Expanded Ritual: Shiʿi Islamic Videography in Lahore

In my work as an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker I am interested in the force of enthusiasm, excess, or outrage that turns affective thresholds into moral ones. The first time I became aware of these thresholds marked the turning point in the eighteen months of fieldwork I undertook in the Pakistani city of Lahore between 2017 and 2020. While looking for a site associated with a festival of contemporary art I crossed paths with Ali Raza, a trader in devotional objects and religious media from the Ithnā ʿAshariyyah, or Twelver Shiʿi branch of Islam, whose sound and video recordings document the annual ʿAshura procession that marks the tenth of the Islamic month of Muḥarram. In his opinion, these recordings instantiate the difference between the ethical qualities of media recorded live and studio recordings (Cooper 2022). Ali Raza told me that only his “live” recordings, their rough grain, shaky sound, blurry vision, and proximate bodies, possess the added quality of māḥaul, an Urdu term that in this context we might render in English as a moral atmosphere. I was fascinated by the idea that a video or sound recording could possess an unquestionably good moral atmosphere, a notion that contrasted with how I heard the term used to describe the negative character of secular media. Local Shiʿi “cassette and video houses,” which operate beside shrines or in Shiʿa-majority neighborhoods, strive to spread ʿazādārī, or public and communal mourning for Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad whose death at the Battle of Karbala in 680 ce is mourned on the tenth of Muḥarram (figures 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d). During the commemoration of death anniversaries, ʿazādārī also refers to the task of providing condolement to the Ahl-e Bait, the family of the Prophet Muhammad, who the Shiʿa believe hold the rights of succession over the Muslim community.

Figures 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d.A selection of business cards for Shiʿi devotional media stores in Lahore. Photos courtesy of Timothy P. A. Cooper, 2017–2020.

For a while Ali Raza’s business, Five Star Cassette House (hereafter FSCH), remained latent in my research, one of the many devotional media stores dotted around Shiʿi neighborhoods whose business cards sat on my desk awaiting a repeat visit. Like these other traders whose activities combined faith and commercial trade, Ali Raza established his presence within his community through diffuse forms of patronage rather than inherited status. His humility led him to remind me that he is not a sayyid, a Muslim believer who can trace his lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad and the Ahl-e Bait. But he was also a man keen to publicize his faith. When I returned to learn about his personal archive of procession recordings, sermons, and elegiac recitations dating back to the mid-1980s, I was struck by a large plastic poster hung outside his store on the metal girding of an electrical pole. As we shook hands, he pointed above him, smiling. “Look and that’s me,” Ali Raza said, gesturing to a six-foot-long image of himself whipping his bare back with zanjīr blades used by Pakistani Shiʿa for self-flagellation during periods of commemorative mourning.

Ali Raza claimed to be the first to hit upon the idea of documenting Shiʿi commemorations, particularly the famous Muḥarram processions that pass through his neighborhood, on nascent home recording technology. I was struck by these recordings produced and disseminated by FSCH between 1984 and the present. As recordings of ritual procession, they did not immediately appear to have an overt object that their videography was trying to document. It was Ali Raza’s intention that soon after the procession had finished, participants, or ʿazādārs (mourners), would be able to purchase a keepsake of their participation in the event. Perhaps for that reason, his recordings are intricately connected to the pulse of the atmosphere, its sonic mood, ambient materiality, and the muddled flesh of collective bodies. His recordings are not so much discursive; they capture the threshold affects that made earthly bodies copresent with what local elegies (known as nauḥah) call the maz̤lūm-e Karbalā (the oppressed of Karbala). As a videographer, he strives each year to realize his own exacting standards, which are that, “Whoever was there sees the recording and says, ‘Yes, Brother, that’s how it was.’” As one of the first Shiʿi videographers in Pakistan, Ali Raza acted without precedent for the recording of Muḥarram commemorations. This article asks, what sequence of events and techniques of montage did this videographer choose to deploy to make his recordings of Lahore’s Muḥarram commemorations commensurable with the experiences of those participating?

To answer this question, I build upon data assembled both from ethnographic research in the Pakistani city of Lahore and through analysis of FSCH recordings, devotional objects, and material culture. While I might have drawn on wider datasets derived from Shiʿi interlocutors from varied social, economic, and religious backgrounds, in this article I present data that pertains largely to one videographer. Reiterating this fine-grained focus, my bounded site of research lies on one street in the Walled City of Lahore. Close readings of Ali Raza’s procession recordings show that his sequences of montage operate as a largely extra-discursive manifestation of the intimacies of Pakistani Shiʿi faith. Rather than turning to the canon of ethnographic film, I attempt to understand these emic videographies through the art historical concept of “expanded cinema,” which is used to describe the place of the moving image in a wider community of associated objects, and the notion of “acousmatic presence” used to examine sounds disentangled from their visual source. While suggesting the utility of thinking across film studies and anthropology, I also deploy a critical hermeneutic approach to the close reading of moving image media by using emic concepts and means of adjudication that emerge from the ethnographic study of the spaces of its creation, circulation, and reproduction.

