Ashura: Atonement, Mourning and Return

At 12:47 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, March 2, 2004, big bold letters on the New York Times homepage say: Shiite Shrines in Iraq Attacked By Multiple Blasts – in large, underlined Times New Roman typeface.

I’m logging on to check email before I go to bed. So that I can wake up reasonably early, deposit money in the bank, pay my rent, and go to Arabic class in the afternoon. Because I’m a student of Comparative Religion. And a Muslim, who wants to study the Word of God, reread and renew and transform. This is my holy work.

Someone’s holy work is death, I register. And someone else’s is reporting that 150-word story for the AP. And someone else’s yet again is that bold typeface. This is it. This is grief for the electronic age. This is grief for an expatriate. This is what it looks like to float a muslim in the international seas.
And tell me if you see this: there is a procession of men, bare-chested and bloody; a circle of women, wild-haired, black-clad; and everything is noisy. Ritual mourning is a state of being, sacred as a fast, hard work. Controlled, deliberate mourning for a purpose – sham-e-ghariban – have you heard the story? Doesn’t it hurt? Can’t you feel your throat dry when Yazid’s army cuts off the water and the babies cry? Can’t you hear the dead Hussein cry for his daughter to come find him in the dark of the battlefield? Doesn’t every part of you say, ‘That was RasulAllah’s grandson! Where was Yazid’s shame?’

Where did that shame go when the bombers followed with their holy work. And the crazy thing is, although they turned studied pain into chaos and anguish, it’s still a day of shahadat – of bearing witness, in the sight of God, to the atrocity that is human malice, the Iblis that is Aadam.

This is Ashura, folks, and I’m a Sunni girl in a foreign homeland, wondering what on earth is holy work anymore. I drank my Hi-C citrus drink today and remembered, as my tongue tingled, that I had wanted to fast and forgot. We fast on Ashura because of Noah and the Flood, or because of the Israelites freedom from the Pharaoh – Sunnified Muharram. The Hadith literature backs it up, make what you will with ahadith, so it’s Islamically true: the Holy Prophet fasted on Ashura. And he recommended fasting the two days on either side to distinguish the Muslim celebration from the Jewish fast of Yom Kippur while still keeping its essence.

Weird, that the Day of Atonement, the Day of Return to God’s Mercy in Judaism, was both remembered and re-envisioned by Muhammad – a kind of Muslim Passover, a return to God’s Grace. It was celebrated in the sober reflection of a normal, voluntary fast, unpunctuated by ritual catharsis or even congregational prayer. And weird, that within two generations, we found cause to transform it again – into a day of mourning. And we’ve been mourning ever since.

And this is our reality. Imam Hussein died again, along with the rest of his Ummah, which is our Ummah, which is the Ummah of those damned bombers. On this day, we mourn fresh deaths, and old deaths; and be it the loss of rightful leadership or the loss of one beloved of beloved RasulAllah, what we ought to mourn, what we always mourn, is our own ass backwards momentum, our own blindness, our own refusal to realize that this old fight has us beat – there’s no winning it. And there’s so much holy work to do.

Far from home, far from the raids in Sarhad and the almost mundane violence in Sind, far from the casual ‘bismillah’ offered for a stubbed toe, it’s strange to me that a headline can bowl me over. I was the poster child for the new, desensitized millennium, I thought. But I guess it’s all about what we remember – we remember the story; what we bear witness to – we bear witness to pain; and to what we return. And there’s the rub: to what do we return?