I address the dialectics of the local and the global by analyzing the subtle debates that take place annually between clerics and practitioners, as well as in the popular press, as the month of Muharram approaches. The transnational quality of the muḥarram phenomenon is most apparent in the debates and the rhetorical posturing resulting from them. My conclusion suggests that while recent global influences in the form of proselytizing activities place certain constraints on Trinidadian Shi‘i practice, the local nonetheless is resilient enough to devise strategies of accommodation to external pressures and concerns. The ritual complex at the heart of this book is an important case study for describing how the local/global dialectic unfolds over time, but it also addresses some general issues of relevance to the study of festivity and public performance.
The ta‘zi̅yeh/muḥarram/Hosay rite, however variegated in the three locations explored here, is an apt vehicle for expanding the discourse on festivity in general because it raises some broader issues concerning parades and power.39 The rite also functions within an idiom of conspicuous display shared by many festive events. Language analogies are useful here as well, for all festivals share an expressive vocabulary. Writing about the “language of festivals,” Roger Abrahams notes that they are “resounding times and elaborated places for excited exchange, for bringing out, passing around, for giving and receiving the most vital emblems of culture in an unashamed display of produce, of the plenitude the community may boast, precisely so that the community may boast. The emblems explode with meanings, for they are invested with the accumulated energies and experiences of past practice. They epitomize not only the seasonal passage but the history of the culture, a history spelled out in terms native to the group and appropriate to the place and the season.”40 He could easily have had the rituals discussed here in mind when he wrote the above passage. The Muharram rituals clearly manifest the transactional nature, emblematic multivalence, and collective history embodied in the festivals to which Abrahams alludes. Néstor García Canclini further adds that economies of consumption need to account for the reception of the products conspicuously displayed in the marketplace of culture.41 I contribute to the concerns of Abrahams and Canclini by situating the Muharram ritual complex in the discourse of power relations that condition both the language of the event and how it is received, consumed, and interpreted by various agents present in the audience at the time of public display.
The fruits of my labor will be of interest to scholars in a number of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, for I consider my study an interdisciplinary exercise. I blur genres to understand a very complicated and multivocalic performance event from both a textual and contextual point of view. To perform this feat successfully requires me to be somewhat of an academic bricoleur, but crossing disciplinary borders in the social and human sciences while using a variegated theoretical toolbox is absolutely necessary for the type of multisited study presented here.42
In short, my overall study demonstrates the remarkable resilience of the local vis-à-vis certain globalizing forces impinging upon it. Readers will find that my data fill a gap in studies on Indo-Muslim culture in Trinidad. Those especially interested in diasporic culture will benefit from the triangulation of my field sites, which has allowed me to tell a story that spans half the globe and more than 1300 years. I have intended, however, to keep the discussion in this work as free of jargon as possible to let the descriptive data speak on their own accord, for I believe, along with Paul Rabinow, that representational facts themselves are theoretically loaded.43 Most importantly, it is my hope that because I have kept the text relatively accessible to a broader reading audience the people of St. James, Trinidad, who have befriended me over the past ten years will take the time to read this book. It is for them that I wrote it.
Chapter 1
Orientations and Overview
paradigm 1: EXAMPLE, PATTERN; esp: an outstandingly clear or typical example or archetype 2: an example of a conjugation or declension showing a word in all its inflectional forms.
—Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1986)
The Karbala Paradigm
In June 1981 a bomb exploded in a Tehran meeting room during a high-level political meeting, killing over one hundred people. Among those who died in the explosion was Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, the leader of the Islamic Republican party. In 1986 this tragic event was commemorated with an Iranian postage stamp that identified a total of seventy-two killed in the explosion. The tally is equal to the number of people who traditionally are believed to have died with Imam Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, “on the plain of sorrow and misfortune”1 at Karbala in 61 A.H./680 C.E.2 The stamp reads in both Persian and English: “Fifth Martyrdom Anniversary of 72 Companions of the Islamic Revolution.” This powerful example demonstrates how the existential present can be explained and justified by reference to the historic past. Such popular symbolic techniques for the propagation of an officially sanctioned state ideology also instill a strong sense of religious ethos in those members of the global Shi‘i community who pledge allegiance to Husayn. They remind believers that their supreme martyr’s tragic demise is a recurrent phenomenon bridging past and present.3
The Karbala paradigm is a force as vital and potent today as it was during the first few centuries after the original event; it is one without parallel in human history.4 The Karbala paradigm can be understood as, using Kenneth Burke’s term, a “representative anecdote,” or as Abrahams explains, “a proposition, not necessarily in narrative form, that is so conventionally recognized and understood that it can organize and analyze experience in common for those who draw on it together.”5 Indeed, every aspect of the pious Shi‘i Muslim’s life revolves around this anecdotal paradigm and is ordered by it. Moreover, it serves as a model for appropriate human behavior and as a rhetorical force to oppose tyrannical rulers.6 But as we will see, the expression of the Karbala paradigm varies through time and space to make sense of contemporary sociopolitical realities. Variation in meaning and interpretation can best be gauged through a survey of the annual cultural performances that commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn.
During the first ten days of Muharram, Shi‘i Muslims, regardless of where they reside, commonly observe Husayn’s sacred commemoration. The tragic circumstances surrounding his redemptive suffering and vicarious death resonate throughout the Shi‘i world, providing a central paradigm for a Shi‘i theological emphasis on personal suffering as a method for the achievement of salvation. Indeed, there is great merit associated with weeping for Husayn, and even just remembering the event can absolve sin.7 As Mahmoud Ayoub states in his richly detailed study of Shi‘i redemptive suffering, “in the ritualistic moment, serial time becomes the bridge connecting primordial time and its special history with the timeless eternity of the future. This eternal fulfillment of time becomes the goal of human time and history.”8 Thus the Karbala event is enacted in numerous local ways wherever the Shi‘ah reside in order to reap its soteriological benefits and often to bring about sociopolitical change. For this reason, the period of mourning during the month of Muharram is paramount, rewarding the pious participant with the benefits of Paradise. In the words of Elias Canetti, the suffering of Husayn and its commemoration become the essence of Shi‘ism, which is “a religion of lament more concentrated and more extreme than any to be found elsewhere…. No faith has ever laid greater emphasis on lament. It is the highest religious duty, and many times more meritorious than any other good work.”9
Muḥarram’s metahistoricity provides an apt vehicle for what I wish to term “subjective apprehension.”10 Subjective apprehension is not an experience bound by time and space during the observance, for the implications of the seventh-century armed conflict between the imām and his foes are brought to bear on contemporary experience through ritual performance. As has been pointed out by one astute observer, “this places the passion of Imam