Expanded ritual

As the ninth of Muḥarram approaches, and with it the day of ʿAshura, all attention in Lahore turns to the Mochi Gate area of the Walled City and to the area known to its residents as the Mahalla Shian, an area of around 4,500 predominantly Shiʿi households. In North India and Pakistan, a maḥalla describes a neighborhood of an urban quarter. Not strictly demarcated by particular borders or streets, a maḥalla is porous to changes in social or corporate groups identified by profession or religious denomination. The procession that passes through the Mahalla Shian is taken out on the ninth and tenth of Muḥarram every year, leaving from the nearby Nisar Haveli and following a route that takes it through the small alleyways toward the south of the city to its ultimate destination, the shrine and Imambargah of Karbala Gamay Shah. Across South Asia, Muḥarram rituals have historically been a flashpoint for interreligious riots. In the early twenty-first century in Pakistan, targeted attacks on Shiʿi processions have killed thousands. Despite these dangers, the material and visual culture of Shiʿi worship is a wellspring for the distinct character of popular religiosity in Pakistan. While the Shiʿa are frequently othered in majoritarian discourse, the Ahl-e Bait are also loved and mourned by many Sunni Muslims, Hindus, and Christians.

Sound recording and videography are only two of the technologies of affect that Ali Raza produces for sale in the maḥalla. When I first met him, his store was a laboratory for the saturation of rosewater into the feather plumes that adorn the headdress of Imam Husain’s white steed Zuljanah. The arrival of a symbolic white steed into the Nisar Haveli on the ninth of Muḥarram evokes among assembled mourners the realization of the Imam’s death on the battlefield of Karbala and initiates the day-long procession through the streets of Lahore. Each year, Ali Raza produces these resplendent headdresses for the many Zuljanahs carefully trained by Shiʿi communities across the city for their own processions. The plumes are made from bottle-green feathers plucked from the chests of birds recently arrived from their winter migrations from Siberia to upper Sindh. On makeshift plinths made from stacks of audiocassettes in his store, the headdresses sat in clear plastic drums immersed in rosewater for weeks before their ultimate use. Although digital and social media platforms have eclipsed older analogue technologies, this diverse community of objects remains known to customers as Five Star Cassette House. The devotional sensorium cultivated by his wider line of work often proved more lasting than the videography that established his reputation in his community. During the writing of this article, when two of the three discs of his 2011 coverage of the ninth and tenth of Muḥarram proved unplayable due to an inoperable error, I was still able to appreciate a secondary experience of the event. Opening the discs from their plastic wrapping a decade after they were first sealed, I caught a powerful scent of the rosewater used to saturate that year’s plume.

With his primary line of work in the fabric trade, Ali Raza operated his devotional object store and “cassette house” as an interface for several core aspirations. To him, it was a kind of hobby, an ongoing apprenticeship for his adult sons to learn about their faith, and a way to propagate his reputation as a pious patron of his community. At the entrance to the store his own set of zanjīr blades hung on the wall, elaborate 1.5-foot-long shards of sharpened steel with years of his own blood congealed onto the blades. Beyond the zanjīrs, his store stocked panjah (embossed metal hands that evoke the arms of Haẓrat ʿAbbas severed at the battle of Karbala), headdresses and jewellery for ornamenting Zuljanah in procession, ʿalam pāk (the black battle standard used in Karbala), devotional objects to adorn tābūt (a symbolic coffin-like structure used on the death anniversaries of the Imams and Ahl-e Bait), shabīh (replicas of coffins, shrines, and evocative objects related to Shiʿi hagiography), Arbaʿīn and Karbalaʾi tabarrukāt (paraphernalia for pilgrimages to Iraq for the events surrounding ʿAshura and Arbaʿīn), amulet necklaces known as taʿwīz sealed with prayers selected by Shiʿi clerics, and Imām Zamīn armbands^[1] sold in a pair, one with the name of Imam ʿAli and the other with the name of Fatimah to be worn by brides and grooms at local weddings (figures 2 and 3). Besides a small selection of hagiographic literature, the objects he sold were mostly somatic, to be used as adornments to celebration, mourning, and commemoration.

Figure 2.Zuljanah headdress, Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Timothy P. A. Cooper, 2018.

Figure 3.Imām zamīn worn by brides and grooms at local weddings, Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Timothy P. A. Cooper, September 2018.

