Guest Editor’s Introduction: Sensing Muḥarram in Asia; Shiʿi Poetics of Place and the Religious Sensorium

The articles in this special issue explore how Shiʿa use sensorial and place-making methods to remember the battle of Karbala and make the Imams and members of the Prophet Muhammad’s family (the Ahl-e Bait) present.^[1] Sense and place are mediated by memory, materiality, and embodiment—to name a few—to collapse historical time and geographical distance experienced by Shiʿa between the Karbala “event” in 680 ce when Imam Husain and his small troop of supporters were killed at the banks of the Euphrates River by the army of the Umayyad khalīfah Yazid ibn Muʿawiyyah ibn Abi Sufyan (r. 680–683). These events are remembered and commemorated by Shiʿa during the days leading up to the tenth day, known as ʿAshura, of the first month of the Muslim lunar calendar, Muḥarram. For Shiʿa in many parts of the world, Karbala is a polyvalent spatial referent, just as Muḥarram’s meaning is conditioned by history and culture.

The articles in this special issue each show how Shiʿa actively participate in the formation of the cultural memory of Karbala. Cultural memory is a material phenomenon, as Jan Assmann has described, which is something “stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent; they may be transferred from one situation to another and transmitted from one generation to another” (Assmann 2015, 331). Shiʿi cultural memory of Imam Husain, Karbala, and the Ahl-e Bait is shaped by the cultural production of material objects and ritual practices, which in the context of the articles in this issue include taʿziyas (a replica of Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb), karbalā grounds (multipurpose sites containing soil from Husain’s shrine complex in Iraq, cemeteries for the burial of ʿalams,^[2] and taʿziyas), mosques, mausolea built in imitation of Husain’s rauẓah (tomb) in Karbala, video recordings, television programs, oratorical and poetic performances, and masquerade. Shiʿa have used ritual, material practices, the sensorium, and various modes of embodiment to inculcate the presence of the Imams and Ahl-e Bait in ways in which religion and culture converge. Moreover, these articles trace practices of place-making by which Shiʿa themselves cross boundaries of historical time and geographical-physical space to participate in Karbala. What “Karbala” means is simultaneously universal for Shiʿa and uniquely and intensely individual as to which memories, emotions, and “reminding” objects and spaces emplace Karbala in local contexts, making the place, historical event, and its sacred personae immediate and real.

For Shiʿa, the battle of Karbala is braided together with Imam Husain’s martyrdom; it is the memory of “an event [and] a person in a place” (Casey 2000, 183; quoted in Carr 2013, 48). For Edward S. Casey, memory and place are connected through embodied forms such as rituals and habits, which anchor individuals and groups to “here” while also establishing a temporal bridge linking the present to the past and future (Carr 2013, 48). Commemorative rituals, such as majlis-e ʿazā (the mourning assembly), held from dawn until late in the night during the first ten days of Muḥarram, as well as on Thursdays (Jumʿa-rāt) and other significant days throughout the year, involve rituals by which Shiʿa engage with material devotional objects and “the body to produce sense-inflected cultural memory of Karbala, the Imams, and the Ahl-e Bayt” (Ruffle 2020, 282). The Muḥarram-atmosphere in Rhys Sparey’s article is intersensorial and embodied, making Imam Husain and the battle of Karbala immediate for Shiʿa through video and audio media. In his ethnographic analysis of sound and videographic recordings of Muḥarram mourning assemblies produced by Ali Reza’s Five Star Cassette House in Lahore, Timothy Cooper describes the “pulse of atmosphere,” in which Shiʿa watch these media forms and feel, “Yes, Brother, that’s how it was.” These are not deflected, distant forms; instead they offer real and immediate means for Shiʿa to remember and share in collective grief for Imam Husain’s suffering at Karbala, such as feeling the thirst and parched tongue of his young daughter Sakinah as she went for days without a drop of water to drink, or to experience parental anguish imagining what it would be like to hold your infant in your arms (as Husain did) while his throat was pierced through with an arrow. These indignities are recounted in mourning poetry and assemblies, and processions of men performing bloody self-flagellation with flails (zanjīr kā mātam) establish a ritual “Muḥarram-place” (Sparey, this issue) that is always live, “invit[ing] the participation of live people who are not always temporally or spatially co-present but who share a sense of tuned presence” (Cooper 2022, 672).

