After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (24 page)

His name was Shimr, a name destined to live on in the Shia annals of infamy alongside Muawiya, Yazid, and Ubaydallah. His orders were clear. He was to place Hussein’s encampment under siege, cutting it off from all access to the river. In the terrible, stifling heat, he was to allow
not one drop of water through his lines. Thirst would bring Hussein to his knees.

With four thousand trained soldiers against a mere seventy-two warriors, there was to be no escape. Nor did Hussein want any. Now that he had reached his final destination, he and all those with him would pass from the time-bound realm of history to the timeless one of heroes and saints.

As both the survivors and the besiegers told their memories of the next seven days, they would unfold as an almost stately series of events, as though the story were playing itself out on a stage far larger than this desolate patch of sand and stone. Even as they spoke, the tellers seemed aware of how sacred it would be, of how history would loose the bonds of gravity and soar into legend. While Shimr and his four thousand men waited for thirst to do its work, limiting themselves to occasional skirmishes with Hussein’s warriors, undying memories were created. One by one, the iconic images of Shiism were brought into being.

There was Hussein’s nephew Qasim, who married his cousin, Hussein’s daughter, in that beleaguered encampment. Even as they all knew what was to come, they celebrated life over death, the future over the present. But the marriage was never consummated. No sooner was the ceremony over than Qasim demanded that he be allowed to go out to engage the enemy in single combat. It was his wedding day; he was not to be denied. Still in his embroidered wedding tunic, he stepped out from the tents toward Shimr’s lines.

“There were ten of us in that sector, all on horseback,” one of Shmir’s men remembered, “and a young man all in white came toward us, a sword in his hand. Our horses were circling and prancing, and he was nervous, turning his head this way and that. I saw two pearls swinging from his ears as he moved.” They did not swing long. The newly made groom was cut down, and all the promise of a wedding day abruptly snuffed out.

Then there was Abbas, Hussein’s half brother, who wore two
white egret’s plumes atop his chain mail helmet, a distinction awarded only the bravest warrior. Driven by the parched cries of the children as the small encampment ran out of water, he made his way through the enemy lines at night and filled a goatskin at the river, only to be ambushed on the way back. One man against many, he fought until his sword arm was cut off. At that, they say, he laughed, even as the blood poured out from him—“This is why God gave us two arms,” he declared—and went on fighting with the other arm, the neck of the goatskin clenched between his teeth. But when the other arm too was cut off, all the valor in the world could not save him. The sword that pierced his heart also pierced the goatskin, and the water ran red with his blood as it spilled out onto the sandy soil.

And there was Hussein’s eldest son, Ali Akbar. He was on the brink of adulthood, a fresh-faced youth, yet he too insisted on going out to do single combat, determined to die fighting rather than of thirst. “A lad came out against us with a face like the first splinter of the moon,” said one of those who crowded in on him. “One of his sandals had a broken strap, though I can’t remember if it was the left one or the right. The left, I think.”

When Ali Akbar was quickly cut down, Hussein “swooped down like a hawk” to cradle his dying son. That is how the two are still shown in Shia posters, a famed pose deliberately mirrored in other posters showing Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, cradling the body of his father, the revered cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who, along with his two older sons, was murdered by Saddam’s thugs in 1998.

But perhaps the most iconic image of all was that of Hussein’s infant son. Just three months old, he was so weak from dehydration that he could no longer even cry. Hussein himself, despairing, came out in front of the tents and held the infant up in his arms for all the enemy to see. His voice cracked and parched with thirst, he begged Shimr’s men to have mercy on these children, to allow water at least for them.

The only reply was an arrow, shot straight into the neck of the infant even as he lay in Hussein’s outstretched hands.

They say that the infant’s blood poured between Hussein’s fingers onto the ground and that as it did so, he called on God for vengeance. But stories told again and again, through the generations, develop their own logic. In time it was said that Hussein beseeched God not for vengeance but for mercy. “Oh God, be my witness, and accept this sacrifice!” he said, and the infant’s blood flew upward from his hands in defiance of gravity and never returned to earth.

