Ashura

Ashura falls on the tenth of Muharram, and it is the clearest case in the Islamic calendar of a single date meaning opposite things to different communities.

For Sunni Muslims it is a day of voluntary fasting. The hadith literature reports that the Prophet found the Jews of Medina fasting on that day in commemoration of the deliverance from Egypt, said that Muslims had a greater claim to Moses, and fasted it, adding a recommendation to fast the ninth as well, so as to differ from the Jewish practice. The fast is recommended, not obligatory, and the day's tone is one of gratitude. The connection to the Jewish Day of Atonement, also on the tenth of a month, has been noted since the early period.

For Shia Muslims it is the anniversary of the killing of Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, with his family and companions at Karbala in 680, by forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. It is a day of mourning, and the mourning is public and intense: recitation of the narrative in assemblies, processions, elegies, chest-beating, passion plays performed in Iran, and among some communities practices of self-flagellation that a number of senior Shia clerics have discouraged or forbidden.

That the same date carries a fast of thanksgiving in one tradition and the deepest mourning in the other is not a coincidence to be smoothed over. Both observances are old, they have separate origins, and the collision on one day is a durable source of sectarian tension where the two communities live together.

The events at Karbala are among the better-attested episodes of early Islamic history in the sense that both traditions agree on the outline: Husayn refused allegiance to Yazid, set out for Kufa on the invitation of its people, was intercepted, was denied water, and was killed with some seventy companions and family members, his surviving relatives taken captive to Damascus.

What the event became is a distinct question. Shia devotion has developed the narrative into something with a structure of its own, a majlis in which the story is recited to produce weeping, an established literature of elegy in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other languages, and the taziya passion drama of Iran, which is among the very few developed theatrical traditions in the Islamic world.

The theology attached to it is substantial. Husayn's death is read as a deliberate, foreknown sacrifice against tyranny, and it has been mobilised politically with great force, most visibly in the Iranian revolution of 1979, where the slogan that every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala framed the shah as Yazid.

Sunni tradition honours Husayn as the Prophet's grandson and a martyr, and regards the killing as a crime. It does not attach the commemorative apparatus, and some Sunni scholars have criticised the mourning practices as innovation.

Pilgrimage to Karbala for the fortieth day after Ashura draws crowds reported in the tens of millions, which makes it among the largest annual gatherings of people anywhere on earth.