Sensing Shiʿism Online: The Intersensoriality of Nauḥah Recitation Videos on YouTube

Sound is a crucial component of any muḥarram ritual;^[1] one hears the variously martial or somber marching of feet in processions, the beating of chests and drums in maʾātim (funerals; sing. mātam), the shouts of labaik yā Husain (I am here, Husain) in the streets, the cries and supplications of mourners, and the recitation of poetry (nauḥah) in the imāmbāṛā (ritual hall; pl. imāmbāṛe).^[2] Such sounds can be functional, incidental, or devotional, as they facilitate the observance of muḥarram, signal the character of the occasion, or extol the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala (Umayyad Caliphate, now Iraq, 61 ah/680 ce).^[3] Hence, they are not “music” in the way that Islamic law pertains to it, since the closest translation into Arabic (musiqā) often bears connotations of specifically “secular” and “sensual” contexts (al-Faruqi 1985, 6–7).^[4] However, this article will show that the “emotional texture” of muḥarram reflects an ontology of the mourning majlis (assembly; pl. majālis) that is more sophisticated than the binaries of secular and sacred or sensuous and ascetic (inter alia) will allow for (Wolf 2000, 84).^[5] A substantial corpus addresses this arbitrary delineation of existence (e.g., Hagedorn 2001; Halder 2020). This corpus includes new studies problematizing much of the language used to describe digitality: for instance, “virtual” versus “physical” (Sparey 2022), “simulated” versus “real” (Willems 2021), or “asynchronous” versus “live” (Auslander 1999). These categories are found not to correlate with online and offline experiences, themselves not discrete categories. Yet, insufficient attention has been paid to the implications of such dichotomous terms in a simultaneously digital and religious ritual context. Accordingly, this article examines how the incorporation of muḥarram rituals into “digital culture” (Bennett 2011, 4), by way of “highly produced” recitation videos that are available to use and consume on YouTube,^[6] further compounds “relational” phenomenologies of digitality—namely, what it means to be digitally mediated—which is explained later (Willems 2021, 3).^[7] This is important for understanding not just the religiosity of respondents to digital muḥarram artworks, but the role of Shiʿi mourning majālis in their everyday lives and the significance of emoting and sensing in their ontological conception of the majlis.^[8]

Rites of mourning in the Hijri month of muḥarram have always recalibrated to the affordances of new technologies, from the assumption of tonal structures that originate in Hindustani musical traditions to the use of microphones and speakers to amplify an elegist (as in Halder 2020).^[9] It is, therefore, unsurprising that recordings of nauḥah recitations and the accompanying maʾātim should prove so popular, the examples in this article having reached view-counts exceeding tens of millions. Despite the high levels of engagement these videos receive, they are yet to capture the attention of scholars, emerging at a crossroads of divergent opinions manifest along disciplinary lines that are yet to be reconciled: there are those who perceive the arts and rites of muḥarram as deeply intercorporeal (Eisenlohr 2021) and those who perceive digital mediation as separative and individuating (Goriunova 2019); those who perceive engagement with the arts and rites of muḥarram as an intersensorial experience (Ruffle 2021b) and those who perceive the digital sensorium as “reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface, . . . [whereby] the senses turn into eyewash” (Kittler 1986, 1). In the views of Eisenlohr and Ruffle, the ritual is holistically embodied, wherein a plethora of emotions and practices activate a plethora of senses, which are entangled and copresent. In the contrary views of Goriunova and Kittler, digital mediation distances bodies and limits their capacity to feel, for the result of a digitally mediated act in their view is “data generated about something” (Goriunova 2019, 135, italics added). The “digital subject,” therefore, is conceptualized as “neither a human being nor its representation but a distance between the two” (ibid., 128).

To place these perspectives in dialectical relation is to paradoxically aver that the nauḥah recitation video is at once a unifying bodily process on a divisionary and fragmented platform. In contrast, this article argues that the videos in question have the following effect on the human sensorium: they sublimate the auditory to the visual, yet the affective power of their visual cues depends on auditory and tactile modes of comprehension and reaction. Indeed, for many, “looking is a form of touch: . . . how can one gaze upon the absent . . . member of the ahl-e bayt without being able to look into his or her ‘eyes’ and feel that presence?” (in Ruffle 2021b, 283–84, italics in original). These imbue the audiovisual artworks with an intersensorial cyclicality contingent on the viewership’s grief, which the videos provoke. An attached commentary reveals that this grief is not only real and meaningful—and, thus, not simulated and virtual—but entails complex and multifaceted sensory experiences that influence mourners’ physical environments and other people. This article posits digital atmospheres as a way of articulating this influence.

Digital atmospheres

The digital atmosphere is a development on Patrick Eisenlohr’s application of the phenomenology of intercorporeality to street processions in Mumbai, India during muḥarram. Eisenlohr’s (2021) article, like this one, mobilizes phenomenology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of experience, deliberately, to emphasize the materiality of atmospheres; in other words, Eisenlohr argues that atmospheres exist as “distinct, material entities” rather than “as a variant of affect.” He writes that atmospheres “do not just emerge through sensory impressions and their interplay”—they are not solely felt—“but also involve . . . bodily encounter and immersion” with/in something external to the body (Eisenlohr 2021, 371). For example, in muḥarram, emotions and sounds radiate from mourners, such as through weeping and drumming “and, through multiple modes of mediation, impact affectively and sensorily the bodies of other” mourners (Sparey 2022, 287) until “atmospheres become shared and social” (Eisenlohr 2021, 385). Existing between and across multiple bodies, they are, therefore, intercorporeal.^[10] The argument of this article is that, despite a canon of media theory that routinely characterizes technological advancement as yet another barrier to organic sociality and “authentic” experiences, commenters and their comments beneath nauḥah recitation videos on YouTube evidence the opposite (Ali 2022, 137):^[11] they reveal digitally mediated but nonetheless “holistic gestalten,” bodies, their interactions with other bodies, and the atmospheric effects of their copresence on themselves and each other (Eisenlohr 2021, 371). To mourn through commenting beneath a nauḥah recitation video is thus an intercorporeal and intersensorial affair.

