Ritual, Blood, and Shiite Identity: Ashura in Nabatiyya, Lebanon

What you see here is the real Islam. Islam is not found in books, it is here.

-Nabatiyya resident, Ashura 2000¹

Lebanon is a small country, roughly the size of Connecticut, but the venerable southern city of al-Nabatiyya seems a continent away from the fussy lifestyles, the bustling restaurants, and the Hard Rock Cafes of cosmopolitan Beirut.² The 60-minute or so drive from Beirut to Nabatiyya is not just a departure from the capital's sensual delights but a sojourn to a part of the country that lived in the vortex of conflict for more than three decades. Many Beiruti bon vivants are aghast at the prospect of making the southward trek. Yet, for Lebanon's largest sect, the 1.4 million or so Shiite Muslims (about 40 percent of the total population), Nabatiyya is the commercial center in Jabal 'Amil, the Shiite heartland that extends from the wadis and hills of southern Lebanon to the southern Biqa valley. In fact, every weekend there is what seems a tidal flow of people from the overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim suburbs of Beirut southward as Shiites head to the al-dai'ah, "the village," which is usually taken to mean "going to the countryside" where life is simple, wholesome, and unblemished by urban vices. Except during the bone-chilling, often icy winter in Jabal 'Amil, when people stay in Beirut and its environs, hundreds of thousands of people move back and forth weekly. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the flow often reversed as the people of the South sought refuge from bombardment and conflict with relatives in the comparative safety of the city.

While the precise advent of Shiism in Jabal 'Amil is in dispute, there is no question that the community predates the introduction of Shiism to Persia (Iran) in the 16th century. Certainly, Jabal 'Amil was a center for scholarship at least by the late 14th century. Indeed, scholars from Jabal 'Amil (as well as from Iraq and Bahrain) assisted in the installation of Shiite Islam in Safavid Persia (1502-1736). This was well before the Persian cities of Mashhad, Shiraz, or Qum emerged as major centers of Shiite scholarship. Jabal 'Amil has long been eclipsed by al-Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, the two great Iraqi shrine cities, and since the 19th century by the now famous Persian (Iranian) cities of Shiite learning. Regardless, Jabal 'Amil continues to be revered by Shiites, especially during Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar.

In Beirut, where members of Lebanon's 18 recognized sects palaver, work, and live cheek to jowl, religious practice and ritual, as opposed to sectarian identity, is often tucked away from public view in mixed areas. Lebanese are astute in discerning cues and clues that reveal an interlocutor's sectarian roots and cultural identity but at least until recent decades public religious ritual was often spurned in order to avoid provoking intersectarian tension. Although public and private mourning of Imam Hussein ('azah al-Hussein) and the tragic events (masa'ib) of Karbala, have long occurred in Shiite communities, public commemorations of Ashura, the 10th day of Muharram, are relatively recent phenomena in the southern suburbs of Beirut (known as al-dahiyah), where they began less than 50 years ago.

The practice was introduced to the Beirut suburbs by a migrant from Baalbak, al-Hajj Ahmed al-Khansa, after he made pilgrimages (ziyyarat, but literally "visits") to Najaf and Karbala, where he witnessed a number of public ceremonies during Muharram in 1938. When he returned to Beirut, he instituted public mourning not simply as a display of communal piety but as a vehicle for mobilizing recent migrants to the city. Not surprisingly, longtime residents and well-established Shiites resisted ostentatious commemorations of Ashura, which they feared might alienate their Christian neighbors who then politically controlled these areas (Khuri 1975:181-86). Hajj al-Khansa built such a powerful foundation among the new urban residents that he eventually became a leading local politician. Today the al-Khansas are the largest and most influential clan in the southern suburbs of...