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Karbala and the Imam Husayn
in Persian and Indo-Muslim literature
The late Professor Annemarie Schimmel
/
Al-Serat, Vol XII (1986)
I still remember the deep impression
which the first Persian poem I ever read in connection with the
tragic events of
What is raining? Blood.
Who? The eyes.
How? Day and night.
Why? From grief.
Grief for whom?
Grief for the king of
This poem, in its marvelous style of
question and answer, conveys much of the dramatic events and of
the feelings a pious Muslim experiences when thinking of the
martyrdom of the Prophet's beloved grandson at the hands of the
Umayyad troops.
The theme of suffering and martyrdom
occupies a central role in the history of religion from the
earliest time. Already, in the myths of the ancient Near East,
we hear of the hero who is slain but whose death, then,
guarantees the revival of life: the names of Attis and Osiris
from the Babylonian and Egyptian traditions respectively are the
best examples for the insight of ancient people that without
death there can be no continuation of life, and that the blood
shed for a sacred cause is more precious than anything else.
Sacrifices are a means for reaching higher and loftier stages of
life; to give away parts of one's fortune, or to sacrifice
members of one's family enhances one's religious standing; the
Biblical and Qur'anic story of Abraham who so deeply trusted in
God that he, without questioning, was willing to sacrifice his
only son, points to the importance of such sacrifice. Iqbal was
certainly right when he combined, in a well known poem in
Bal-i Jibril (1936), the sacrifice of Ismail and the
martyrdom of Husayn, both of which make up the beginning and the
end of the story of the Ka'ba.
Taking into account the importance of
sacrifice and suffering for the development of man, it is not
surprising that Islamic history has given a central place to the
death on the battlefield of the Prophet's beloved grandson
Husayn, and has often combined with that event the death by
poison of his elder brother Hassan. In popular literature we
frequently find both Hasan and Husayn represented as
participating in the battle of
It is not the place here to discuss
the development of the whole genre of marthiya and
taziya poetry in the Persian and Indo-Persian world, or in
the popular Turkish tradition. But it is interesting to cast a
glance at some verses in the Eastern Islamic tradition which
express predominantly the Sunni poets' concern with the fate of
Husayn, and echo, at the same time, the tendency of the Sufis to
see in him a model of the suffering which is so central for the
growth of the soul.
The name of Husayn appears several
times in the work of the first great Sufi poet of
Your religion is your Husayn, greed
and wish are your pigs and dogs
You kill the one, thirsty, and nourish the other two. [Divan,
p. 655]
This means that man has sunk to such
a lowly state that he thinks only of his selfish purposes and
wishes and does everything to fondle the material aspects of his
life, while his religion, the spiritual side of his life, is
left without nourishment, withering away, just like Husayn and
the martyrs of Karbala' were killed after nobody had cared to
give them water in the desert. This powerful idea is echoed in
other verses, both in the Divan and in the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa;
but one has to be careful in one's assessment of the long praise
of Husayn and the description of Karbala' as found in the
Hadiqa, as they are apparently absent from the oldest
manuscripts of the work, and may have been inserted at some
later point. This, however, does not concern us here. For the
name of the hero, Husayn, is found in one of the central poems
of Sana'is Divan, in which the poet describes in grand
images the development of man and the long periods of suffering
which are required for the growth of everything that aspires to
perfection. It is here that he sees in the 'street of religion'
those martyrs who were dead and are alive, those killed by the
sword like Husayn, those murdered by poison like Hasan (Divan
485).
The tendency to see Husayn as the
model of martyrdom and bravery continues, of course, in the
poetry written after Sana'i by Persian and Turkish mystics, and
of special interest is one line in the Divan of 'Attar
(nr. 376) in which he calls the novice on the path to proceed
and go towards the goal, addressing him:
Be either a Husayn or a Mansur.
That is, Husayn b. Mansur al-Hallaj,
the arch-martyr of mystical Islam, who was cruelly executed in
God has kept the ecstatic lovers like
Husayn and Mansur in the place of gallows and rope, and cast the
fighters for the faith, like Husayn and 'Ali, in the place of
swords and spears: in being martyrs they find eternal life and
happiness and become witnesses to God's mysterious power.