Elsewhere, I have written about digitally mediated intercorporeality in the context of Shiʿi mourning. That article demonstrates how the synchronicity of mourners’ copresence was signaled to them by the producers of a talk show filmed in Karbala in an increasingly overt manner throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. In contrast, the presence of commenters below nauḥah recitation videos is not “live” in the sense that their process of writing comments is not visible in the same way that callers’ weeping and praying as unfolds in real time is audible to the show’s audience (Sparey 2022, 293). Hence, this article is concerned with ascertaining the intercorporeality and intersensoriality of a practice of commenting, the offering of “digital artefacts,” which Michal Hron, Nikolas Obwegeser, and Sune Duelholm Müller characterize as “primarily non-material” following an “understanding of digital artefacts as objects that ‘take shape on a screen or hide in the back end of a computer program, composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemas’” (Hron, Obwegeser, and Müller 2022, 171; see also Ali 2023).^[12] But, following Eisenlohr’s understanding of atmospheres in the context of street processions in Mumbai, the cruciality of intercorporeality to muḥarram marks it as a veritably material occasion. Willems suggests a possible key to comprehending this contradiction: “relational affordances” (2021). Willems’s suggestion boils down to this simple dictum: “broader environments and contexts shape the use of technology,” meaning that “the affordances of mobile social media should be understood in relation to the wider mediated context of which they are a part” (2021, 1680, 1684). By turning attention to, as Willems proposes, the context of using hardware that facilitates digital mediation, this article ascertains what is residual of the human body, its sensorium, and its spatial context from the comments mourners have collaboratively left beneath nauḥah recitation videos. The emotional texture that connects the disparate spacetimes wherefrom the comments are written is a digital atmosphere.

This article’s argument unfolds as follows: (1) the article introduces Royall Records and the nauḥah recitation video; (2) it outlines the various methods employed in its analysis of these videos and the threads of comments attached to them; (3) it deliberates the ontology of the muḥarram mourning majlis and the role of the senses in this ontology; (4) it considers how prevailing phenomenologies of digital mediation contradict this ontology and set up the primary research problem of this project; (5) it ascertains five of the fundamental aspects of the Shiʿi sensorium as espoused by the relevant corpus from the videos of Royall Records (emotional texture, translocation, naẓar, and cultural memory) in an effort to gesture toward a possible resolution of this problem; and (6) it reflects on these findings to elaborate the formation of the commentative majlis that the videos and their viewership constitute and the digital atmospheres it entails. Crucially, the bodies and emotions at play in the commentative majlis coincide in felt, physical, and real ways.^[13]

Royall Records and the nauḥah recitation video

Royall Records is a record company based in Pakistan, although its pioneers, the elegist Nadeem Sarwar, who recited in their first video, and his two sons, who are also elegists, Ali Shanawar and Ali Jee, live in Australia. Since 2010, it has been publishing videos on YouTube of elegists reciting nauḥah poetry, some of them based on traditional poems, others on newly composed ones, most in Urdu, some in English and Farsi. The videos are highly produced and have, following their greatly increased popularity, become only more highly produced. Some of the videos adopt a minimalist staging, while others resemble taʿziyeh, passion plays that retell moments from the Battle of Karbala. This genre should be understood as distinct from the orthodoxy of reciting poetry in imāmbāṛe, which Regula Qureshi calls “majlis chant” (1981, 50–51).^[14] She writes that in such a context “there can be no instrumental accompaniment, . . . chant is subordinated to the text, . . . [and] standards of beauty and excellence relate to its basic function of conveying and arousing the emotion of grief” (Qureshi 1981, 50–51). In contrast, as will become clear, not all the aesthetic choices of producers and musicians pertain to the evocation of grief, and yet they may be, and are, used to such an effect. This is indicated both by the presence of instruments and postproduction effects that resemble pitched instrumentation, as well as stylized vocal performances, aspects of which are borrowed from secular singing traditions. This article focuses on three videos: Jahan Hussain Wahan La Ilaha Illallah (2010) by Nadeem Sarwar, Ghareeb Baba (2019) by Ali Jee, and Remember Hussain (2020) by Ali Shanawar and Ali Fani.^[15] These videos have been selected for their variety, in terms of their sights, sounds, poetics, choreography, staging, and postproduction effects. They also represent the lifespan of the art world, ensuring that the claims made in this article apply to the lasting features of the genre and do not just reflect the quirks of a brief historical moment.

Methodology

The analysis that follows considers at once the rich art-historical and poetic recitation traditions on which the case studies draw, the discourses instigated in their comments sections, the affordances and mechanics of the technologies required (filesharing, Internet, laptops, keyboards, phones, and so forth), and, to a limited extent, ethnographic accounts of their use. Martin Stokes has also considered YouTube videos as sites of Muslim community formation and religious, political, and emotional expression. His chapter focuses on aesthetics, “understood here as the quest for beauty” (Stokes 2016, 41). This article mobilizes the concepts of aesthetics differently. “Without meaning to overlook ‘the problems of a semiotically oriented aesthetic theory,’” this article builds on “the opposition Suanne Langer draws between ‘discursive’ and ‘presentational’ forms. The latter denotes what Ludwig Wittgenstein believes ‘we cannot speak about’ but Langer argues ‘is a bearer of articulate content and meaning’, such as images and sounds; that which is not explicitly discursive” (quoted in Sparey 2022, 289). In that vein, this article is interested in illuminating the rationale for and effect (as expressed by commenters) of creative decisions regarding staging, postproduction, and dress, but also gesture and musical tropes such as a recurring midi trill and drone.

