Introduction
On another occasion I invited one of my informants to witness the development of photographic plates, … and he saw in the process … the actual embodiment of ripples into images, and regarded this as a demonstration of the truth of his clan.
—Gregory Bateson, Naven
Diaspora consciousness is entirely a product of cultures and histories in collision and dialogue.
—James Clifford, Diasporas
Ta‘zi̅yeh/Muḥarram/Hosay
Each year during the first ten days of Muharram (al-muḥarram), the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Shi‘i Muslims throughout the world join in a common observance to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, the imām Husayn. Husayn died in the seventh century on the plains of Karbala, in what is now contemporary Iraq. The dramatic commemoration, known variously as ta‘zi̅yeh in Iran, muḥarram in India, and Hosay in Trinidad, is the focal point in the religious life of the Shi‘i mourning community. Because Imam Husayn’s suffering and death is seen as the most important tragedy in history, the annual reactualization of the event is the central Shi‘i ritual observance of the year. Muḥarram is a metahistorical phenomenon because the observance related to it makes possible individual identification with, and direct experience of, Imam Husayn’s vicarious suffering. During the observance, subjective apprehension is not spatially and temporally bound, for the historical battle that occurred in 61 A.H./680 C.E. is made present through the pious actions of Shi‘i Muslims the world over.
The temporal and spatial transcendence of the tragedy fit in well with the anthropological notions of liminality as developed by Arnold van Gennep and elaborated by Victor Turner.1 They place the passion of Imam Husayn at Karbala in an atemporal and aspatial framework beyond all fixed points of classification. Turner sees liminality as a state of transition during which “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Moreover, the ambiguity of the liminal period “is frequently likened to death.”2 Muḥarram, being an annual rite of communal passage bridging each year to the next is thus a process of symbolic community death and rebirth, a ritual of renewal par excellence.3 Although this is a universal overview applicable to the observances throughout the world, we find that the event is a complex, polysemic affair when viewed from an ethnographic perspective. In actuality, the ritual complex in context is comprised of a plethora of regional and local symbols; we find a variety of observances unique to given locales. In this book, I focus on local expressions of the Muharram rituals in Trinidad, but not without first situating them within the global development of Shi‘i popular piety in Iran and India, the geographic trajectory along which the rite passed during its lengthy odyssey that ended in the Caribbean.
As is the case with many Shi‘i observances, the various modes of ritual action expressed during the month of Muharram share the common aforementioned goal of identification with the martyr Imam Husayn. This identification pervades all domains of Shi‘i life. The pervasive notion of Husayn’s drama providing an ideal model for human action in everyday affairs is what many scholars of Shi‘i Islam, following Michael Fischer, refer to as the “Karbala paradigm.”4 I situate my study within this model in Chapter 1 to show that Trinidadian Shi‘i Muslims act locally within a much broader transnational frame of reference, that is, from within a global ethos and worldview. Having stated this, however, I wish to note that the ways in which the goal of subjective apprehension is reached differ considerably in their performative aspects in Iran, India, and Trinidad, the three main sites of my study.
Participants share a common core of symbolic meaning but create separate emergent realities unique to their respective cultural, geographic, and linguistic environments. Common sense alone should tell us that the ritual performance of a shared core of faith and belief can take peculiar turns in specific geographic locations even when tied to a historical story or, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term, a “master narrative,” with relatively stable motifs embedded in it.5 But the ethnographic record also demonstrates that firm links with the original event are maintained in various religious contexts through processes of material and verbal enactment such as the building of cenotaphs and biers or the telling of the story of Imam Husayn’s tragic death through numerous forms of narrative. These narrative events pertaining to Husayn’s ordeal provide much of the collective global knowledge that serves as the basis for the construction and performance of lasting ritual reenactments on the local level.
Passages from dramatic ta‘zi̅yeh scripts recited during staged “passion plays” in Iran suggest that salvation is guaranteed for all mourners because the imām is able to mediate between God and man on the Day of Judgment, the ultimate moment of reconciliation for one’s deeds on earth. Interpreting the observance from this emic, or insider’s, point of view concretizes the notion that participating in annual renewal on the human level is not only desirable but absolutely necessary in terms of the overall soteriological goal motivating the event. Participation in the annual muḥarram renewal is humankind’s chief role and responsibility in this lifetime, according to the Shi‘i perspective. Through participation in performances, systems of abstract theological meaning are shaped into emotional, experiential, and subjective local forms of knowledge comprehensible to the individual and his or her community. My study seeks to unravel the variety of local meanings attributed to Hosay in Trinidad. Thus the bulk of the study focuses on the Caribbean. To explicate fully the Trinidadian variant of muḥarram, however, I have provided the historical background of the rite’s origins and observance in Iran and Iraq in Chapters 1 and 2 in order to inform my ethnographic observations included in the later chapters. Once having completed this task, I trace in Chapter 3 the rite’s diffusion to South Asia, from where it was eventually transported to the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century via indentured laborers who were brought from India to work on colonial plantations under the British Raj.
Ta‘zi̅yeh in Iran
In Iran, staged performance grew out of processional observances that were recorded by Muslim historiographers as early as the tenth century. The reactualizations first took place at locations where large numbers of people could gather, like crossroads or public squares. Ritual battles would take place in front of an audience while tableaux of bloodied martyrs moved past the stationary audience on wheeled platforms. In the sixteenth century, a private tradition of verbal martyr narration called rauz̤eh khvāni̅ also began to flourish. These two traditions—public performance and private recitation—existed side by side but separately for nearly two hundred and fifty years. The two fused in the mid-eighteenth century to create what we know today as ta‘zi̅yeh. Ta‘zi̅yeh, like the muḥarram processions, developed historically as a communal event. The important element in the observance was participation. An audience member could not just observe passively. The viewer had to show emotion by weeping in order to experience the suffering of Husayn, and only in this way could he or she completely identify with the martyr.
In spite of the numerous historical changes that have contributed to the shaping of ta‘zi̅yeh as we know it today, the soteriological purpose has remained constant: participation in the performance helps an individual to obtain salvation through the intercession of the martyr. The vicarious suffering and death of Husayn has been an instrument of redemption for all believers, and belief has been most readily manifested by performance participation. This underlying theological goal is central to the observance worldwide, and a host of scholars have identified it as the theological core complex of