In contrast to the ways in which largely Sunni Islamic-derived concepts surrounding Islam as a “discursive tradition” have been understood by scholars like Talal Asad, Charles Hirschkind, and Saba Mahmood, Shiʿi practice richly instantiates the extra-discursive forces at play in Muslim life. In Karen Ruffle’s proposal for an “ethics of everyday Shiʿism” (2021, 4), the norms and values of the Shiʿi everyday provide a kind of container for repertoires that “cultivate an ethos of love, longing, sadness, and loyalty” (2021, 6). For many South Asian Shiʿa, the Ahl-e Bait are figures one lives alongside in surrogated, ambient, and latent forms. Central nodes of practice like ʿazādārī (mourning) and pursadārī (condolement) are emotional activities that one does not do out of catharsis or in performance but in the immediacy of copresence with figures like Bibi Fatimah Zahra, the mother of Imam Husain, that one mourns or tries to console. These feelings of copresence are mediated by what Ruffle calls the distinctly “body-oriented” (ibid., 166) character of Shiʿi material culture that does not simply provide the semiotic representation of bodies but is somatically felt as the threshold of a Shiʿi sensory zone of experience.

For many Pakistani Shiʿa, these circulating repertoires locate normativity outside of legal-textual traditions and in material culture, devotional objects, and everyday forms of moral pedagogy. The constitution of these repertoires also raises questions over the relationship between affect and Shiʿi ethics, and in Ali Raza’s case, the relationship between videography and material culture. These include questions such as: How are affective and emotional experiences marshaled in the cause of mediating the copresence of the Ahl-e Bait among mourners for whom discursive traditions are not the only way such intimacy comes to be felt? How is the affective and emotional experience elicited by the materiality of the videomaking apparatus and its edited content evocative of the intimacy between corporeal bodies? This latter question echoes debates in the quite different scholarly realm of structuralist filmmaking and poststructuralist film theory. I refer here to the practices bracketed as “Expanded Cinema,” a term coined by Stan Van der Beek in the United States to describe experimental filmmaking that interrogated the materiality of the built environment, the sensual stimuli of a film’s unfolding, and the site-specific elements that become integral parts of the manifestation of filmic and extrafilmic space (1966, 338). Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) was the first book-length study to take video seriously on its own terms, viewing it as an art form ideally suited to reflect the contextual dynamics of technological and social change. Youngblood’s book came at a time when televisual media was able to promise a sense of immediacy, copresence, and direct connection to events as they unfolded. Such emerging phenomenological complexities that turned broadcast events into “live events” coincided with the rise of Expanded Cinema and its interest in the communities of objects that become imbricated in the temporality and materiality of moving image media.

Framing this article around concepts derived from readings of experimental film, music, and artists’ moving image media is not an attempt to align Shiʿi ritual videography with Euro-American academia. Instead, I observe that the videos released by FSCH wield their affective force through forms of lingering and longing expressed temporally and spatially, rather than through the linear movement of a narrative toward its denouement. This coheres with Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between two kinds of film-image, the “movement-image” (2002) and the “time-image” (2005). Films classed as “movement-images,” such as mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema, assume that time is secondary to movement, cause, and effect, while the “time-image” allows the viewer to linger, cohabit, and endure the unfolding of cinematic time. In the “time-image,” movement is subordinated to time, forging what Deleuze called the “paradoxical characteristics of a non-chronological time; the pre-existence of a past in general; the coexistence of all the sheets of past” (2005, 99). Despite Deleuze’s focus on genres of film practice, these observations should not be restricted to visual media but also to the operation of sound among relations that are expressed spatially, whether these are theological, ritual, or broadly secular.

The expanded community of objects, media, and phenomena among which Ali Raza’s recordings exist as peers means that videography is simply one technology in a fluctuating hierarchy of ritual affects. Yet, sitting beneath the glass counter that serves as his cash desk was a lasting reminder of the preeminent position recording has taken in achieving his present status in the maḥalla. On show to his customers were four identification badges for FSCH designed to be worn by videographers to identify them as allied to their collective (figures 4 and 5). One reads “labaik yā ḥusain” [I am present, Hussain]. Five Star Cassette House. Mochi Gate, Mahalla Shian, Lahore." The necessity for identifying badges to signal one’s membership within the community evokes the precarity and securitization of Shiʿi worship over the three decades since Ali Raza began his operations. Following attacks on Shiʿi commemorations by Sunni militants, such as that which targeted the Jamia Masjid Kashmirian in the Mahalla Shian in 2004, and a trio of blasts that struck Karbala Gamay Shah in 2010, Muḥarram events are marked by a sizeable police presence, undergirded by neighborhood wardens, marshals, and scout groups organized by local prayer associations.

Figure 4.Identification badges worn by FSCH camera and sound operators, Lahore, Pakistan. Photo courtesy of Timothy P. A. Cooper, April 2020.

