Heroism and Being-towards-Death: On Sacrificial Martyrdom in Contemporary Shiʿism

Abstract

This paper examines the philosophy of martyrdom, heroism, and death, with reference to Islam in general and Shiʿism in particular. This paper will be divided into two parts; the first will highlight the etymological and philosophical significance of the Arabic term martyrdom (istishhād) and its interrelation with the notion of testimony (shahāda), allowing for the clarification of the complexity of the existential privation of death and the communality of heroic martyrdom. The second part will move beyond the observation of Qurʾanic canonical sources by traversing traditional Shiʿi references and narratives, allowing for a reflection on the articulation of the ontology of martyrdom, such as its temporal horizon and mortality. Consequently, the state of affairs surrounding the phenomenon of heroic martyrdom embodies testimonies of both love and hate, of belongingness and enmity, and of devotion and hostility. Yet, the identification of such heroism is, in practice, coupled with a tacit sense of a Heideggerian ‘fall’ due to its inseparability from the pull of religious, social, and communal violence and aggression. Thus, in both theory and practice, a phenomenology of heroic martyrdom and death takes into account the ideological and societal contexts of the use of violence and the concrete rituals in its mediation of aggression.

1. Introduction

In the early times of Islam, Arab tribalism competed with a religion that was designed to reduce, if not completely eliminate, strongly entrenched tribal sensibilities. The umma, the idealized early Islamic community, was based on religious affiliation rather than the traditional blood ties that bound kin into cohesive social units. From the very formation of the umma, the Prophet directed Muslims not to draw distinctions from ethnic affiliation or geographical origins. In fact, the transcendent and universal religious community of Islam remained more of an ideal than a reality, creating a sense of tension between long-established and newly fashioned group identities and ubiquitous patterns of political behavior. Upon a brief survey of historical and theological studies, as well as an analysis of etymology, martyrdom and testimony appear to have always been conjoined. The concept of witness, whether in martyrdom or in the end days of the Apocalypse, is an intensely live metaphor and should be understood in terms of the active act of witnessing that believers bear before Muslim courts of law (Trites 1973). Regardless of the semantic relation between ‘witness’ and ‘martyr’, their interrelatedness—as it will be further clarified throughout this essay—becomes ever more pressing in terms of religious attitudes and experiences, wherein the hero becomes the witness and the martyr who sacrifices life for faith.

While much scholarship on Shiʿism is centered on the topics of succession, theological doctrines, or the ahl al-bayt (family of the [Prophet’s] household), this paper will touch upon the significance of death, the communality of martyrdom, and the intersubjective elements of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testifying’ in acts of heroism (Pierce 2016). It attempts to articulate spiritual experiences, beyond the ego, through a mechanism of rigorous phenomenology, which ultimately serves theology and religious analyses. Through this, phenomenology can turn such analyses into systems of knowledge in their own right, ones that are distinct from the natural and historical sciences of humankind (Louchakova-Schwartz 2006). Although such phenomenological analysis is not always theoretical, it does highlight the experiential relation that is of a particular kind of transcendence towards the divine as an other, of death as an intersubjective phenomenon, and of heroic martyrdom as a template for sectarian continuity. In such an experience, phenomenology expresses the structure of religious experience as it is informed by one’s human situation (Louchakova-Schwartz 2018).

It is important to note, in this case, the fact that the traditions and hagiography that elaborated the episodes connected with the battle of Karbalāʾ created a religious exemplar out of Husayn ibn ʿAli’s suffering while idolizing his martyrdom. These communal narratives established—and continue to establish—powerful and long-lasting moods and motivations among the Shiʿi community. This reinforces their communal sense of identity, which is acutely derived from their distinct religious sect (Nakash 1993). In this view, moods are not taken as mere mental constructs or states that arise from, are the result of, and are caused by certain situations and contexts. Rather, moods are taken as fundamental modes of existence that are quite disclosive in reflecting our way of being in the world. It is through these moods that we experience certain modes of the world and through which this world is made present to us. The question here, however, is, to what extent can we understand communal moods through a community’s ontology of martyrdom?

