Learning to Mourn with Hussain (A.S.)

Schopenhauer said that “The right form of address between man and man is not Maniseur, Sir, and the like… but… my fellow sufferer.” Human condition is one of loss (khusr as the Surah Al-Asr puts it) and need of redemption through faith and patience. Tears constitute the most sacred water. And gift from the earth for our Heavenly journey. We are all sahib-i- taziyat and need to be mourners or azadars. All Muslims need to wear a special cross in H shape to remind themselves of Hussain. More than weeping for Hussain we are really weeping for ourselves for failure to side with Hussain on daily basis. Nothing shatters ego better than tears. The prophet didn’t extol laughter but weeping as he noted if we all knew things better we too would weep. God is asking for our attention or participation on the side of dharma, against our cousins or interests and we fail to say we are present (Labayka). Hajj prepares us or reminds us for saying God we are present when needed by any one who has none to take care. As long as justice isn’t done, we need to weep for or be reminded of Hussain. And justice is never done as Derrida noted, but we must ever approximate it. To take God seriously is to take justice seriously. There can’t be a more edifying education than provided in the passion drama representing Karbala. Once every year, if not every day, we do need to weep at our sorry state, at our cowardice, at staying neutral in a situation of moral confluct where it means complicity in evil. Every country needs a Muharram procession to protest against its own failures or failures of those who fail to deliver. Muharram procession isn’t just recreating a past event but call for action today, right now, in the thick of history.

Newer generation raised on scientific diet or within more secular ambiance finds much in the practice of azadari meaningless – it notes, for instance, in certain practices, survival of pagan or mythic motifs in the birth of hero and tribal sacrificial cult. Reasons are many. One reason for alienation from Muharram rituals is failure of religious leadership to connect Hussain to contemporary times, to distinguish between the merely symbolic or cultural expression and the timeless principles underlying such practices. Religious leadership has failed to concretize the content of Hussain’s struggle against deprivation or inequality or concentration of wealth or oppression. Hussain sought to bring God and His law to the centre so that none plays a lord or denies the marginalized their access to God’s wide earth. One has little right to participate in Muharram rituals if one doesn’t do daily sadaqah (say of one rupee only) or calculate zakat or take trouble to find due recipient or transform him/her to be a donor in due course or doesn’t have an account in interest free credit cooperatives or locks gold/money in banks withholding its access for investment for the locality or neighbours or friends or refuses a request for lift or takes no interest in strengthening community bonds through feasts, keeping available space for marriage or hosting the travelers. If all Muslims contribute one hour’s income in Muharram/ one kg meat/ one item in excess at home to creating revolving fund for different facilities, we wouldn’t see a single beggar or needy person suffering for want of fee, medicine or shelter. We need to create facilities for distributing water or juice or food throughout year and not just on Muharram day. A comprehensive welfare programme could be charted from just one kg of meat routinely consumed during qurbani or functions in Muharram if it were contributed (and stored as currency – what better form of currency or cheque than meat in Kashmir as it can be encashed anytime) for the whole year. Every office could have free qahwa served throughout year especially for those who come for different works and are not offered anything. Anyone who enters an office for any work deserves to be served at least water if not qahwa, juice, dry fruit and lunch as well. Secretariats or minisecretariats should have free food corner for all casual labourers and visitors from daily sadaqah or resources raised in Muharram but spent mainly for functions or arranging sermon sessions. Executing what is said in a sermon on virtues of Hussain and Hassan (known for hospitality) is what Muharram celebration should focus at. Say, providing soft loans to struggling youth or to the indebted. Every case of bad debt in Budgam could be addressed if every azadar in the district contributed one to ten k for a year to soft loan fund and just one rupee a day as sadaqah. These gestures would bring significance of Hussain back to common man. Helping the needy or justice for the weak is deeper meaning of weeping and meeting and breast beating on few days of Muharram. We weep why was Hussain wronged or kept thirsty and keep wronging our neighbours and the needy all the time.

It is laudable to see people serve water etc. on Muharram. How more laudable would be to find each year establishment of Hussaini counters/canteens, on permanent basis, distributing free food, soft loan, ice creams, books, scholarships to target groups throughout year. A family or two only need help in a Mohalla and their pension or requisite services can be arranged for whole year through proper management of resources people make available in Muharram. The idea of Hussain that has moved history is the idea of caring for the other and it is easy to carve out Hussaini pension scheme, Hussaini healthcare scheme and Hussaini education scheme sponsoring needy cases. If one tenth of budget on sermons and events and conventional tokens of remembering Hussain (as) were channelized to these initiatives we would not find any Muslim begging or desperate for soft loan or fees. Even facilities for non-Muslims could be carved out as legacy of Hussain. Let every hospital and school and public space have some facility created in the name of Hussain. Let one to ten percent of budget spent on community feasts in Muharram be allocated to community empowerment and we will see a world that truly cares for Hussain and people for whom he gave life. As the Bible records: Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:40) What do azadars do for the least of their 140 (40x4) neighbours or relatives in debt or jobless youth or addicts? This is the question that people should ask while weeping for Hussain.