This tradition is particularly strong
in the Turkish world, where the names of both Husayns occur
often in Sufi songs.
Turkish tradition, especially in the
later Bektashi order, is deeply indebted to Shi'i Islam; but it
seems that already in some of the earliest popular Sufi songs in
The well known legend according to
which the Prophet saw Gabriel bring a red and a green garment
for his two grandsons, and was informed that these garments
pointed to their future deaths through the sword and poison
respectively, is mentioned in early Turkish songs, as it also
forms a central piece of the popular Sindhi manaqiba
which are still sung in the Indus Valley. And similar in both
traditions are the stories of how the boys climbed on their
grandfather Prophet's back, and how he fondled them. Thus, Hasan
and Husayn appear, in early Turkish songs, in various, and
generally well known images, but to emphasize their very special
role, Yunus Emre calls them 'the two earrings of the divine
Throne'. (Divan, p. 569)
The imagery becomes even more
colourful in the following centuries when the Shi'i character of
the Bektashi order increased and made itself felt in ritual and
poetical expression. Husayn b. 'Ali is 'the secret of God', the
'light of the eyes of Mustafa' (thus Seher Abdal, 16th
cent.), and his contemporary, Hayreti, calls him, in a beautiful
marthiya, 'the sacrifice of the festival of the greater jihad'.
Has not his neck, which the Prophet used to kiss, become the
place where the dagger fell?
The inhabitants of heaven and earth
shed black tears today.
And have become confused like your hair, O Husayn.
Dawn sheds its blood out of sadness
for Husayn, and the red tulips wallow in blood and carry the
brandmarks of his grief on their hearts ... (Ergun, Bektasi
sairleri, p. 95).
The Turkish tradition and that in the
regional languages of the Indian subcontinent are very similar.
Let us have a look at the development of the marthiya,
not in the major literary languages, but rather in the more
remote parts of the subcontinent, for the development of the
Urdu marthiya from its beginnings in the late 16th
century to its culmination in the works of Sauda and
particularly Anis and Dabir is well known. In the
The boat of Mustafa's family has been
drowned in blood;
The black cloud of infidelity has waylaid the sun;
The candle of the Prophet was extinguished by the breeze of the
Kufans.
But much more interesting than the
Persian tradition is the development of the marthiya in
Sindhi and Siraiki proper. As Christopher Shackle has devoted a
long and very informative article on the Multani marthiya,
I will speak here only on some aspects of the marthiya in
Sindhi. As in many other fields of Sindhi poetry, Shah 'Abdu'l-Latif
of Bhit (1689-1752) is the first to express ideas which were
later taken up by other poets. He devoted Sur Kedaro in
his Hindi Risalo to the martyrdom of the grandson of the
Prophet, and saw the event of
The moon of Muharram was seen,
anxiety about the princes occurred.
What has happened?
Muharram has come back, but the Imams
have not come.
O princes of
He meditates about the reason for
their silence and senses the tragedy:
The Mirs have gone out from
But then he realizes that there is
basically no reason for sadness or mourning, for:
The hardship of martyrdom, listen, is
the day of joy.
Yazid has not got an atom of this love.
Death is rain for the children of 'Ali.
For rain is seen by the Oriental
poets in general, and by Shah 'Abdul Latif in particular, as the
sign of divine mercy, of rahmat, and in a country that is
so much dependant on rain, this imagery acquires its full
meaning.
The hardship of martyrdom is all
joyful rainy season.
Yazid has not got the traces of this love.
The decision to be killed was with the Imams from the very
beginning.
This means that, already in
pre-eternity, Hasan and Husayn had decided to sacrifice their
lives for their ideals: when answering the divine address Am
I not you Lord? (7:171), they answered 'Bala'
(=Yes)', and took upon themselves all the affliction (bala)
which was to come upon them. Their intention to become a model
for those who gain eternal life by suffering and sacrifice was
made, as Shah'Abdu'I-Latif reminds his listeners, at the very
day of the primordial covenant. Then, in the following chapter,
our Sindhi poet goes into more concrete details.
The perfect ones, the lion-like
sayyids, have come to
Having cut with Egyptian swords, they made heaps of carcasses;
Heroes became confused, seeing Mir Husayn's attack.
