Word: ashura
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...celebration of Ashura, the shi'ite day of mourning, was one of the first passionate displays of Iraqi freedom after U.S.-led troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in the spring of 2003. Saddam had banned the holiday, which commemorates the battlefield death of Muhammad's grandson Hussein in A.D. 680. But tens of thousands of pilgrims suddenly appeared in the streets of Karbala after the coalition troops swept through, scourging themselves bloody in the traditional attempt to replicate the pain of Hussein's death. In 2004 and 2005, a different sort of pain was imposed, by terrorists-most probably...
...That small triumph passed largely unnoticed, given the cartoon conflagrations throughout the Islamic world. And it's possible that a peaceful Ashura was just a fluke; there was plenty of violence elsewhere in Iraq last week. Insurgent attacks-about 70 a day-are significantly higher than they were last year. But there are curious patterns to the violence, which may have something to do with the absence of carnage in Karbala. Last summer al-Zarqawi apparently received a letter-later released by the U.S. government-from the al-Qaeda leadership ordering him to stop bombing Islamic innocents. Recently al-Zarqawi...
...problem with both The Passion and with news reports about Ashura is their shared failure to provide even minimal context. Gibson’s film fails because it barely touches on what Jesus did or why he mattered. In assuming that viewers already know the smaller details of Jesus’ life and martyrdom, The Passion preaches only to the choir, whose members may wonder why the sermon is so light on content and so fixated on glass-studded whips...
News coverage of Ashura was similarly superficial, almost entirely ignoring the holiday’s religious significance and, in the case of Karbala, the one million other worshipers who weren’t contributing to the self-inflicted blood loss. Like Gibson, many of the Karbala arguably focused too much on violence and not enough on the non-physical elements of their faith. Nevertheless, the media’s one-dimensional portrait of the holiday mostly served to betray its own unhealthy fixations...
...course, the release of The Passion and the sometimes barbaric worship of Ashura are not the same thing. Onscreen violence is never the same as real-life violence, no matter how graphic. Non-Muslims certainly have a right to ask why some Shiites choose to observe Ashura as they do; violence, even violence done by individuals against themselves, is something people instinctively fear, and such questions are entirely justified...