A Day of Mourning...

As promised, another holiday has arrived here in India. Unlike the holidays that I have described so far, this one is not a celebration, but instead a day of mourning. The Remembrance of Muharram is a Muslim holiday that marks the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala (in 680 AD) which took place in the present day Iraq. This battle involved two groups; one side supported the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Husayn ibn Ali, while the other supported a rival of Islam. Husayn ibn Ali's group was small, consisting mainly of women and children, and fewer than 100 men (including many members of Muhammad's family), while the other group is said to have had over 30,000 armed forces (Western academics put this number near 4,000, but hey, who ever said that religious stories have to be historically accurate, you can get more butts in the seats with a good story, and the story is MUCH better when it is 100 vs. 30,000 rather than 100 vs. 4,000). The smaller group was surrounded and made to suffer without food and water for three days in the Iraqi desert before all of the troops were slaughtered following the murder of Husayn ibn Ali and his six-month-old son. The body of Husayn was subsequently desecrated. The women and children of the group were taken and imprisoned for one year before they were finally released. Though this massacre was a terrible event, it did have one upside for the burgeoning religion, Husayn ibn Ali's martyrdom brought many new converts to Islam (in particular, to Shiaism).




This holiday is observed mainly by the Shi'a sect, and the martyrdom of Husayn is remembered by the recitation of prayers and Islamic teachings, but in some places people go as far to beat themselves and self-inflict wounds in an acknowledgement of his suffering. I have not seen any type of observance of the holiday, unless one considers coming into lab on a holiday torture, in which case my entire lab is observing Muharram...