Let me explain why we are all in the situation of taziyet and qualify, by virtue if being humans, as mourners (azadars). Creation is in a state of disequilibrium. It is the fallen world in need of redemption, for creation is identified with the world of autonomous beings. As Simone Weil says in First and Last Notebooks: “Our sin consists in wanting to be and our punishment in believing that we exist. Expiation is wanting not to be, and salvation for us consists in seeing that we are not. This theme of birth as “sin” is present in the poetry of great mystics. One may here quote Kashmiri mystic/Rishi Nunda popularly called Shaykh al-Alam (the Master of the World): Gunah panin taeti panay maaren/taetri ha daphem zas kth kuth (My sins shall kill me/there I will cry why was I born) (trans. Abu Naeem) This reminds us of the fraternity of mystics which has always welcomed death with a smile. We need to understand why Sophocles said it was best not to be born and the next best to die young and why Sartre called life useless passion. Mysticism sees life in time as bondage as consciousness is fettered by limitations. Life in time is suffering, bondage, exile. It is punishment for being born. To be born is a matter of shame in a way as is implied in the legendry dialogue between Muslim sage Syed Ali Hamdani and Kashmiri mystic Lalla on the latter’s birth when she refused her mother’s milk. The Shaykh says further: “Nan-i henz shrakh kun-i payem halkes/adi andhem lanen nyay” (“Why didn’t the knife for cutting umbilical cord cut my neck?/ I would have long back solved the long standing tangle”). In much quoted (though of suspect authority according to one opinion) dialogue with her wife he says: Zind-i- yus mari roazi tehnzi kath (the one who dies while living shall endure). This echoes a tradition (“Die before you die”) often quoted in Sufi texts. Decreation, as Simone Weil uses the term, connotes precisely this. Fana precisely achieves this and that is why it is the cornerstone of spiritual path.

Tragedies, mournings and elegies accomplish certain ends and help express certain truths of spirit and as such are found everywhere in the world. Religion is sacrifice, a point illustrated across traditions (a brilliant exposition one may find in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Hinduism and Buddhism). The world is a product of sacrifice by the Supreme Self. Violence we find in institutions of sacrifice is part of the kitty of psycho-spiritual health – one needs to review the debate on violence and the Sacred in philosophy and anthropology to appreciate how violence of which ultimate expression is hell accomplish purification and why should the noblest and most virtuous.

Given God alone really exist and ours is a loaned derived existence that is bound to perish as far as it separate us from the Principle and we are required to do proper roles in the drama of life and our wages are dependent on how well we played this role. Scandals must come but wail to those through whose hands they come, as the Bible states. Those who resist getting consumed by love bring suffering to themselves and others and for such children of Yazid we need Hussains. However, God is subtle and uses every character to contribute to the larger good, in the long run. Villains in the drama of life, like Satan in the cosmic drama, have a role that must be recognized. All things, save God’s Face/Being, are destined to perish. There remains a terrible beauty behind every event of which Yeats talks and Blake calls for in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The cosmic dance appreciated in a Unitarian vision “justifies” all and our task remains both of contemplation of the unity/transcendence of opposites and joining the dance and siding with justice at the dualistic plane on which drama of unity unfolds. A world without Hussain and Karbala would be an impoverished world in both moral and aesthetic terms where much of the fire of love and passion and warmth of tears and the wild cry for justice would be absent. With Zainab we need to appreciate the splendor of beauty in Karbala. “Lives become petty and laughable to the extent that they shy away from the presence of the tragic. And to the extent that they participate in a sacred horror, they become human. It may be that this paradox is too great and difficult to uphold: still, it is no less the truth of life than blood is”. Karbala is only an instantiation of pain and suffering (karb-o-bala) that constitute the very tapestry of life and as such can’t be avoided.

Weil’s statement, that to say ‘I’ is a lie justifies the call for crucifixion which converges with the objective of martyrdom of Hussain. Not mine, but Heavenly Father’s will is to be done and that is what redeems us or brings falah. The world and its vexations or trials constitute elaborate providential arrangement for weaning us away from samsaric trappings or maya. However there is a need for justice as well that is eternally etched in the human breast and here the question of truth comes to the fore and justice as its image. Weil notes in this connection:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, ‘Why am I being hurt?’, then there is certainly injustice.

This explains Hussain’s repeated exhortations to the opponents to shun their path and should help settle the question of exonerating Yazid or any perpetrator of oppression or instigator of violence. Who doesn’t feel that justice or good has been defied under the desert sun of Karbala? The verdict expressive of collective conscience of humanity represented best by the poets across cultures is for Hussain and against Yazid and as such no apology on behalf of Yazid really matters when Hussain and Yazid have become symbols of good and evil in mytho-poetic space of mankind, especially Islamic world.

Weil further explains why to be human is to seek return to God:

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales on initiation. If I accept this gift it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization… Humility is the refusal to exist outside God. It is the queen of virtues. The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.”