Discourse analysis, so Brian Paltridge writes, “considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used” (2012, 14). “In other words, discourse analysts deduce what is meant by what is discursively formulated, be it said, written, or otherwise integrated into a ‘discourse’” (Sparey 2022, 288). However, the medium for articulating such a discourse is crucial to the generation of meaning. Such a medium might be physical space, but another such medium might be YouTube, and the material hardware that facilitates and demarcates both; for example, the four walls of an imāmbāṛā in the first instance and a computer in the second. Although, per Willems, the affordances of these media are relational, being the “product of the interaction between technology, user and context” (2021, 1690). This article, concerned with such relationality as is revealed in the comments sections, asks what may be inferred from the written word vis-à-vis the relationship between the human body and how it relates sensorily to the means by which the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala are commemorated. Eisenlohr elucidates the very same “constellation” from the materiality of sound and the ways in which it both “proceeds from” and “acts upon felt bodies” in the generation of “sonic atmospheres” that have the effect of “making claims to the city” or, rather, the Internet in the context of these recitation videos. The underlying rationale of this “atmospheric citizenship” is religious (Eisenlohr 2021, 371, 375–76; see also Fattah 2020). As a mourner explains to David Pinault, “it demonstrates we would have stood with . . . [Husain] and shed our blood and died with him” (1992, 105). This article therefore conceptualizes YouTube commenting as an embodied practice contingent on the manifold situations and environments from which the videos are accessed.

In short, this article attempts to situate the human body between the videos it perceives and the comments it expresses. The analysis does not just proceed in reverse, determining what facets of the religious sensorium those expressions unveil, but pinpoints how the videos semiotically anticipate and direct such responses based as much on the production and performance as the affordances of the medium. Occasionally, the article develops ethnographic accounts of engagement with Royall Records’s videos and discussions with its users. However, no fieldwork trips or interviews were conducted specifically for this study, and interviews from previous research projects are drawn upon only with the aim of contextualizing the digital subject in physical space rather than serving as evidence of any claims made herein. The absence of participant-observatory methodologies is partly a limitation of researching during the Covid-19 pandemic but is also germane to the main argument in this article: interaction with the videos of Royall Records is an active and intersensorial ritual practice both despite and because of being digitally mediated. As Richard Rogers puts it, “the task is to think along with . . . [digital] devices and the objects they handle, . . . to strive to follow the evolving methods of the medium” (2013, 1).

Theoretical framework: Approaching the Shiʿi sensorium

The framework established in this article for approaching the Shiʿi sensorium is composed of four elements—emotional texture, translocation, naẓar (discussed in the following paragraphs), and cultural memory—neither of which should be understood as totalizing or discrete, but as four of infinitely many entry points into illustrating the sensory meaningfulness of commentative engagements with nauḥah recitation videos. These categories naturally overlap, and the examples given of each could belong to any other category.

Emotional texture

Richard Wolf coined the term “emotional texture” to explain “multiple, subjective embodiments of emotion” (2000, 84). This complex emotionality is rooted in the earliest days of muḥarram, the death of Imam Husain at the Battle of Karbala having a triple meaning: it was distressing for the family of Husain to have lost a relative, and it was calamitous for all Muslims to have lost a direct descendent of the Prophet, but for Shiʿi Muslims in particular, a whole belief system had been attacked together with the spiritual and political leader of their community.^[16] This sentiment has been described both as love and remorse, coping with the loss of a loved one and expressing remorse for the community’s failure to prevent Husain’s martyrdom. Here, blurred distinctions between “personal” and “collective” levels of religious emotion are essential (Zahab 2008, 109). Orthodox hagiography has it that both were expressed by Husain’s sister, Zainab, immediately after her brother’s death by beating her chest and weeping. Due in part to Zainab’s holy lineage, her method of mourning became an annual tradition that would outlast the pre-Islamic custom of grieving by beating the chest, such that, in the present, it is unique to the ritual memorialization of Husain. The narrative espoused by the commemorative poetry styles Husain and his companions as martyrs because, in the past, they are said to have traveled unarmed and, in the present, they signify an ongoing resistance to an oppressive status quo. As such, Shiʿas can earnestly empathize with Zainab’s grief by bringing their own experiences of oppression to the fore (as in Abou Zahab 2008), the purpose being to “awaken” spectators to the significance of Husain’s death (Pinault 1992, 106). Yet, as I have written elsewhere, “the majlis . . . is engaged as much in intercorporeal communication as intracorporeal affect” (2022, 290):

The production of grief for the martyrs pivots on its juxtaposition with pride in Abbas’ battle heroics, heart-breaking pity for Ali Asghar’s helplessness and thirst, reverence for the beauty of Fatima Kubra’s spousal love and loyalty, awe for Zaynab’s courage to speak truth to power, fortitude in imagining Hurr’s eleventh-hour change of heart, or contrition for one’s own shortcomings in light of all this. (Binder 2021, 286)

Stefan Binder (2021) writes this in reference to complex modes of empathy (or as Liyakat Takim describes it, “closeness”) that allow for mourners to comprehend the gravity and relevance of the Battle of Karbala (Takim 2004, 109). In elaborating his understanding of the emotional texture of commemorations of the Battle of Karbala, Wolf became one of the first scholars to consider the Shiʿi sensorium. As the musician Sayyid Shakkil Haidar Rizvi explains to him, “from the sound of the drums, the pain of Karbala comes to their hearts” (in Wolf 2000, 98). Therefore, the first stage of the analysis contained within this article ascertains the emotional texture of muḥarram from the videos of Royall Records.