But he soon turns to the eternal
meaning of this battle and continues in good Sufi spirit:
The hardship of martyrdom is all
coquetry (naz).
The intoxicated understand the secret of the case of
In having his beloved suffer, the
divine Beloved seems to show his coquetry, trying and examining
their faith and love, and thus even the most cruel
manifestations of the battle in which the 'youthful heroes', as
Shah Latif calls them, are enmeshed, are signs of divine love.
The earth trembles, shakes; the skies
are in uproar;
This is not a war, this is the manifestation of Love.
The poet knows that affliction is a
special gift for the friends of God, Those who are afflicted
most are the prophets, then the saints, then the others in
degrees', and so he continues:
The Friend kills the darlings, the
lovers are slain,
For the elect friends He prepares difficulties.
God, the Eternal, without need what He wants, He does.
Shah 'Abdu'l-Latif devotes two
chapters to the actual battle, and to Hurr's joining the
fighters 'like a moth joins the candle', e.g., ready to immolate
himself in the battle. But towards the end of the poem the
mystical aspect becomes once more prominent; those who 'fight in
the way of God' reach
Paradise is their place, overpowering
they have gone to
They have become annihilated in God, with Him they have become
He ...
The heroes, who have never thought of
themselves, but only of love of God which makes them face all
difficulties, have finally reached the goal: the fana fi
Allah, annihilation in God and remaining in Him. Shah 'Abdu'l-Latif
has transformed the life of the Imams, and of the Imam Husayn in
particular, into a model for all those Sufis who strive, either
in the jihad-i asghar or in the jihad-i akbar, to
reach the final annihilation in God, the union which the Sufis
so often express in the imagery of love and loving union. And it
is certainly no accident that our Sindhi poet has applied the
tune Husayni, which was originally meant for the dirges
for Husayn, to the story of his favourite heroine, Sassui, who
annihilated herself in her constant, brave search for her
beloved, and is finally transformed into him.
Shah'Abdu'l-Latif's interpretation of
the fate of the Imam Husayn as a model of suffering love, and
thus as a model of the mystical path, is a deeply impressive
piece of literature. It was never surpassed, although in his
succession a number of poets among the Shi'i of Sindh composed
elegies on
The Prince has made his miraj
on the ground of
The Shah's horse has gained the rank of Buraq.
Death brings the Imam Husayn, who was
riding his Dhu'l janah, into the divine presence as much as the
winged Buraq brought the Prophet into the immediate divine
presence during his night journey and ascent into heaven.
Sangi knows also, as ever so many
Shi'i authors before him, that weeping for the sake of the Imam
Husayn will be recompensed by laughing in the next world, and
that the true meditation of the secret of sacrifice in love can
lead the seeker to the divine presence, where, finally, as he
says
Duality becomes distant, and then one
reaches unity.
The theme of Husayn as the mystical
model for all those who want to pursue the path of love looms
large in the poetry of the Indus Valley and in the popular
poetry of the Indian Muslims, whose thought was permeated by the
teaching of the Suf'is, and for whom, as for the Turkish Suf'is
and for 'Attar (and innumerable others), the suffering of the
Imam Husayn, and that of Hasan b. Mansur, formed a paradigm of
the mystic's life. But there was also another way to understand
the role of Husayn in the history of the Islamic people, and
importantly, the way was shown by Muham-mad Iqbal, who was
certainly a Sunni poet and philosopher. We mentioned at the
beginning that it was he who saw the history of the Ka'ba
defined by the two sacrifices, that of Ismail at the beginning,
and that of Husayn b. 'Ali in the end (Bal-i Jibril, p.
92). But almost two decades before he wrote those lines, he had
devoted a long chapter to Husayn in his Rumuz-i bekhudi
(p. 126ff). Here, Husayn is praised, again in the mystical
vocabulary, as the imam of the lovers, the son of the virgin,
the cypresso of freedom in the Prophet's garden. While his
father, Hazrat 'Ali, was, in mystical interpretation, the b
of the bismi'llah, the son became identified with the
'mighty slaughtering', a beautiful mixture of the mystical and
Qur'anic interpretations. But Iqbal, like his predecessors,
would also allude to the fact that Husayn, the prince of the
best nation, used the back of the last prophet as his riding
camel, and most beautiful is Iqbal's description of the jealous
love that became honoured through his blood, which, through its
imagery, again goes back to the account of the martyrdom of
Husayn b. Mansur al-Hallaj, who rubbed the bleeding stumps of
his hands over his blackened face in order to remain surkh ru,
red-faced and honoured, in spite of his suffering.