In their articles examining the role of video media in shaping Shiʿi ethical life in South Asia, Timothy Cooper and Rhys Sparey link the concept of atmosphere to the experiential and to the religious sensorium. For Cooper, atmosphere has an explicitly moral quality through which “the semiotic regimes by which a medium becomes able to communicate a sense of presence are wholly contingent on a sensoria—of atmospheres, absences, and moods—that do not conform to any generalized theory of action or intention.” Similarly, Sparey conceives that the Muḥarram atmosphere “through which this place-making occurs transpires cyclically through the body, where the body is both cause and effect, sonically asserting its presence and feeling such presence as the reason for asserting it.” Cooper and Sparey largely draw inspiration from recent work on sonic religion by the anthropologist Patrick Eisenlohr, for whom “atmospheres fill spaces as they proceed from persons, objects, or their constellations in events” (2021, 371). Atmosphere is somatic and sensorial. Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, however, calls for attention to the spatial and material qualities of atmosphere: “Atmosphere is similarly an exchange between material or existent properties of the place and the immaterial realm of human perception and imagination. Yet they are not physical ‘things’ or facts, as they are human experiential ‘creations’” (Pallasmaa 2014, 232).

The articles in this special issue are arranged around two broad themes, place-making and the Shiʿi sensorium. In the first article, Karen Ruffle considers the extent to which the heuristic models of the Islamic/ate and the Persianate accommodate the materiality and ritual practices associated with Karbala as place in South Asian Indo-Shiʿism.^[3] The Islamic as defined by Marshall Hodgson in the Venture of Islam (1974), which privileged a Sunni-Hanafi normative piety and discursive tradition, flattens Muslim diversity and complexities of lived experience, while his neologism of “Islamicate” binarizes religion and culture as two separate phenomena in Islamic civilization, particularly for Muslims who are not Sunni and who live beyond the central Arab lands. As a linguistic model, the Persianate accounts for religious phenomena in literature, but it is not a first-order concern; again, religion and culture are bifurcated for the most part. Both the Islamic/ate and the Persianate are spatial models that account for large-scale populations spread out over broad geographical space over historical time, yet the interconnection between place-making, memory (and the imagination), and religion cannot be adequately accommodated by these models. Karbala is a “memory place” (Carr 2013, 49) that crosses time and space to make place and meaning for Shiʿa (and others) in Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and beyond. The article engages three case studies of Indo-Shiʿi transplacement of Karbala to the subcontinent: The first focuses on a karbalā burial ground in Hyderabad, India; the second examines the composite built space and burial ground of the Karbalā Talkatora rauẓah built in 1800 Lucknow; and the third is on taʿziyas (replicas of Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb), which are displayed during the first nine days of Muḥarram, then taken out in procession on the tenth (ʿAshura) and buried in karbalā burial grounds, which are consecrated with soil from Karbala. Both devotional object and sacred space recreate the site of the Imam’s martyrdom in the subcontinent, moving Shiʿa across time and reaffirming their connection to Husain, the Ahl-e Bait, and Karbala as place.

In the second article, Reza Masoudi Nejad examines how Muḥarram ritual in the Dongri neighborhood in Mumbai has produced spaces for social negotiations over the past two hundred years. Masoudi pays particular attention to the emergence of a Wahhabi “counter-ritual” in Dongri’s Muḥarram-space. “Mumbai Muḥarram” is described as an urban ritual that includes diverse ritual actors involved in complex social negotiations. The Wahhabi counter-ritual in Mumbai-Muḥarram is the most recent addition to the role that the commemoration of Husain’s martyrdom has for the city’s diverse ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste groups in negotiating status and position in the megacity. Wahhabi opposition to Muḥarram processions is expressed by setting up shāmiānahs (stages) and waving banners, which Masoudi acknowledges is relatively ineffective in convincing Shiʿa to reform their ways but does reaffirm Sunni in-group solidarity. As an urban ritual, Masoudi’s account of the ritual and its counter-ritual offers a spatially informed ritual analysis of Mumbai Muḥarram.

The third article, by Maziar Mozaffari Falarti, traces the history of the stock figure, the Sufi faqīr (a mendicant, mystic, beggar) who undergoes a period of temporary asceticism (faqīrī) during the ten days of Muḥarram in nineteenth-century Malaya. Drawing on a broad archive of sources, including newspapers, accounts of Muḥarram written by colonial authorities, and extensive primary sources in Malay, Falarti argues that the tradition of boria (street performance in the Malay peninsula involving buffoonery and masquerade) has historical precedent in south-central India, where the trope of the faqīr (and associated figures such as majnūn and the jogī) was important in colonial Penang’s Muḥarram ritual. Mozaffari Falarti questions colonial and scholarly presumptions that the development of boria was the result of the intermarriage of Indians and Malays, resulting in the transformation in the meaning of Muḥarram among a predominantly non-Shiʿa population. The prevalence of non-Shiʿi participation in Muḥarram ritual in rural India and the faqīr and jogī tropes in India, Mozaffari Falarti shows, shaped the development of boria in colonial Penang. The sense of place as a human experiential creation is palpable with the refashioning of the faqīr in the boria rituals in colonial Penang.