Figure 5.Hand-painted sign advertising “Five Star Cassette House,” Lahore, Pakistan. Photo by Timothy P. A. Cooper, March 2018.

The māḥaul of the maḥalla

Like many other Shiʿi media houses, FSCH was not born only out of such precarity, but also out of the economic changes wrought by remittance capital and returning Pakistani expatriates from the burgeoning Gulf states. Like many of his generation, Ali Raza spent much of the 1980s in the Gulf, in his case as a support worker with a contingent of the Pakistan Army in Saudi Arabia. While he was there, he longed for the “atmosphere (māḥaul) of the maḥalla,” as he put it. In a country characterized by its Wahhabi and Salafist Sunni faith, Ali Raza found that Pakistani Shiʿa like him were only allocated a large tent, within which they were instructed to commemorate ʿAshura privately. Longing for the sights, sounds, smells, and sheer publicity of his maḥalla, Ali Raza promised himself he would establish a business that would amplify and expand the Muḥarram commemorations that take place in Lahore. In audio- and videocassette technology he saw his opportunity. Due to import laws left ill-defined by the martial law administration of Pakistan’s General Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988), most of the hardware that managed to make its way into Pakistan came from Gulf migrants, diaspora professionals, and army staff. Ali Raza quit smoking and ate simple meals, allowing him to eventually bring back two video cameras, twelve VCRs, audiocassette recorders of all types, and almost a thousand blank audio- and videocassettes.

The commemoration he strived to amplify was the famous ʿAshura procession that departs from the Nisar Haveli and ends at Karbala Gamay Shah, and which has developed over time into Pakistan’s most renowned Muḥarram event. Karbala Gamay Shah is reported to be the oldest Imambargah in Lahore and is named after Baba Ghulam Ali Shah, or Gamay Shah, a humble devotee who lived in the city during Ranjit Singh’s era of Sikh rule (1801–1838 ce). Gamay Shah dedicated his life to practicing mourning for the Ahl-e Bait and espousing the virtues of Imam Ali. Tradition has it that he and his female companion Mai Agha inspired fellow devotees to dress in black and carry a paper taʿziya (a replica of the tomb of Imam Hussain) on the ninth of Muḥarram. He would begin at the Mochi Gate area of the Walled City of Lahore and process slowly to his hermitage in what is now the shrine and Imambargah that bears his name. This precolonial practice was formalized following the impact of British military campaigns in Afghanistan and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. During the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–1842), the British forces were aided by a local leader and head of a Turkic family of the Qizilbash tribe, Ali Raza Khan Qizilbash. For these services, he was awarded the title of hereditary Nawab and vast swathes of land in and around Lahore. In the decades that followed, the Qizilbash family put this wealth and power to the service of their faith. By the nineteenth century their Mubarak Haveli, located in the Mochi Gate area of Lahore where Baba Ghulam Ali Shah began his Muḥarram procession, had become the center of Shiʿi devotional practice. Over the years the Mubarak Haveli was extended and, in the 1930s, divided into a section named Nisar Haveli. Together, they remain the center of Shiʿi devotion in the Walled City.

Perhaps shaped by his own interest in the forms of authority that legitimize and demarcate the experience of the Muḥarram procession, Ali Raza viewed this postcolonial history as bound up with the problem and promises of “permission” as he called it, using the English word. Before the British came, he whispered to me, no permission was required to mourn the Ahl-e Bait. One was simply subject to whatever repercussions came from putting into practice Shiʿi commitments to publicizing and disclosing one’s faith. When the British authorities enacted laws that such processions should have licenses, they awarded the Qizilbash family a hereditary license that would pass down the family line.^[2] As distinct from landed wealth, the procession is, quite literally, a moveable asset. Rather than generating capital, the processions also disperse forms of pious patronage widely across social and economic spheres. From this illusive and evasive license, the procession provides opportunities for individuals and groups to impress upon it their own forms of authority and legitimacy. These range from the Government of Pakistan, which provides security arrangements; telecommunications companies, who are often asked to sever internet connectivity to forestall terror attacks; and Ali Raza, who was able to become a figure of importance in his community by binding his Muḥarram recordings to existing public Shiʿi imaginaries.

When I first asked for his oldest recordings, Ali Raza displayed a mix of frustration and indifference. Perhaps his frustration was directed at the palpable gap in his personal archive that lay between his 1985 recording and those from the early 2000s. A labor-intensive attempt to digitize his 1990s videos had ended with the malfunction of the storage drives he had purchased at great expense.^[3] His indifference I located in his suggestion that for the purposes of secondary research, an older recording would be no different from the latest one. He told me,

The bazaar is the same, the azān is the same. The only thing that is different are the faces of the people. . . . The sequence (tartīb) that has already been made will not change. You know the route you took to come here? That route will be the same whenever you come and visit me. It is equal to that.

