent prerequisite to eventual reconciliation and for deconstructing the now “secularized” modes of scapegoating the Other.

In the Republic of Azerbaijan, which gained independence after the collapse of the USSR, the socio-political events of the last 70 years  were being assessed and viewed from a completely new point of view. One of the main tasks of researchers is to consider the damage done to the national and religious values of the people during the years of Soviet power, to bring them up for public discussion, to give a scientific assessment of the ongoing processes. In general, the research topic is of particular importance from both scientific and practical points of view.
Unlike other syncretic fields that study the religious life of society or the role of religion in public life, this article is based on historical documents and facts about what parameters the Bolsheviks and atheists knew about the attributes of religion and how they fought against them.  In the article the forms of the struggle of the Bolsheviks with religious holidays and rituals in Azerbaijan, the peculiarities of anti-religious policy from the first years of Soviet power, are described and explained by the facts. In addition to studying religious indicators and parameters of that time, this article also shows methods and techniques for dealing with them.

Festivals bring people together in affirmations of community. This article looks at two festivals in coastal locations in Indonesia and Brazil with a close inspection of performances of fight-dancing included within both festivals. The improvisatory or choreographed organization of the fight-dancing performances echoes the manner in which the festivals themselves are assembled. As these festivals grow in popularity, the process of inventing tradition is heterogeneously co-constituted by those parties who actively invest in the symbolic capital of the events. Verbal and non-verbal forms of expression reinforce each other in the construction of a multivalent sense of regional traditions. The corporeal engagement of organisers and participants blurs the boundary between embodied remembering and narrative accounts. Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the interweaving of fight-dancing with the history, growth, and post-colonial expression of regional festivals.

This article is a study of mourning among Shi'a Muslims during the COVID-19 pandemic through a call-in talk show called #IAMHUSSEINI. By analyzing the discourses of callers and presenters and locating them within a visual context of the television studio, this article shows how the viewership of #IAMHUSSEINI constitutes a televisual majlis (Arabic: 'assembly') composed of more than passive asynchronous consumption and resembling what Patrick Eisenlohr refers to as 'atmospheres'. This article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic drove #IAMHUSSEINI to recalibrate to expectations of a spatially proximate ritual, rather than sustaining a 'natively digital' aesthetic, repurposing Richard Rogers' approach to digital methods. This change brought about a tacit understanding of the televisual majlis among #IAMHUSSEINI's viewers. This article therefore posits a difference between 'spatial intercorporeality', in which bodies are mediated by spatial proximity, and 'functional intercorporeality', in which they are mediated by the material preconditions of a shared activity.

There has been a welcome rise in recent scholarship on the links between the two partitions of 1947 and 1971 and what these links have meant for residents of the vast eastern region of the subcontinent. This extraordinary book focuses our attention on Muslim migrations and settlements within and beyond this region in the course of the 20 th century. In doing so, it aims to balance out the focus on predominantly Hindu refugees in the historiography of partition and its aftermath, as well as to address the broader—arguably Eurocentric—fields of migration and diaspora studies. It begins by proposing that we view Bengal as not only a source of migrants but as a destination: to conceive of a 'Bengal diaspora within Bengal as well as outside it' (p. 2). This conceptual scaffolding is boldly built by considering, in the same analytical frame, short-distance migrations and settlements within the subcontinent—between eastern India and East Pakistan and within eastern India—alongside longer-distance migrations and settlements between the Bengal region and the UK. This is an ambitious and powerful epistemological move that decentres dominant theorisations of diaspora—and indeed, transnationalism—that are built on solely long-distance mobilities. What does such a naming and framing accomplish? The book, thus framed, unfolds in three parts. The first part sets up the vast historical and theoretical canvas of the project, with chapter 1 outlining a sweeping history of mobility and immobility in 'the eastern zone' from 1847 to 1947. This counters the dominant historiography of the subcontinent that accounts for the inter-Asian migrations of the 19 th century as gradually slowing down due to sedentarisation through intensive

Analysing the experience of diasporic communities has been the focus of
extensive research and debate over the past few decades. Ethnic and Racial Studies has played a role in both publishing some of the most important research papers in this field as well as fostering critical debate about conceptual and analytical tools that are used to study this phenomenon. It is in the spirit of this critical engagement that we publish this symposium on Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais’ study of The Bengal Diaspora. It brings together six critical commentaries by Michael Keith, Nasar Meer, Pawan Dhingra, Victoria Redclift and Fatima Rajina, William Gould, and Sean McLaughlin. Each of the commentaries focuses on specific facets of the book and we hope in
doing so they provide an insight into the rich and unusual research on
which the book draws.

Martyrdom, sacrifice, and the dedication of one's life to fight for a higher cause are central themes of Shi'i militancy. I recount my journey among Iranian Shi'i youth who fought or enlisted to fight in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, to trace their ineffable experiences and silences, which they used to justify desires for martyrdom. I explore by way of an ethnography of mourning and the lamentation ceremonies of Muharram how individuals' ineffable experiences and perplexities emerge as explanations of their own commitment to the cause. I call on the Laca-nian Real to discuss how people craft the unarticulated, the unsaid and networks to navigate their subjectivity while they encounter the divine. I broaden the Lacanian Real through an exploration of Shi'i mystical notions, in order to address how Lacan's work can be applied in non-European traditions of the unsaid and the unarticulated.