In the fourth article, Stefan Williamson Fa examines sensory-aesthetic devotional Muḥarram practices in contemporary Azerbaijan, where, since the nineteenth century, mourning Imam Husain’s martyrdom has been the focus of reformist critique. Williamson traces the history of Soviet anti-Muḥarram campaigns targeting self-flagellation (sinəzən/sinə vurmaq), which was argued to have no basis in Islamic law (sharīʿah). Magazines and journals published polemical literature denigrating Azeri Shiʿi devotion to the Imams, Ahl-e Bait, and memory of the battle of Karbala, which was largely ineffective as Muḥarram rituals flourished in the Caucasus and Iran in the years leading up to World War I (here we see parallels to critiques of Muḥarram observed by Masoudi and Mozaffari Falarti in their articles). In the post-Soviet period, public recitation of devotional poetry has become popular. Since the late 1990s, Azeri-Turkish mǝddah and növhǝ (two genres of devotional poetry) have seen increased circulation, first on cassette, CDs, and VCDs, and now on social media platforms on the internet (see Cooper and Sparey in this issue for further discussion of the role of media in shaping moral atmospheres in the shared Muḥarram-spaces of ritual).

Aoun Hasan Naqvi’s photographic article “show[s] the ecosystem of Karbala and how it functions.” Naqvi’s photographs constellate around karbalā grounds (see Ruffle in this issue) in Lucknow, India, the capital of the erstwhile Shiʿi Nawabs of Awadh (r. 1722–1858). Over a series of twenty-three photographs, the multiple meanings that Karbala as place and historical event has for Lucknow’s Shiʿa are vividly captured by Naqvi. Karbalā grounds are polyvalent built spaces that include cemeteries, replicas of Imam Husain’s tomb (rauẓah), mosques, spaces for holding assemblies (majlis-khānah), as well as waqf (a religious endowment established for the upkeep of buildings and institutions) properties, such as shops that lie outside the walls of the sacred space providing income for its upkeep and daily running. Naqvi’s photos document the rhythms of religious practice and the daily life of the devotees who visit several of Lucknow’s karbalās. Notable is his decentering of Muḥarram ritual in his photographs to show how these “memory places” reflect everyday religious practice for Lucknow’s Shiʿa.

In the sixth article, Rhys Thomas Sparey examines three Urdu-language nauḥah (a short, rhythmic mourning poem in couplet form) videos by Nadeem Sarwar, Ali Jee, and Ali Shanawar and Ali Fani. Sparey lays out his argument in six steps to analyze the ways these videos and their devotional viewership (as a form of darśan or auspicious reciprocal gazing, Sparey argues) is constitutive of digital atmospheres, which produce diverse forms of sociality. Sparey argues this sociality is shaped by the religious sensorium, technologies, emotions, and their interfacing with the body. This digital atmosphere fosters for Shiʿa the meaning of Muḥarram as it pertains to emotional texture, translocation, darśan, and cultural memory—interrelated, critical concepts according to Sparey in the Karbala place-making process.

In the seventh article, Timothy P. A. Cooper focuses on the strategies adopted by Ali Raza, a videographer in Lahore, to express sentiments of love and mourning for Imam Husain and the Ahl-e Bait. Shiʿi cassette and video sellers in Lahore aim to propagate a moral atmosphere of public and communal mourning, ʿazādārī, through the sale of “live” recordings of processions and mourning assemblies (majlis-e ʿazā). Cooper engages with what he calls “non-diegetic” sound and found images to establish a sense of immediacy and simultaneity for the viewer, ultimately affecting what he calls “co-presence.” Five Star Cassette House’s video productions create acousmatic presence, in the form of “disembodied sounds” that foster co-presence between ʿazādārs (ritual mourners), as well as with the Ahl-e Bait and the maẓlūm-e Karbalā (Karbala’s oppressed ones).

In the eighth article, the epistemic dimensions of Shiʿi khit̤ābat (oratory) in Karachi assemblies (majālis) is examined by Nabeel Jafri. He draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a two-year period to illustrate how orators make claims to knowledge—what he calls “Husain’s University”—in the majlis, in the form of demonstrating the performance of “original” research and citational practices. The university, according to Jafri “is a symbol of progress and khit̤ābat is often claimed by Shiʿi devotees as a similar symbol and practice. . . . The university is, at least theoretically, an institution that is accessible and inclusive.” We see majlis participants as keen connoisseurs of orators and khit̤ābat, and Karachi Shiʿa are vociferous in not only shaping the form and content of oratory but also the fortunes of the city’s khat̤ībs. As with many of the articles in this issue, Jafri’s essay shifts scholarly attention away from Muḥarram ritual. Devotees not only participate in ritual practice, Jafri argues; they also are actively involved in its theorization.