When he described the production of a sequence (tartīb), he conflated the event itself, his recording of it, and the mediation of these two immediacies by the urban sphere. This puzzling trajectory supports Reza Masoudi Nejad’s argument that the importance of urban space has long been overlooked in studies of ritual activity, particularly given the proclivity for Muḥarram processions to negotiate spatial, moral, and ritual thresholds (2018). From these sites of effervescence, individual agency can be derived from the act of demarcating thresholds, as Epsita Halder has shown in her work on female gatekeepers who protect and preserve ritual space for Shiʿi women (2019).

Perhaps this conflation of spatial and surrogated routes becomes less puzzling considering how Ali Raza’s community refer to the processions as performing ziyārat, an Arabic root-word used commonly in Persian and Urdu that describes an act of visitation to sites and routes associated with the Prophet Muhammad, the Ahl-e Bait (the family of the Prophet Muhammad), and the Shiʿi Imams. The form of visitation activated by ziyārat can be done in several different ways. Babak Rahimi (2019) has examined how in Iran ziyārat can be digitally mediated in ways that are not understood to be subordinate to corporeal visitation. As a documentarian of the manifestation of ziyārat in a Lahore neighborhood, Ali Raza’s “sequence” is an act of mediation that must find ways to make itself ambient in its intended production of a sense of sheer immediacy. In the work of Patrick Eisenlohr and Birgit Meyer, the dialectic of mediation and immediacy concerns a kind of semiotic occultation in which “practitioners . . . negotiate between established typified forms of religious interaction and the search for personal immediacy in interaction with the divine” (Eisenlohr 2009, 287). From this paradoxical sense of presence in absence, Meyer has called, “for an analysis of the social processes through which media become so much entangled with what they mediate that they are not visible as such” (2011, 26). Ali Raza’s recordings do this by mediating the affective sentiments that the absence the Ahl-e Bait evokes among his community. In turn, he and his customers judged the success of his Muḥarram recordings on their ability to depict the movement of a kind of moral atmosphere (māḥaul) built from the relational space that exists between those in his community. Ali Raza compared this to the movement of sound: “If you see the live azān,” he said referring to the call to prayer that ushers in ʿAshura on the tenth day of Muḥarram, “you’ll hear Allah is the Greatest from one side. It starts from this corner [indicating the east end of the street] and goes until this corner [indicating the end of the street in the west]. My recordings move like this.”

In his attempt to understand the “dialectic of mediation and immediacy,” Eisenlohr’s later work draws on more recent German philosophies of atmosphere (2018). In these terms, atmospheres are described in both art-historical and acoustic terms, as tuned, resonant, and arbiters of harmony and dissonance. For Gernot Böhme, atmosphere, “takes away the homogeneity of the surrounding space and fills it with tensions and suggestions of movement” (1993, 121). Helpful as these discussions are for accounting for the absent mood, both that of the Ahl-e Bait and of the māḥaul of his community that Ali Raza was so eager to depict when in Saudi Arabia, German philosophies of atmosphere as “suggestions of movement” do not fully account for the forms of moral atmosphere that are predicated on membership within a Shiʿi neighborhood. Instead, this is an atmosphere that emerges independently from Shiʿi praxis and through the various media of Shiʿi ethical life, in which a profound spatial and temporal friction resides in eliciting the transcendent copresence with the Ahl-e Bait by evoking their absence (Ruffle 2017, 333). I am hesitant to say the dialectic of mediation and immediacy does not apply here. Rather, the semiotic regimes by which a medium becomes able to communicate a sense of presence are wholly contingent on sensoria—atmospheres, absences, and moods—that do not conform to any generalized theory of action or intention. Instead, Ali Raza’s “sequence” suggests the possibility of simultaneity with different kinds of temporal, divine, and divinely guided copresence.

The Muḥarram sequence

While migrating media onto a new format came with its own challenges, the initial problem for Ali Raza was how, and what, to record of the Muḥarram procession that takes place in his maḥalla that would make his neighbors say, “Yes, Brother, that’s how it was.” This sequence was not given. When he began recording, the Muḥarram processions had not yet been broadcast live on national television, as they are every year on numerous leading private networks. Originally possessing only two video cameras, he was unable to record coverage of the movement of the procession from the Nisar Haveli through to Karbala Gamay Shah. Instead, he needed to devise, through experimentation and error, what he called the tartīb (sequence; also, arrangement) that could come to characterize his unique coverage of the annual event. His notion of a sequence not only refers to its staging or its mise-en-scène but to its spatial and affective veracity. Such is his dedication to verisimilitude that his sequence is vulnerable to being broken by slight errors in postproduction. He told me, “We have to be very careful that the wording of the azān is not broken, so that an act of impious innovation doesn’t happen.” Valorizing his own craft, he was keen to note that the level of continuity required is not only spatial but also theological, as well as one that needs to be verified by the experience of those who attended.

