Originally posted on Google+, 15 January 2012.
The photos you will see below are from my archive, taken in the early 1990s, but they couldn't be more current. They show a ritual of extreme mourning, and the last time it was performed was yesterday. That's because yesterday marked the end of a 40-day mourning period for a religious leader who has been slaughtered, along with almost all of the people who were with him, by a rival for the position of leading the faithful.
That incident happened a while back, but every year the supporters of the victim mark the anniversary by trying to share in the experience of their killed leader, attempting to make up for the fact that they hadn't been there at his side, reliving the pain and the desperation of that moment. Their grief took on a ritualized form which, at the raw end, is what you see below.
So who is all the fuss about? Well, saying that the killing happened "a while back" may have been an understatement. The dead man was Hussein, son of Ali, and grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. His followers believed that the community of the faithful should be led by a family member of the prophet. After the prophet died, they first championed Ali. When Ali was assassinated, they backed his son Hussein. They called themselves the "Party of Ali", shiat Ali in Arabic, which got shortened to "the Party", or – now here we go – "the Shia".
The massacre of Hussein and his companions, 1386 years ago in southern Iraq, turned out to be a catastrophe for the Shia, and became the defining moment for their movement. Because from now on, they were the underdogs, despised and sidelined by the believers of the victorious mainstream. They were bullied to such an extent that they made it legitimate to practice their belief in secret and, when asked, deny their true faith.
With the death of Hussein, they had lost the chance to ever dominate the mainstream of Islam. So when Shiites commemorate their historic defeat each year, not only do they grieve the loss of an important figure in the early days of Islam. The massacre stands as a symbol of their own fate, for centuries of oppression. Never is this more true than during the days of mourning, when Shiites become a target, even in areas where they are in the majority. Yesterday and today, bombs went off at processions in Iraq, killing more than 60, and in Pakistan, where the death toll currently stands at 16.
Most of these processions aren't as bloody as the one you see here. In some places, people just beat their chest, chanting religious slogans. In others, they use symbolic wooden sticks instead of metal blades for the flagellations, which makes it a largely pain-free symbolic exercise – depending on the intensity, of course.
In Pakistan, actual blades are more common, and while some folks try to use them with a degree of caution, others really go for it and whip themselves into a trance-like state. As bloody as it may be, it is not meant to cause lasting physical harm. If someone is losing control, helpers will intervene, stop him and carry him off. That is not nearly as easy as it sounds because a devotee like that usually puts up stiff resistance. On one of the photos, you see five men struggling to carry one such devotee off the scene.
I felt I needed to provide some context first. But finally, here are the photos: the flagellations during Chehlum, as it is called, in Gilgit, northern Pakistan.