Translocation

Patrick Eisenlohr (2021) and Peter McMurray (2021) find that it is rarely through sound alone that the emotional texture of muḥarram is generated, the former stating that “the quality of being ‘Shiʿa’ is not just an arbitrary, symbolic marker. It is about a collective experience of suggestions of motion exerted by sounds and the actual movement of people and objects through a neighborhood” (Eisenlohr 2021, 375). Likewise, the latter concludes that “congregations and individuals mobilize Karbala through sound and urban procession” (McMurray 2021, 1883). The raison d’être for processing to commemorate Husain and his companions is elucidated by Wolf: “virtual pilgrimage is . . . central to muḥarram rituals, where, as I mentioned earlier, the destination of taʿziya (replicas of Husain’s tomb) processions is called а Karbala” (Wolf 2010, 120). By moving through time and space to somewhere other than Karbala, mourners undergo a spiritual and emotional pilgrimage to Karbala. The second stage of this article’s analysis is thus concerned with illuminating the role of the case study videos in facilitating translocation.

Naẓar

Despite such an emphasis on sound and motion, David Pinault has described Shiʿism as “imagistic in orientation,” since “the muḥarram rituals that . . . [he] witnessed in India . . . all involved some aspect of darśan,” worship that involves “see[ing] and be[ing] seen by the deity” (2001, 18). Indeed, Vernon Schubel has shown how important muḥarram rituals are for providing “clear demonstrations to . . . children of what their community stands for” (1991, 125), but what precisely it stands for is “solidarity with the martyrs” (Rahimi and Amin 2020, 85). Mourners in muḥarram are accordingly witnessed by God asserting the sacred lineage of the Ahl-e Bait (the Prophet’s descendants) and instantaneously witnessing, through multiple modes of empathy, the martyrs’ sacrifices and, so Schubel writes, that is what they stood for. The third stage of this article’s analysis consequently determines what is darśan-ic about the nauḥah recitations of Nadeem Sarwar, his sons, and their collaborators. Given the Hindu origins and connotations of the term, it prefers, however, to express this demonstrative quality of muḥarram more in terms of naẓar than darśan, where the former is “a unique Arabic-Islamic term/concept that conveys at once ‘seeing’ and ‘reflecting,’” being seen by God commemorating the martyrs of Karbala and reflecting the divinity they believe he attributed to their lineage (Akkach 2022, ix). Although Pinault’s mobilization of the term “darśan” is possibly relevant to a specifically “Indo-Shiʿi” context, this article aspires to make claims about Shiʿi piety in a transnational space: the Internet (Ruffle 2021b, 281).

Cultural memory

Karen Ruffle has examined “image-objects” since, she writes, they “are the material media in which Shiʿi cultural memory is embedded, and its particular decorative forms and visual practices reflect the social and cultural frames required for this embedding” (2021b, 273). Cultural memory is the basis of the semiotic aesthetics of muḥarram arts. There are some examples in my article on the Shiʿi talk show, #IAMHUSSEINI: “staged before the red lights of bayn al-ḥaramayn (the space upon which the Battle of Karbala transpired) and the flag of Hussein, its set evokes the blood shed in Karbala before a glass panorama revealing Hussein’s tomb, relentless visual reminders of the lugubrious tone that the show determinedly sustains” (2022, 295). Jan Assmann describes cultural memory as something “materialized and 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” (in Ruffle 2021b, 271). As Ruffle clarifies, what meaning is encoded in such symbols as red lighting and the flag of Husain is “deep knowledge of Shiʿi theology and the Karbala event” (ibid., 272). The memorialization of the Ahl-e Bait bears a proselytizing and affective function, since it reiterates through material media, including the production of sound, the significance of their death. Therefore, it is imperative that this article in the fourth and final stage of its analysis considers the cultural memory ingrained in the semiotics of those three nauḥah recitation videos.

Findings: Sensing Shiʿism online

Emotional texture

Qureshi finds mātam to “represent the climax of an increasing fervor of grief,” and there is a sense in Nadeem Sarwar’s Jahan Hussain Wahan La Ilaha Illallah that Sarwar and his producers are interested in cultivating a process of escalating intensity through certain creative tropes, such as the overlay of repeated musical phrases and visual animations (1981, 47). For instance, the video opens with the repetition of Husain’s name. On each repetition, his written name flies into the center of the screen from alternating corners. An ensemble of vocalists pauses on the final syllable, as all visuals are reduced to a single flickering candle. With each reiteration of the shahādah (testimony), ashhadu ʾan lā ilāha illāʾ-llāh (I bear witness that there is no god but God), Arabic writing appears from various sides of the screen, in the same manner as Husain’s name. Regarding intensity, Karen Ruffle writes the following:

Once the group’s crying has reached a fever pitch and people begin to strike head, chest, and thighs in grief, the nauḥa-khwān will come forward and recite rhythmic poems that increase the intensity and speed with which mātam is performed. This crescendo will be maintained for a certain period of time—the nauḥa-khwān determines how long he thinks the group can sustain this emotional intensity. (Ruffle 2015, 193)

In Ruffle’s analysis, nurturing emotional and physical intensity throughout the course of the recitation is as central to Shiʿi mourning as is grief, for, in endeavoring to express the impossible scale of such grief, mourners can do justice to the multifaceted and incomprehensible tragedy of the Battle of Karbala. In Ruffle’s “spatially compresent” case study—that is, in a situation wherein copresence is defined by the “concrete actuality” of spatial proximity—it is primarily a sonically directed intensity, a heard crescendo—crying, recitation, percussion—that produces the intercorporeal atmosphere of extreme sadness into which mourners are physically immersed (Sparey 2022, 286).^[17] In Jahan Hussain Wahan La Ilaha Illallah, it is indicated visually, as multiple entrances of the same name or phrase converge and overlay. Nevertheless, this visually rendered intensity entirely depends on a consideration of the sonic, as knowledge of who the candle is lit for, who the elegist is dressed in black for, and who is honored by the overlaying calligraphy of the shahādah is clarified by a recitation of yā ḥusain (O, Husain) and a percussive midi trill. It is made evident to the viewer by Sarwar’s chest beating that this trill is intended to symbolize mātam en masse. In the same way, as in Ruffle’s analysis, a sonically rendered intensity depends on a consideration of the tactile: namely, an embodied response to and production of sound: “people begin to strike head, chest, and thighs” (2015, 193).