In the following sections I will examine the central zones of activity Ali Raza settled upon in his Muḥarram sequence, loosely given in chronological order relative to their appearance within his annual recordings.

The Azān-eʿAlī Akbar

First, his annual recordings document the moments preceding and following the fajr azān, the dawn prayer that, on the morning of the tenth of Muḥarram on the plains of Karbala in 680 ce, was given by ʿAli Akbar, the teenaged son of Imam Husain. In the first Muḥarram commemoration recorded by Ali Raza after returning from Saudi Arabia in October 1984, the disc begins with a pensive throng of male ʿazādārs. While most of the assembled crowd wait with their shirts off and sharp-edged zanjīrs in their hands, an equal number of women look on, visible behind the bamboo blinds of the balconies overlooking the street. When the fajr azān is recited, referred to in the Maḥalla Shian as the “Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar,” Ali Raza’s camera roughly pans across the outdoor assembly. Assembled ʿazādārs put their heads in their hands while others, unaware they are being recorded, appear unsure how to respond. A single double-deck cassette recorder is held aloft recording the diegetic track to be overlaid onto the video recording. The placement of the sound source amid the ʿazādārs was designed to document the recitation of nauḥah dear to the community. From his 1984 recordings to the present, those were primarily the nauḥah, “Karbalā Akbar merā hai naujawān” and “Merā gayā Husain jo mardān-e Karbalā.”

This latter nauḥah I heard a number of residents of the maḥalla describe as the “designated one” (makhṣūṣ) that has been recited every year in the moments before the Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar. Echoing the sentiments of his wider maḥalla, Ali Raza told me that this nauḥah “has been designated as if it has been patented, or is the logo, of that time.”^[4] A female reciter renowned in the maḥalla described to me the power of the nauḥah by reciting a verse, before explaining,

This elegy is about the night of martyrs. The poet is presenting an imaginary scenario (khayāli manz̤ūr). The poet is saying that this might have happened at this time. There are black clouds, dust storms, the women and children are there. The pain and yearning [soz] in the nauḥah—you can see how strong that is.

In short, the imagery deployed in that particular nauḥah bridges the affective and emotional lifeworlds of the maz̤lūm-e Karbalā with the residents of the Maḥalla Shian by iterating this sense of speculative or imagined presence.

From the first recording undertaken by FSCH, the Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar has remained the focal point of Ali Raza’s sequence. By the time of his 2007 recording, the first to be released as a set of three discs, the act of waiting, listening, and reflecting before the fajr prayer takes up almost the entirety of the first disc and half of the second. This is not a narrative whose engine races toward a denouement. Instead, amplified sermons remain barely audible, and nauḥahs are recited haltingly between tears. The modes of viewership one must bring to watching these recordings require the cultivation of a different kind of attention. Ali Raza’s emphasis on the pensive, waiting body results in moments in which the onscreen action consists largely of the camera struggling to find clear shots through the streamers and banners. The camera searches for faces, for legible horizons. The camera is also a witness, a recursive participant that registers copresence. Time is secondary to movement, cause, and effect, in the guise of what Deleuze called “the coexistence of all the sheets of past” (2005, 99). Indeed, in the recording of ritual events, we cannot speak of the beginning of the recording as a recursive rite of remembrance and renewal, particularly in the case of the Day of ʿAshura, which has multiple temporal layers. It is perhaps better to speak of certain affective, as well as spatial, thresholds that gather force through expectation, imminence, and anticipation. These thresholds provide an axis around which subsequent displays of mourning, joy, effervescence, or self-mortification impress upon their viewers and participants the weight of verisimilitude, that these affects and emotions were manifested and built, rather than conjured at will.

Zanjīr-zanī

The second element that was apparent in Ali Raza’s Muḥarram sequence from the earliest recordings is also arguably the most recognizable and sensationalized element of Muḥarram videography. That is, zanjīr-zanī, which in Pakistan refers to the act of flagellating one’s own back with curved blades that cause lacerations and bloodletting. In these sections, the camera’s attention is alert and empathetic, echoing the attentive faces that watch out for one another during short bursts of self-flagellation practiced within a supportive enclosure of bodies. While the show of zanjīr-zanī documented in FSCH’s recordings is undoubtedly one that delineates and reinforces a masculine ritual sphere, it is one predicated on vulnerability and the cultivation of what Ruffle calls “morally and ethically attuned personhood through rituals of austerity” (2015, 173). The place of zanjīr-zanī in Ali Raza’s Muḥarram sequence should not be understood solely as a spectacle of public piety but as a manifestation of what art theorist Rosalind Krauss calls “the narcissistic enclosure inherent in the video-medium” (1976, 64). By the time of his 2005 recording, the view of Ali Raza’s street during the Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar and zanjīr-zanī sequences was increasingly dotted with the preview screens of other handheld digital cameras and early camera-enabled cell phones. Documenting participation in this way is not simply self-congratulation but also registers a male ʿazādār’s active membership within the maḥalla, which is demarcated not only spatially but in terms of exemplary demonstrations of love and condolement to the Ahl-e Bait. These acts of disclosure are witnessed, documented, circulated, and amplified by the act of recording.