For Iqbal, the position of Husayn in
the Muslim community is as central as the position of the
surat al-ikhlas in the Holy Book.
Then he turns to his favourite topic,
the constant tension between the positive and negative forces,
between the prophet and saint on the one hand, and the oppressor
and unbeliever on the other. Husayn and Yazid stand in the same
line as Moses and Pharaoh. Iqbal then goes on to show how the
khilafat was separated from the Qur'anic injunctions and
became a worldly kingdom with the appearance of the Umayyads,
and it was here that Husayn appeared like a raincloud, again the
image of the blessing rain which always contrasts so
impressively with the thirst and dryness of the actual scene of
Karbala'. It was Husayn's blood that rained upon the desert of
Karbala' and left the red tulips there.
The connection between the tulips in
their red garments and the bloodstained garments of the martyrs
has been a favourite image of Persian poetry since at least the
15th century, and when one thinks of the central
place which the tulip occupies in Iqbal's thought and poetry as
the flower of the manifestation of the divine fire, as the
symbol of the Burning Bush on Mount Sinai, and as the flower
that symbolizes the independent growth of man's khudi
(=self) under the most difficult circumstances, when one takes
all these aspects of the tulip together, one understands why the
poet has the Imam Husayn 'plant tulips in the desert of
Karbala". Perhaps the similarity of the sound of la ilah
and lala (=tulip), as well as the fact that lala
has the same numerical value as the word Allah, e.g., 66,
may have enhanced Iqbal's use of the image in connection with
the Imam Husayn, whose blood 'created the meadow', and who
constructed a building of 'there is no deity but God.'
But whereas earlier mystical poets
used to emphasize the person of Husayn as model for the mystic
who through self-sacrifice, finally reaches union with God,
Iqbal, understandably, stresses another point: 'To lift the
sword is the work of those who fight for the glory of religion,
and to preserve the God-given order.' 'Husayn blood, as it were,
wrote the commentary on these words, and thus awakened a
sleeping nation.'
Again, the parallel with Husayn b.
Mansur is evident (at least with Husayn b. Mansur in the way
Iqbal interprets him: he too claims, in the Falak-i mushtari
in the Javidnama, that he had come to bring resurrection
to the spiritually dead, and had therefore to suffer). But when
Husayn b. 'Ali drew the sword, the sword of Allah, he shed the
blood of those who are occupied with, and interested in, things
other than God; graphically, the word la, the beginning
of the shahada, resembles the form of a sword (preferably
a two-edged sword, like Dhu'l-fiqar), and this sword does away
with everything that is an object of worship besides God. It is
the prophetic 'No' to anything that might be seen beside the
Lord. By using the sword of 'No', Husayn, by his martyrdom,
wrote the letters 'but God' (illa Allah) in the desert,
and thus wrote the title of the script by which the Muslims find
salvation.
It is from Husayn, says Iqbal, that
we have learned the mysteries of the Qur'an, and when the glory
of Syria and Baghdad and the marvels of Granada may be
forgotten, yet, the strings of the instrument of the Muslims
still resound with Husayn's melody, and faith remains fresh
thanks to his call to prayer.
Husayn thus incorporates all the
ideals which a true Muslim should possess, as Iqbal draws his
picture: bravery and manliness, and, more than anything else,
the dedication to the acknowledgement of God's absolute Unity;
not in the sense of becoming united with Him in fana as
the Sufi poets had sung, but, rather, as the herald who by his
shahada, by his martyrdom, is not only a shahid, a
martyr, but at the same time a witness, a shahid, for the unity
of God, and thus the model for all generations of Muslims.
It is true, as Iqbal states, that the
strings of the Muslims' instruments still resound with his name,
and we may close with the last verse of the chapter devoted to
him in the Rumuz-i bekhudi:
O zephir, O messenger of those who
are far away
Bring our tears to his pure dust.
Published by the
Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland
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