Since Sarwar’s video in 2010, the popularity of the nauḥah recitation video has grown exponentially, garnering millions of views and charting nationally on popular music rankings in Pakistan. Another of these popular online elegists is Sarwar’s son, Ali Jee. His video Ghareeb Baba (2019) exhibits several differences that reflect the increasing acceptance and profitability of the form. The Royall Records logo is the first thing the viewer sees. The title slide is animated opulently, as specks of gold dust traverse the screen and explode into the title: “poor father.” Many of the musical hallmarks established in Sarwar’s video return, such as the faceless ensemble of male chanters, yet one can hear distinct tones of voice at different pitches, hinting at increased manpower and improved recording hardware. Chants are accompanied by subtitles in English throughout the video, facilitating access to a broader audience. The mātam en masse effect returns in stylized phrases, at first for only eight counts; stylized, in the sense that they do not persist for the duration of the recitation but return as occasional rhythmic accoutrements that afford the elegy a quasi-musical quality. Although the effect has come to be used in this way, the sound of it now more realistically resembles a crowd of mourners beating their chests and, alongside its first iteration, the video fades between Jee performing his own mātam and waving toward the camera, where an imagined majlis is formed. Therefore, mourners do not only hear their fellow mourners, but see one of them, even if they double as elegist and ritual officiator. At another point in the video, Jee is filmed behind a wire mesh positioning himself as the figurehead of a digital majlis, as trapped and attacked but unbowed, symbolic of the “overcoming” narratives of Karbala (Tabar 2002, 297).

This is all to show how these videos adapt to the affordances of the digital and, in so doing, penetrate deeper what might be termed a “natively digital aesthetic” (Sparey 2022, 287); that is, this aesthetic advances the “quest for beauty” that Stokes describes (2016, 41) through creative tropes that are “born in the new medium” (Rogers 2013, 19). When the chant is no longer subordinated entirely to the text and its standards of beauty no longer relate solely to the evocation of grief (as in Qureshi 1981), is it musiqā (music) or nashīd (hymn), “controversial” or “legitimate” in the view of Islamic law (al-Faruqi 1985, 8)? Although, this article is not the place to deliberate such a question, the relationship between elegist and audience in the videos of Royall Records as educed in this section demonstrates how, even though the possibilities of their usage diversify, the emotional texture of the videos resembles that of the nauḥah poems that are recited in a spatially compresent context.

Translocation

Whereas Wolf and McMurray have explored the trans-locative quality of muḥarram processions, Anthony Hyman finds that many Shiʿas “identify” with “the fervently Shiʿa atmosphere of the Islamic Republic of Iran as ‘home’ in a performative separation of themselves from the Sunni-majority, Sunni-led, or predominantly non-Muslim or secular-governed countries or regimes in/under which they reside” (Hyman 1986, 81). Hence, there is a glocal quality to spatially compresent muḥarram rituals: to Pinault’s South Asian informant, “namaz is in Arabic and pretty much incomprehensible. Whereas the majlis is in Urdu and holds our attention” (1992, 116).^[18] In other words, Shiʿas forge a “transoceanic form of belonging” with one another by expressing a similar religious tendency the world over and mutually identifying with sites dear to Shiʿas, such as Iran, home to the world’s only Shiʿi government, but doing so differently (Eisenlohr 2021, 388).^[19] Yet, another affordance of the recitation video is its global reach; respondents may be in any number of countries around the world, save for barriers of accessibility regarding class, censorship, and digital literacy.^[20] By marking a global medium as typically “Indo-Shiʿi,” and usually doing so in Urdu, the video cultivates norms of ritual translocation that reposition the focus of mournful translocation in South Asia, where Royall Records was founded (Ruffle 2016, 59). Monique Ingalls finds that Christian worship videos became the norm for worshipful musicking in evangelical contexts, leading American mega-churches to broadcast them in place of an organist or band (2016). Hence, the scope or potential of this cultivation should not be underestimated. Indeed, this article will later show how several of the videos’ viewers responded in comments.

Viewers are reminded that this is the marketable property of its creator, with Sarwar’s logo having been watermarked in the corner of the screen. In India, guilds may organize muḥarram rituals, and Pinault has found that “impressive public performances of matam and nauhas increase a guild’s prestige” (1992, 126). Ingalls also writes of the commodification of worship on the web, though it is cynical to conceptualize corporate signs as entirely bound up in issues of advertising, copyright, and prestige, although they certainly factor into it (2016). Rather, the publicization of piety, and the person or organization responsible for having it “offered on behalf of the community,” is crucial to the religiosity of the occasion (Pinault 1992, 124). Or, as Paulo Apolito has shown, it is difficult to exist digitally without being somehow neoliberal. In fact, the “mutual entanglement” of business, religion, and digital media is “far from new. Neoliberalism has simply intensified it” (in Stokes 2016, 43). This is not meant to diminish the lucrative potential of corporatizing digital muḥarram artworks, including those that may be given a ritual function. It just so happens that the branding of commemorative artworks during muḥarram is a practice established prior to its digitization, and much corporatization of nauḥah recitation videos can be attributed to the necessity of performative piety recalibrated to a digital medium and the mode of its production, at least to the degree that performers and producers are also religious.

As an undisclosed ensemble of male vocalists chant the name of Husain, the titles give way to the record company’s logo and Husain’s name written in bold Urdu script in red across the center of the screen. Behind them, an image of Husain’s tomb appears, with its iconic red flag bearing the words yā ḥusain. Here is an evident attempt to audiovisually illustrate the dual process of translocation Wolf describes (see 2010), as markedly “Indo-Shiʿi” symbolism is overlayed onto the holy sites of Karbala (Ruffle 2016, 59). Through ritually mourning in Urdu using raga (musical modes), which are singularly “Hindustani” phenomena according to George Ruckert and Richard Widdess, respondents summon a sense of Karbala wherein Husain’s tomb is located (2000, 66). To put it another way, the Indo-Shiʿi idiom serves as a “conceptual bridge . . . between one event and another,” between the watching of the video and the massacre that took place at Karbala (Wolf 2014, 9). As the commenter Pagli Zenix types, “everytime I listen i feel like I’m in front of holy shrine of IMAM HUSSAIN A.S.”