Although the performance of zanjīr-zanī is different from the video narcissism Rosalind Krauss viewed in Euro-American video art, Ali Raza’s videography similarly strives to interrogate and celebrate the individual as one agent within a ritual collective. This is most evident in Ali Raza’s own self-promotion on plastic posters that advertise his store and through short sequences of video idents. An ident is a short sequence or still image employed by television stations and internet channels that works as a logo that signals to the viewer the identity of the broadcast. Predicting its unfettered onward circulation, each of his releases begin and end with a short segment showing Ali Raza himself performing self-flagellation with a tangle of curved blades. These idents were frequently updated as the years progressed and usually show him flagellating among a circle of men, some of whom often seem to be visibly stricken by the experience of watching. In more recent recordings, after a period of intense bloodletting there is a brief shot of his sons performing the act with blades whose length are relative to their age.^[5]

The Zuljanah julūs

Like the Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar and sections of zanjīr-zanī, the third element in Ali Raza’s sequence, the Zuljanah julūs, featured prominently in the earliest-released recordings in 1984 and 1985. In much of the footage from this period to the present, the event is preceded by something akin to a rumor running through assembled ʿazādārs before an overwhelming display of sorrow takes hold. After a surge of emotion, sorrow takes second stage to an urge on the part of many participants to touch the Zuljanah and soak up the blessings activated by their proximity to this transhistorical, translocative ritual event. In Lahore, the looming presence of Muḥarram throughout the year is felt most palpably through Zuljanah horses, who are regularly trained for the climactic and contingent conditions of the densely packed parade by being taken for walks among heavy-vehicle traffic on the city’s main dual carriageways. The everyday conditions of the urban are used as a rehearsal for the dense gathering of bodies, and with it the translocative evocation of the battlefield of Karbala. The recording of the Zuljanah julūs and the pensive waiting of the Azān-e ʿAlī Akbar also provided the model for Ali Raza’s later foray into recording the procession of the tābūt of Imam Hasan on the twenty-eighth of the Islamic month of Ṣafar. From this point on, the sequence of his 28 Ṣafar recordings centered on the sudden reveal of the tābūt of Imam Hasan. As the administrator of his community’s procession in mourning of Imam Hasan, the recording becomes a kind of document that registers his own patronage.

The arrival of the nauḥah party

The fourth node that FSCH recordings anchor themselves to is the arrival of the nauḥah party^[6] and their group recitation of elegiac poetry that takes place alongside more organized displays of mātam and zanjīr-zanī. In Ali Raza’s 1985 recording, the arrival of the nauḥah parties inaugurates perhaps the most remarkable element in his Muḥarram sequence. As they recite, the camera performs deft tilts to record three corresponding means of eliciting copresence with the Ahl-e Bait. As the nauḥah is recited to the taʿziya of Imam Husain, an assembled row of men performs periodic rounds of mātam (mournful chest-beating, rather than the bloody self-flagellation of zanjīr-zanī). This extended dialogue between the taʿziya, the lament, and the bodies of ʿazādārs is remarkable precisely for its multiple temporal and corporeal address. Loath as I am to be accused of determinism, these forms of manifesting and sequencing the immediacy of the ziyārat appear to be a novel form driven by the arrival of home recording technology. Ali Raza’s tartīb grew out of a desire for capacious media to affect the event itself, to amplify it, and to become an object of adjudication for those to whom the event becomes meaningful.

Sight and sound unseen

Finally, the fifth element I have identified in Ali Raza’s sequence is the Muḥarram program of oration given at the Nisar Haveli. In his career as a videographer, the inclusion of orations came much later, when expanded digital storage limits allowed for more typically discursive elements to creep in. In previous years, the program of oration was either the source of nondiegetic sound—that is, sound that does not originate from the image—or the source of a broadcast conveyed to the street outside through loudspeakers. While sound was central to the emergence of the Muḥarram sequence as he devised its recording, in his earliest recordings it was largely ambient sound rather than oratorial or discursive messages. This is perhaps because much of the earliest sound sources were recorded separately from the image and therefore emanated from a different source. The same is true of the moving-image material. In his 1984 recording, the footage is aged and highly saturated as the sun rises on the morning of the tenth of Muḥarram. A rapid succession of shots of the procession shows footage of a Punjab ambulance waiting and the Pakistan Red Crescent on standby. The perspective and visual clarity of the footage suggests it was recorded from the television, and that Ali Raza included it to give a wider sense of coverage and reach.