Then came the eve of the final day—
ashura,
the tenth of Muharram—the setting for the Shia equivalent of the Last Supper. Hussein begged those of his men who still survived to leave him to his fate. “All of you, I hereby absolve you from your oath of allegiance to me, and place no obligation upon you. Go home now, under cover of darkness. Use the night as a camel to ride away upon. These men of Yazid’s want only me. If they have me, they will stop searching for anyone else. I beg you, leave for your homes and your families.”

They stayed. Their mouths parched, lips swollen, voices harsh and rasping with thirst, they swore never to leave him. “We will fight with you until you reach your destination,” one of them proclaimed. And another: “By God, if I knew that I was to be burned alive and my ashes scattered, and then revived to have it done to me again a thousand times, I still would never leave you. How then could I leave when what I now face is a matter of dying only once?”

“Then call upon God and seek his forgiveness,” said Hussein, “for our final day will come tomorrow.” And then he used the Islamic phrase uttered in the face of death: “We belong to God, and to God we shall return.”

It was a long night, that last night. A night of prayer and preparation. Hussein took off his chain mail and put on a simple white seamless robe—a shroud. He had myrrh melted in a bowl and anointed himself
and his men with the perfume, and all of them knew that they were being anointed as corpses are, for death.

“Tears choked me and I pushed them back,” one of Hussein’s daughters would remember. “I kept silent and knew that the final tribulation had come upon us.”

Tears are infectious, almost physically so. Whether in a movie house or in real life, people fight back tears of sympathy and then find that their vision has blurred and the fight has already been lost.

But for the Shia, there is no fighting back tears. On the contrary, they are encouraged. Grief and sorrow are the signs of deep faith, the overt expression not only of atonement and horror but of an abiding conviction that the tears count, that they have purpose.

In the ten days leading up to Ashura, every detail of the ordeal at Karbala fourteen hundred years ago is recalled and reenacted. The story so central to Shia Islam has been kept alive year after year, century after century, not in holy writ but by the impassioned force of memory, of repetition and reenactment.

A vast cycle of
taziya,
or Passion plays, is staged every year—so many of them in so many places that the Oberammergau cycle of medieval Christianity is a pale mirror by comparison. The pacing is almost stately, the dialogue more a series of speeches than give-and-take, but no Broadway or West End performance has ever had so rapt an audience. Every appearance onstage of a black-robed Yazid or Ubaydallah or Shimr is greeted by hisses and boos. The newlywed groom about to bid farewell to his still-virgin bride before going to his death is acclaimed with tears. As Hussein holds up his infant son in front of the enemy, people beat their breasts and wail softly, almost to themselves, as though if they could stifle their sobs, the tragedy would somehow be averted.

But the height of the Passion plays, the most intense point, comes not when Hussein is actually killed but at the moment he dons his white
shroud. For all the terrible pathos of what has already happened, this moment—one of the least dramatic to Western eyes—is the most unbearable for the audience. It is the moment of calm in the face of death, the willing acceptance of the call to self-sacrifice.

For ten days the commemoration of Ashura has been leading to this moment. Men have gathered in
husseiniya—“
Hussein houses”—special halls set aside specifically for telling the story of Karbala, for tears and reflection, grief and meditation. Women have crowded into one another’s homes to build the wedding canopy for Hussein’s daughter and his nephew Qasim, then decorate it with silk ribbons and strew petals on the floor, creating a marriage bed for the union that will never be consummated. They stretch another, smaller canopy over a cradle and fill it with offerings for Hussein’s infant son: candies and toys. They implore Hussein to intercede for them and for their children in their twenty-first-century lives, to keep them safe from drugs and violence and any of life’s other temptations and dangers. And they mourn, beating their breasts and slapping their cheeks faster and faster as their chanting picks up its pace—“Hussein, Hussein, Hussein, Hussein, Hussein”—until they have no strength left.