The idea of ihsan or perfection of faith is basically witnessing God alone or consuming oneself manifesting His glory. This may be achieved by what Simone Weil calls decreation. Decreation may be effected through horrendous evil and may involve in many cases extreme violence, extreme humiliation, deprivation and distress or forced detachment from everything that binds one to the order of creation. Understanding this point means we don’t ask for compensations to heroes of Karbala and don’t think of any filler of the void like comfort from this or that quarter to sully the innocence and dignity of spirit. Building on previous meditations on Karbala let me repeat. If we weep, it is ultimately for ourselves, for what we share with our beloved heroes, for desecration of the impersonal sacred that grounds our fellowship of spirit. Let us avoid facile apologies for what happened in Karbala and face the heat and thirst and rain of arrows that wrench the attachment to flesh, to pleasure, to all what is not eternal and thus not deserving to be saved. Seeing the old Bhishma in Mahabharata nailed for days is witnessing redemption through suffering. Here is Weil’s scorching logic of grace and redemption:

I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.

To accept what is bitter. The acceptance must not be reflected back on to the bitterness so as to diminish it, otherwise the acceptance will be proportionately diminished in force and purity, for the thing to be accepted is that which is bitter in so far as it is bitter; it is that and nothing else. We have to say like Ivan Karamazov that nothing can make up for a single tear from a single child, and yet to accept all tears and the nameless horrors which are beyond tears. We have to accept these things, not in so far as they bring compensations with them, but in themselves. We have to accept the fact that they exist simply because they do exist.

And “We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.” “We should make every effort we can to avoid affliction, so that the affliction which we meet with may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter.”

There is a distinction between suffering and inflicting violence. The former is a marker of authentic human state and love. To suffer for the sake of God/Other is the glory of man. As Weil would have it:

Relentless necessity, wretchedness, distress, the crushing burden of poverty and of labour which wears us out, cruelty, torture, violent death, constraint, disease—all these constitute divine love. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love him. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough ‘I’ in us to make it possible to surrender the ‘I’ for love’s sake.

Few know that our state in this world is worse than those who were left to mourn on that fateful night (sham-i gareeban). Our extreme poverty, wretchedness and misery is known to prophets, saints, great tragedians and such philosophers as Pascal and Weil. Modern philosophers and writers have aptly presented our penury. Our sin is our very being as one Sufi would put it and this necessitates radical operation of decreation through such mechanisms as reliving the night after the massacre of Hussain and his aides in Karbala (sham-i gareeban). radical operation of decreation through such mechanisms as reliving sham-i gareeban. As Weil puts it:

 We should renounce being something. That is our only good.

Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. It is for this that we suffer with resignation, it is for this that we act, it is for this that we pray.

May God grant me to become nothing.

In so far as I become nothing, God loves himself through me.

And further:

“If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to our sensibility only through suffering and death.” (Weil, 1952: 37). “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.”

Those who understand the passion of the Christ and are abreast with the great tradition of literature on mediations on the cross readily understand Karbala. Let us note why decreation is needed for each one of us and a sort of Karbala must be enacted or chosen for redemption for vast majority of mankind – God anyway makes us taste something of Karbala in many ways. We need to be thankful for every hurt received as this helps us detach and focus on God alone.

What is real is what prevails and that is no less divine in its roots or thingness/being than is scripture. At the root of certain difficulties arising in understanding Karbala is prior misconception regarding religion understood in nauseatingly sentimental/moral terms (‘Be good, sweet child,’ etc) invoking pleasure/pain duality and neglect of the intellectual virtues (which alone survive our death) – as noted by Ananda Coomaraswamy – inviting the Marxist charge of opium of people. We must find deeper import of Karbala at another plane.

In Weil we find an explanation for how the idea of seeking some comfort for Imam Hussain’s camp or temptation of advising other actors in the drama or God to redirect some of its elements in more humane or moral terms that is often indulged in by some Muslims is premised on failure to understand the basic design.

Renunciation demands that we should pass through anguish equivalent to that which would be caused in reality by the loss of all loved beings and all possession, including our faculties and attainments in the order of intelligence and character, our opinions, beliefs concerning what is good, what is stable, etc. And we must not lay these things down of ourselves but lose them—like Job….

We find true renunciation in Hussain who offers or loses all things, relationships and the last and most dear treasure, life.

To the objection that Hussain was blameless, Simone Weil would say, with many Sufis, that he shared the blame of existence. For such Sufis there is no sin greater than being born – choosing existence against the primordial sea of living in divinis. If our existence were not ultimately a scandal, there would have been no death. And one’s being innocent in ordinary sense makes one better able to carry the cross in style – death is no punishment. How do we know, as Socrates long back pointed out, that death is a punishment?

To sum up: Education consists in learning to mourn for human condition, not to seek comfort in any perishable relationship or thing, living for the other, getting consumed by love or consenting to be nothing or wearing cross in style. It involves crossing, with dignity, the sea of karb o bala. We need to learn to prepare for death and master the art of breathing or dying every moment. That is what philosophy, religion and mysticism aim at. Great poetry, especially marsiya, brings home this point. It is time to mourn with Hussain – with dignity and beauty – and cultivate gam-i hussain to win the life of spirit and find inward morning.