On the surface, the inclusion of nondiegetic sound and found images might appear an unusual way of manifesting ritual immediacy. Rather, it seems that FSCH Muḥarram recordings use this device to multiply different temporal and affective realms and, in turn, cohere with Shiʿi theologies of copresence. When the source of the sound, or in the case of the found television footage, the image, is unseen, the viewer must acknowledge the scale of the event evinced by the simultaneity of these varied audiovisual sources. In this multilayered simultaneity, they also may acknowledge the affective pull of copresence between fellow ʿazādārs and their own attempts to manifest copresence with the Ahl-e Bait and maz̤lūm-e Karbalā. In its reproduction of sound as emanating from diegetic or nondiegetic space, filmmaking allows for the manifestation of what Michel Chion called “acousmatic presence” (1999, 8). Acousmatic sound is that which does not visualize or make apparent its source. The term was earlier applied by composer Pierre Schaeffer to describe a field of research and creation that separated sounds from their origin (Kane 2014). Schaeffer’s practice encouraged modes of attention that are not ultimately aesthetic but, as Brian Kane put it, lead to “a way of listening to the soundscape that is cultivated when the source of sounds is beyond the horizon of visibility, uncertain, underdetermined, bracketed, or wilfully and imaginatively suspended” (2014, 7). Since the coming of sound in the late 1920s, modes of filmmaking and videography strove to manifest “acousmatic presence” as a way of mapping and delineating the contours of onscreen worlds. In its dyadic relationship with the visual, acousmatic sound cannot exist without the occultation of its embodied source and, in some respects, the mediating apparatus that allows this occultation to take place. The palpable importance of disembodied sounds in FSCH’s recordings is a reminder that not all ritual affects can be understood through the concept of embodiment, as to a certain degree this precludes the participation of Shi’i figures for whom embodiment is beyond the horizon of mundane visibility. This implicit critique of embodiment that I want to raise here follows various calls for anthropological work on Islam to be sensitive to nondiscursive forces (Mittermaier 2012), the miraculous (Al-Hudaid 2020), and the role of God as a social actor (Schielke 2020). When copresence is elicited through the poetics of editing, different forms of simultaneity might unfold across different moods and modes of ethical adjudication. In this way, the use of nondiegetic sound does not signal the existence of multiple temporalities. Rather, it instantiates an expanded form of ritual that is forged by material, sonic, and atmospheric acts of eliciting copresence with the Ahl-e Bait by gesturing to palpable on- and offscreen absences.

Afterword: Brushstrokes and videograms

It was late February 2020, and after a brief walk through the Walled City in the brilliance of the late-winter sun, I reached Ali Raza’s store. The scene looked starkly different from the ʿAshura commemorations. Bunting and banners composed of red flags were draped across the street, and a raucous gathering of boys hinted at the presence of a celebration. It was the birthday celebrations of Bibi Fatima Zahra. It ended up being an inopportune moment to have brought him a poster of Zuljanah I had found at a printer in Rawalpindi, more conducive as the image was to Shiʿi mourning. As a man of the fabric trade, he inspected the poster intently, deliberating whether any of the layers of this digital print bore the impression of hand-painted work. He inspected the grain of it, sniffed it, caressed its glossy surface, remarked on the clarity of the color, and turned it on its side to try to uncover brushstrokes beneath the digital palimpsest. His interest in the processes of digitization and the continued presence of deeper layers of prior impressions beneath the image made me remember what first drove my interest in his Muḥarram sequence.

Just weeks later, the coronavirus pandemic led to restrictions on Shiʿi commemorations and gatherings. This provided a catalyst for many stores like Ali Raza’s to follow others in transitioning into digital collectives known as “ʿazādārī networks” that use social media platforms to broadcast prayer gatherings and processions to local and diasporic Pakistani Shiʿa on Facebook Live. These new social media iterations do not simply inherit a modality of the “live” from broadcasters and tech giants. They thrive in a sphere of devotional videography demarcated by local actors like FSCH, for whom videography is simply one technology in a wider toolkit of ritual affects. With the arrival of home recording technology in Pakistan in the early 1980s, broad demographics could create, edit, and document the world around them using tools previously associated with habitual mediums of popular enchantment, like radio, television, and cinema. What was previously the remit of the elite, the act of commissioning records of events, became widely available and affordable, the residual effect of which is visible today in the widespread use of smartphones to capture and circulate images, video, and sounds. This article has traced one example of this in Lahore’s Maḥalla Shian, whose occupants have been able to recognize and adjudicate their own presence in filmed footage for almost forty years, in coverage that appeals not to a sense of the internal cohesion of the event, but to the community’s intersubjective experience of its unfolding.