Sesungguhnya Alloh SWT menurunkan syariat Islam dengan sempurna dan islam sendiri merupakan agama Rahmatan Lil A'alamin, bukan hanya untuk muslim tapi untuk semua umat manusia, maka tidak heran apabila banyak para dokter dan peneliti yang konsen meneliti berbagai aspek kehidupan umat islam termasuk puasa

İnternet Röportajı: “Kerbela, Mezhepçilik Hastalığını Tedavi Eden Formül İşlevi Görmeli”,
Anadolu Ajansı’na mülakat, röp.: Mücahit Türetken,
30 Eylül 2017,
<www.timeturk.com/kerbela-mezhepcilik-hastaligini-tedavi-eden-formul-islevi-gormeli/haber-739109>.

(I)Background of the Village and Main Ethnic GroupsThe village, ChakNo. 253/JB (Nangay Sundray) is situated approximately 35 kilometers on the Jhang-Faisalabad road in the East of the Jhang city. This village was established during 19th century under Sawan Mai&#39;s property right initiative. Linder Sawan Mai initiative any person who broke up land in any portion of the district, or who set to work a well that had been deserted, become a proprietor of that land or well. According to Gazetteer of the Jhang District (1883-84) records shortly after annexation, the regular settlement commenced, and it became necessary to fix village boundaries and to create private proprietary rights in land where they had never been before. Before the establishment of formal villages, the masses were living in a state of disarray in houses with their cattle since most of them were predominantly depending on these flocks for their food and livelihood. The village Nangay Sundray was named after the inhabiting Nanga- a sub-clan who relate themselves to Sial tribe.The Sial probably was a pastoral tribe, but little given to animal husbandry, dwelling on the banks of the rivers, grazing their cattle during the end of the cold and the first month of the hot weather in the lowlands of Chenab, and during the rainy season in the uplands of the Bar (Gazetteer of the Jhang District, 1883-84). The inhabitants of this village were predominantly living in the region alongside some other ethnic groups. They still recall the Hindus cohabiting with them. Most of them at that time were economically depending on Hindu Baniya-the merchant group. The population of the locale was majorly constituted by the Nanga families. In addition to the Nanga families there were some other castes who inhabit in the village like, Bharwana, Chiryana, Bajwa. There were some working castes in the locale that provide support to the landed classes in agriculture related activities. There were about 2500 acres of agriculture land in the village. About 95 percent of village land was irrigated through canal irrigation. Although, the ground water was sweet and easy to approach but most of the people were relying on canal irrigation as it was also inexpensive.There were two major cropping seasons in the area while wheat, sugarcane, rice, cotton, maze, barley, and some other fodder crops were yielded. Most of the working classes work on lands on share cropping, fixed rent, or monthly and annual remuneration while fewer of them still work for the landowners under the practice of sepi system (in this practice these workers provide services to the landowners with their specializations and get in-kind remuneration during harvesting seasons). In addition to the agricultural activities local communities were also practicing dairy farming. Recently, a change in the food habits was witnessed in the village. Predominantly, the villagers were using dairy products for diet patterns but recently a trend of selling milk emerged in the village-where four commercial milk collection centers of nationally renowned companies established to collect milk twice a day which consequently reduced the consumption of dairy products.(II)Convergence to ShVismNanga families were converted to the Shi &#39;ism Islam by Syed Shahbal Shah Bukhari-a descendant of Shah Surkh Bukhari and Sufi Saint Mehboob Alam, popularly known as Hazrat Shah Jewana (or Pir Karorya) about a century back. A family of descendants of Shahabal Shah&#39;s was settled in the village. The villagers regularly pay visits for spiritual blessings like for breath {dam), to take amulets {taweez), and making of vows {mannat). They also consult the pir for conflict resolution and political participation.Imambargah Hussainyia was established by Kuryana familiesanother sub-clan of Sial tribe, at crossroad of two villages (Chak No. 253/JB and 254/JB) about a century ago. One of their grandfathers went on to pilgrimage to the holy shrines in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. …

From the Safavids’ time onward, in big cities like Isfahan, Shiraz and Tabriz, non-Muslims lived in separated areas, called quarters (Jewish quarter, Armenian quarter or Zoroastrian quarter). These quarters were like small towns in the heart of a big city, with their own characters. They were mainly built to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims. The formation of these quarters was somehow because of the potential violence. The Muslims wanted to establish non-Muslim quarters to have an exact target and the non-Muslims preferred to live together to protect each other at the time of the events. The quarters were indeed the theatre of the violent acts.
During the Moharram and Safar, there were attacks to these quarters to pillage the houses and to injure or kill the residents. Presumably, whatever happened during one year, all the frictions, enmities and revenges, were amplified during these two months. That would be worse in the years of famine or cholera- the signs of the wrath of God which was caused by the non-believers, the non-Muslims.  The attacks became such a “tradition” that non-Muslims and non-Iranians used to prepare themselves to face the special days. Even the army and the governors of the cities were alerted and would make arrangements to decrease the troubles as much as possible.
This article is looking at these events with a study on the documents of three main sources: Iranian Foreign Affairs Archives, British National Archives and French Foreign Affairs Archives. The paper tries to give some analysis of the events through the documents, employing the theory of “otherness”, and the idea of “the scapegoat”.