Everything culminates on the tenth day, the day of the processions. Men and boys march by the hundreds in the villages, by the thousands and tens of thousands in the cities. Whole squadrons of men beat their chests in unison, their hands clenched into hollow fists, the better to reverberate against the rib cage. And with each step, each blow, “Oh Hussein, oh Hussein …”

The echoing thud of one man striking himself this way is sobering; the sound of thousands can be heard miles away, as loud as the tolling of a cathedral bell at Easter, and far more terrifying for the knowledge that this is the sound of flesh on flesh.

Some go further. They beat themselves not with their fists but with flails of chains, and at the end of each length of chain, a small blade. They flick the flails over the left shoulder, then over the right, again and
again until their backs are bloodied. A few even use knives to slash at their foreheads so that the copious blood of a head wound flows down over their faces to mix with their tears. The sight fills even the most resolute onlooker with awe and a kind of sacred horror.

Throughout the procession, people carry posters blown up large, garlanded with flowers and with green and black silk banners—green for Islam, black for mourning. Some are the standard ones of Hussein, his
keffiya
falling in graceful folds to his shoulders, but others are specifically for Ashura. These show his bare head angled back, blood on his forehead and his mouth open in agony. The head seems to float in space, and in a way it does: it is speared on the point of a lance.

And at the center of each procession, a white riderless horse, Hussein’s horse, its saddle empty.

The sun rose inexorably on the morning of the tenth of Muharram, October 10, in the year 680. As it gained height and heat, the last of the seventy-two warriors in Hussein’s encampment went out one by one to meet their deaths. By the time the sun was high in the sky, only Hussein himself remained.

He said farewell to the women of his family, mounted his white stallion—Lahik, the Pursuer, he was called—and rode out from the tents to confront his destiny. As he charged into the enemy lines, the archers fired, volley after volley. Arrows studded the horse’s flanks, yet still he kept charging. Astride him, Hussein struck out left and right with his sword and for a few moments, it hardly seemed to matter that he was only one man against four thousand. “By God I have never seen his like before or since,” one of Shimr’s men would remember. “The foot soldiers retreated from him as goats retreat from an advancing wolf.”

But it could not last. “Why are you waiting?” Shimr yelled at his troops. “You sons of men who urinate at both ends! Kill him, or may your mothers be bereaved of you!” An arrow struck home in Hussein’s
shoulder, the force of it throwing him to the ground, and they finally crowded in on him.

By the time they were done, there were thirty-three knife and sword wounds on his body. Even that was not enough. As though trying to hide the evidence, they spurred their horses over his corpse again and again, trampling the grandson of the Prophet, the last of the five People of the Cloak, into the dust of Karbala.

At that moment, what the Sunnis consider history became sacred history for the Shia, and the aura of sacredness would permeate the memories of what happened next. There is no mention in the earliest accounts of Hussein’s three-year-old daughter Sukayna roaming the battlefield; no mention either of tears streaming from the eyes of his white horse or of the sudden appearance of two white doves. But who can hold that against the millions of Shia for whom Ashura is what defines them? Details accrue around a story of such depth and magnitude, in the Passion of Hussein as in the Passion of Christ.

Eventually, those who remembered would tell how Lahik, that noblest of all Arab stallions, bowed down and dipped his forehead in his master’s blood, then went back to the women’s tent, tears streaming from his eyes, and beat his head on the ground in mourning. They would tell how two doves flew down and dipped their wings in Hussein’s blood, then flew south, first to Medina and then to Mecca, so that when people there saw them, they knew what had happened, and the wailing of grief began. They would tell how the three-year-old Sukayna wandered out onto the battlefield in search of her father, crying out for him piteously, surrounded by blood-soaked corpses.

With time, it made no difference if Abbas had really fought on with only one arm, or if the horse really did cry, or if the doves really did fly down as though from heaven. Faith and need said they did. The stories have become as true as the most incontrovertible fact, if not more so, because they have such depth of meaning. As with the death of Christ, the death of Hussein soars beyond history into metahistory. It
enters the realm of faith and inspiration, of passion both emotional and religious.