A year on from Ghareeb Baba, Jee’s brother, Ali Shanawar, collaborates with Ali Fani in the English recitation video, Remember Hussain (2020) in which a candle grows and morphs into a bird’s-eye view of present-day Karbala. Subtitles read: “and make me die on the same principles on which Muhammad p.b.u.h. and Muhammad’s household p.b.u.t. died.” This video repeats many of the characteristics of other recitation videos—footage of Karbala is interspersed with Shanawar’s choreography, though Fani is absent—but also beckons a radical departure: in addition to the Arabic supplication, scenes from ḥajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) are also introduced, inserting elements of a generally Muslim piety into a Shiʿi-specific flow. This move perhaps responds to the growing demand for commemorations of the descendants of the prophet among Sunnis such as Bhai Jee, who asserts in their comment that there is “no Shiʿa, no Sunni. We are all Husain.” It also evidences the rapid proliferation of a practice in much the same way as offline forms of nauḥah recitation can differ greatly between regions. This phenomenon thereby problematizes fears regarding the “homogenization of cultural content” (Bourreau, Moreau, and Wikström 2021, 427) and “music consumption” as a result of “streaming” (Knox and Datta 2020, 1). Rather, the video’s facility for translocating its respondents to Karbala is associated to Islam writ large, emphasizing its religious significance more than distilling the distinctly Shiʿi quality of “dissociat[ing] . . . themselves from other religious groups” (Sparey 2022, 291).

Naẓar

In Sarwar’s first video, there is at first only red text against a plain black backdrop displaying the Arabic and Urdu title (“where there is Hussein, there is no god but Allah”) and a Romanized transliteration. Comparable text is dotted throughout the video. It is rare, although not unheard of in majālis, for the text of a poem to be exhibited alongside its recitation.^[21] An affordance of the recitation video, then, is its diagrammatic potential; certain translations or interpretations may be imposed onto the text. In this case, all that has happened is a part of the poetry having been rendered visually, giving access to the recitation for respondents that cannot read Arabic script or may be hard of hearing, implying a degree of hope that respondents will chant along with Sarwar, who is witnessed whipping his audience into religious action, awakening them to the morbid spectacle of historic Karbala.

As a tinned percussive trill resembling mātam begins to set the pulse for the rest of the track, Sarwar is brought into focus, located in a large tent saturated in red lighting. Although the mātam en masse effect sounds artificially midi, the sound recurs in concert with footage of mourners beating their chests, conjuring solidarity and community with a broad spectatorship. Through their incorporation into an imagined community, viewers are reminded of the purpose of Sarwar’s recitation, the purpose being naẓar: viewers infer the mātam of a majlis of which they are compelled to feel an integral part.

When Sarwar begins to perform his nauḥah, Husain’s name and the candle are reduced in size and relegated to the side of the screen, maintaining the broad range of devotional stimuli on offer in majālis. Sarwar’s recitation is remarkably atonal in the sense that it sounds spoken, but with an exaggerated range in pitch that highlight moments in his retelling of the Battle of Karbala, blurring the stylistic boundaries of marsiyah, nauḥah, and mātam. Yet, it is not arhythmic, in fact sounding so rhythmically consistent as to resemble a rap. Sarwar enhances his rap with various hand gestures that both maintain spectators’ interest in his recitation and help express the story. At other times, a two-handed sideways waving motion positions Sarwar as a ritual officiator by imitating the gestures through which elegists prescribe and sustain the rhythm of mātam (such as in Sparey’s analysis of Haj Mahmoud Karimi; see Sparey 2022), reinforcing viewers’ interpretation of the percussive trill effect as a kind of mātam en masse. Not only does this effect indicate to those watching and listening to the video that they all belong to a kind of majlis, but Sarwar is explicitly calling upon his respondents to beat their breasts and grieve for the martyrs, in much the same way that he too is being witnessed commemorating them.

As Sarwar begins to gesture, the URL to his website appears in white writing at the bottom of the screen. Over time, his singing becomes increasingly tonal and begins to ascend in pitch, in parallel with which the camera zooms slowly toward his face. At his highest, Sarwar repeats the shahādah and holds the final syllable, while the earlier anonymous male ensemble returns to chant the shahādah several times alongside Sarwar’s held note. Additionally, one can see in Sarwar’s video and comments attached thereto a broader purview of the field of gathered mourners. In a crowd, mourners may only see from their own single perspective a limited purview. Sarwar’s video offers spectators a tableau of various visual perspectives—a bird’s-eye view of an entire crowd of mourners, for instance, which pans around to reveal a 360-degree field of vision or, indeed, multiple crowds from different events—which imbue the muḥarram-place with a tremendous sense of spatial and temporal scope. Indeed, beneath the videos, respondents can begin to comprehend the timeless, transnational scale of the commentative majlis, which relates the naẓar of it to an unending global mission. Correspondingly, Remember Hussain begins with someone lighting a candle to the sound of a duʿāʾ (supplicatory prayer) recited in Arabic, with English subtitles: “o Allah, please make me live my lifetime in the same way as Muhammad p.b.u.h. and Muhammad’s household p.b.u.t. lived.” Shanawar and Fani’s sentiments are shared by such commenters as these:

Umul Karbalai: “Call us to your dome and give us strength to fight against every evil including our nafs (self) . . . [and] make us Hurr, ya moula (o Mullah).”

Nashra Kalsoom: “karbalā main nahīn thai ham log kah āp par qurbān ho jātai laikin āp nai āmal ko baihtrīn bunā kar āp kai wāris jab āʼain gai un kai lashkar main zurūr shāmil hon gai (We were not in Karbala so that we could have sacrificed ourselves for you but, by making your cause the most important, your heirs will definitely join their army when they come).”^[22]

Through YouTube commentary, these mourners speak directly to Husain. Karbalai, for instance, expresses their willingness to be called upon to emulate Yazid’s general, al-Hurr, who defected to Husain’s side in the Battle of Karbala despite the unlikely chance of victory. Karbalai therefore implies that they too are prepared to undertake such a sacrifice in the cause of fighting similar evils in the present. Similarly, Kalsoom juxtaposes Shiʿas (“we”) with the Imamate (“your heirs”), in a statement of their readiness to be the army that failed to turn up to the bayn al-ḥaramayn battlefield. Both commenters are moved to action and are witnessed on YouTube undertaking it, showing how apt the medium is for articulating the naẓar-esque quality of muḥarram.

Cultural memory

A picture of a globe appears at the onset of Sarwar’s 2010 recitation with the words salām yā ḥusain (“peace, o Husain”) circling around it, instantly setting the tone of the production, since honorifics encompassing a visual representation of the world hints at the proselytizing (or “awakening”) function of public muḥarram displays (Pinault 1992, 106). It is no surprise that the text is red, a color that drenches the streets of Karbala every muḥarram, by way of inestimable lights that evoke “the blood shed by Imam Husayn and his supporters on the Karbala battlefield” (Ruffle 2021b, 270). Green, known as the color of heaven throughout Islam, has become the de facto official color of many countries’ flags, especially those of Sunni regimes such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (Faghfoori, Ghehi, and Soltani 2014, 14). Contrariwise, red signals a distinctly Shiʿi proselytization (see Schubel 1996, 193). Throughout the video, animated smoke climbs the screen, suggestive of the burning encampments of Husain and his companions, visually locating the artwork within a commemoration of the battle of Karbala, especially those commemorative traditions, mostly in India and Pakistan, that involve ceremonially burning replicas of the martyrs’ tombs.

The titles of Ghareeb Baba give way to a high-definition close-up of a child attempting to look through cracks at the tomb of Husain, demonstrating improved picture quality, a more sophisticated consideration of mise-en-scène—notice how silhouettes of Husain’s battle standards fade into a campfire that pans to the figure of Ali Jee placed symmetrically between abstract ruins as increased lighting reveals the seriousness of the expression conveyed upon his face—and a higher production value: for example, the many large, realistic props that portray the aftermath of some tremendous devastation, a complex lighting rig that facilitates all manner of changes in tone, and highly defined closeups of Jee’s mournful features. Here, the elegists utilize an increasingly digital aesthetic to cite a rich art-historical tradition of conveying the gravitas of the traumas undergone by Husain and his companions: the tomb of Husain, his flag, a black thobe or kurta, and props alluding to the Shiʿas’ ransacked encampment. Each occupy an important place in the symbolism of Shiʿi commemorative art (Abbas al-Musavi’s famous painting, The Battle of Karbala, for example, contains all the above; see Brooklyn Museum, n.d., online).^[23] Likewise, Ali Shanawar’s collaboration with Ali Fani encapsulates the enduring importance of cultural memory to the nauḥah video in their recitation’s title, Remember Hussain.

The commentative majlis

Commenting beneath Jahan Hussain Wahan La Ilaha Illallah, Muzahir Ali implores Sarwar that “allah ta’ālī [aur] panjatan pāk kai ṣadqat main isī ṭaraḥ zikr-e ḥusain ʿalayhu al-salām āp kī zabān sai jārī rahai aur ham sab sun kar fīẓayāb ho tai rahain” (The remembrance of Husain a.s. continue with your tongue in the truth of Allah Almighty and the five holy ones and may we all be blessed to hear it). There is much to unpack here, given the spatiality of muḥarram (see Halder 2020; Eisenlohr 2021; McMurray 2021). Stefan Williamson Fa (2022) and McMurray (2021) have discussed consumption of highly produced nauḥah recitations in mourners’ cars to sustain the muḥarram-place in transit and match the demands of twenty-first-century life with a compulsion to commemorate Husain.^[24] Numerous scholars argue that such a compulsion to sustain the air of lamentation intrinsic to the muḥarram-place stems from a sense of “guilt” felt to be inherited by many Shiʿas, for it should be felt as much as possible during the month of muḥarram (Rahimi 2012, 31–34; Guerrero 2017, 29–42; Arjomand 2018, 121).^[25] Mary Hegland (1998) has shown that this guilt cannot necessarily be repudiated in one person’s lifetime but is an impossible bar that must constantly be strived for across generations. Moreover, Eisenlohr suggests that groups of people, by striving for this bar together, claim urban space. At the center of Eisenlohr’s suggestion is the materiality of sound, but this materiality entails motion: “it is about a collective experience of suggestions of motion exerted by sounds and the actual movement of people and objects through a neighborhood” (2021, 375). Here, “place-making” in muḥarram is crucial to mourners’ religiosity (Halder 2020, 59), as they assert their “cultural citizenship,” “the right to be different . . . to the dominant national community” in an act of simultaneous proselytization, resistance, and solidarity (Eisenlohr 2021, 389). These have each been shown to be indispensable modes of “empathy” with the martyrs of Karbala (Jeraj 2024, 38). The emanation of atmospheres 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. Overlapping interpretations of presence contribute additional layers of emotional texture to the muḥarram-atmosphere, metaphorically thickening it, indexed by growing sonic and gestural intensity. At this juncture, one may start to see how Muzahir Ali’s comment, by responding to Sarwar’s recitation, suits Eisenlohr’s analysis. The muḥarram-place is defined by the body of those who may “be blessed to hear” the nauḥah recitation that proceeds from “your tongue,” referring to Sarwar, expressing their grief gesturally through typing such comments as imploring Sarwar to “continue” the process of thickening the muḥarram-atmosphere. This is an intercorporeal process of digitally mediated grief being transferred from the body of an elegist to the bodies of several respondents.

Faran Fiaz remarks in their comment that Sarwar’s recitation is “not old in . . . 2021” and will remain a “heart melting noha [for]ever,” revealing the eternal extent of that bar to which Hegland alludes (see 1998). Commenters make clear too that the intercorporeality of grief in online muḥarram extends beyond hearing and typing: Shazia Hussain writes that this “has my whole heart. When I listen[ed] to this . . . in my childhood, [I] just fell into tears. . . . I wanna listen [to] this many times but . . . [because] of limited resources, I could manage to listen only when muḥarram came. But by the grace of Allah, Now I listen whenever I want.” Hussain, falling “into tears” when listening to Sarwar’s recitation, is equally engaged in an intercorporeal expression and sense of grief that constitutes their inherited duty to the martyrs in muḥarram (in Sarwar 2010). Lara Deeb has examined the various ways in which the Battle of Karbala is “often pointed to by Shiʿi Muslims today as the decisive root of their separate identity” (Deeb 2005, 123). In that sense, Shiʿas are “living ʿashura” (the tenth day and climax of muḥarram) all year (ibid., 122). Hussain’s comment indicates that an affordance of the digital recitation video is object permanence. Contrary to claims that digitality prevents authentic religious experiences in terms developed earlier in this article, the meaning of muḥarram—as emotional texture, translocation, naẓar, and cultural memory—is derived from an intercorporeal process of place-making. However, the comments show that this place may be anywhere. It may even be a manifold network of asynchronous spacetimes. Videos such as Sarwar’s simply allow mourners like Hussain to cultivate and maintain such a place.

How the commentative majlis defines its boundaries online is complicated. There is a long tradition of Christians and Hindus, among other groups, participating in muḥarram processions, especially in India (Korom and Chelkowski 1994). Taj Muscles Mania comments that “I am a Sunni and Proud of it. We Sunnis need to listen [to] this too.” In contrast, Aaamir Ali states: “karbalā nai husayniyat āūr yazidiyat kai darmiyān qayāmat tak lakīr khīch dī ([the Battle of] Karbala has drawn the line between the followers of Husain and the followers of Yazid until the Day of Judgement).” The tension between those aspects of the Shiʿi “identity” that are at once “separate” (Deeb 2005, 122–23) and “inclusive” (Dandekar 2022, 26, 37) form a constant push and pull between “inclusion and exclusion” that has long formed those parts of muḥarram that are “drawing different community connections,” which can be both peaceable and antagonistic (Brown 2003, 203, 205). Therefore, these comments signal the recalibration of the “community process” of muḥarram (Korom and Chelkowski 1994, 150) to a primarily discursive digital format that some scholars have been tempted to label a “reduced” simulacrum of meaningful interaction, that is “reduced” to “pure images” or, comparably, pure words (Apolito 2005, 13). However, this analysis shows how some of the affordances of digitally mediated interaction not only recreate the intercorporeally produced emotional texture of such a religious occasion as muḥarram but even expand and extend the possibilities of community and embodiment to something transnational, intersensorial, and otherwise multifarious.

Conclusion

As Charles Hirschkind argues, “Islamic ethical traditions have been recalibrat[ing] . . . to a new political and technological order” for decades, “to its rhythms, noise, its forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements, its call for citizenly participation” (2006, 11). Eisenlohr notes that the political incitements of muḥarram proclaim an “atmospheric citizenship,” an exercise in place-making that intercorporeally evokes realms of belonging, difference, and diversity (2021, 371). How one understands technological advancement, reflecting millennia of growth and change, must, therefore, depend upon a consideration of the relationship between people, their bodies, and external objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it thus: “the perceived thing rests upon the body proper” and “the body proper hangs upon the perceived thing the circuit of behavior closes upon” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 173). He continues, “when we go from body to thing, we go neither from principle to consciousness nor from means to end. We are present at a kind of propagation, encroachment, or enjambment which prefigures the passage from the solus ipse to the other person, from the ‘solipsist’ thing [which holds that one’s own mind is all that can be confidently declared to exist] to the intersubjective thing” (ibid.), a connection to external materiality and the consciousnesses and bodies of other people, which one is intricately bound up in/by/to, prefiguring Bruno Latour’s theory of the Actor-Network (see 2007). Merleau-Ponty calls this process “intercorporeality” (1964, 173), whereas Eisenlohr describes it as “material phenomena exuding from persons, objects, and their constellations, that intermingle with sentient bodies,” or, in a word, “atmospheres” (2021, 375), rooted in the ideas of Hermann Schmitz (1969).

Indeed, the role of technologies as media among religions in antiquity is extremely well documented (such as in Knut Lundby’s edited volume from 2013). In this context, the nauḥah recitation video reflects a rich history of arts and rites pertaining to the commemoration of the martyrs of Karbala and the diverse realms of sociality attached to them. This sociality involves a plethora of emotions, sensoria, technologies, and worldviews. Mourners’ relationship to them is complex, physical, real, and significant. With a nauhah recitation video, mourners’ bodies can “annex” one another through digital means of affording users both old and new modes of worship, social interaction, and citizenly participation (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 168). The nature of these affordances depends upon the various intersecting spatial contexts in which those means exist. Such relationality forges digital atmospheres and challenges those assumptions of the digital that distinguish between online and offline or digital and analogue in ways that undermine the feelings and perspectives of mourners that use digital media to access, express, and enhance their religiosity. This article thereby hopes to have reinforced the important work of Willems (2021) and others who elucidate the many methods and instances in which the online and offline are related to one another, for only a relational approach can account for the emotional, sensorial, and intercorporeal complexity of commemorating the martyrs of the Battle of Karbala.