For that sole purpose, this paper will be divided into two parts; the first will highlight the etymological and philosophical significance of the Arabic term martyrdom (istishhād) and its interrelation with the notion of testimony (shahāda). The implication of this allows for a complex understanding of the ethical, conceptual, and communal elements when considering the existential privation of death and the communality of heroic martyrdom. The second part of the paper will reflect upon theological texts from Islamic sources to articulate an ontology of martyrdom by explicating its ecstatic temporal horizon to comprehend its impact on mortality, communality, and collective remembrance. However, it is not enough to utilize general works on Islam when it comes to an understanding of the peculiarity of martyrdom within Shiʿism since martyrdom had acquired certain connotations that were and still remain exclusive to the Shiʿi tradition, necessitating a separate and distinct treatment (Asfaruddin 2017). For this reason, this paper will move beyond the observation of Qurʾanic canonical sources by traversing traditional Shiʿi references and narratives.

Thus, through a phenomenological interpretation of an Islamic—and essentially Shiʿi—form of sacrificial martyrdom, we can denote a phenomenology of a theological process of heroization that strives to (1) instigate and facilitate the communal acceptance of death; (2) temporalize the conception of martyrdom by continuously existing in contact with the present, past, and future; (3) faithfully preserve the martyr’s testimony entrusted to God through a ritualistic celebration and remembrance of death, heroic dying, and the dead; (4) transform the martyr into a witness of their own testimony; and (5) incorporate the martyr’s service towards the intersubjectification—and communalization—of death. This process of inheritance of guilt and ressentiment transforms the community into witnesses, further strengthening the link between members of the community while sustaining a militant faith and Weltanschauung (Khuri 1990).

2. The Testimony before Martyrdom

An Etymology: On Istishhād and Shahāda

Arab tribalism, which valued blood ties and linked them to honor and shame, continued to have a profound effect on the body politic of a recently forged Islamic world. Tribal sentiments of honor and shame eventually became intertwined with a concept of martyrdom embedded in religious terminology. In effect, Qurʾanic shuhadāʾ, meaning “witnesses”, were transmuted into individuals who exhibited a form of muruʾa [valor] and shaja‘ah [bravery] by sacrificing limb and even life for the sake of Islamic principles. The concept of martyrdom, here, is highlighted through the etymological significance of the Arabic term martyrdom (istishhād) and the notions of testimony and witnessing (shahāda), which, for the sake of this paper, should only be approached phenomenologically.

It should be noted that the heroization process of martyrdom, specifically in Shiʿism, should not be reduced to a mere ideological institution but considered through a political application that cements the formation and collectivization of a communal identity. More than this, it is a process that seeks the integration of communal intentions towards the creation of a specifically Shiʿi Gesamtperson (literally, collective/total person).1 The discussion of the Shiʿi communality of martyrdom necessitates an understanding of Gemeingeist (common mind), which underlies the unitedness of socio-political opinion in uniting individual life goals and its opposition to private egoism (Caminada 2019). What is the social relevance of sacrifice to a community? More pressing is the question about the nature of ressentiment in such a sacrificial act. More than surrendering a possession, sacrifice means exerting oneself for the benefit of others.

To analyze martyrdom and testimony specifically through a Shiʿi context, the ritualistic role of death, grief, and identity further amplify the question of intersubjectivity and the essence of communality. While it is tempting to understand contemporary martyrdom (within Shiʿism) as cataclysmically separated from its original conceptualization in late antiquity as well as from its roots in terms of its articulation in its classical and late-classical pasts, to do so would be to radically misinterpret the social, political, and cultural processes that accompanied the emergence of martyrdom and its impact within Shiʿism and ignore the character of the Shiʿi umma (community) as it was understood by its own members. As a result, this paper seeks to trace back the origin of communal remembrance within the Shiʿi system by situating the Shiʿi narrative within a wider milieu that speaks to sociological developments and broader religious experiences. According to Derrida, “…the Christian-Roman meaning of “passion” always implies martyrdom, that is—as its name indicates—testimony. A passion always testifies” (Derrida 2000, p. 27). It is this testimony, realized internally and actualized through attestation, that is also communally corroborated, which allows for intersubjective speculation on the communal affectations of heroism and hero-glorification.

The term ‘martyrdom’ has always implied some form of witnessing, and this is attested by Arabic and Greek etymologies. The Arabic noun shahīd, like the Greek “martureō”, translates into English as “to witness” (Rodríguez 2017). Accordingly, in Islam, a “martyr” (shahīd) is one who has suffered death by remaining true to the beliefs of their faith through a ‘passionate’ act, one that has its roots in an intersubjective and communal intentionality. It is interesting, in this regard, that the adhan—the Muslim call to prayer—is known to be a call to witness. After repeating “allāh w akbar” four times (God is great), the statement: “ash’hadu an la ilaha illa allah” (I bear witness that there is no other God but Allah) is repeated twice, followed by “ash’hadu anna Muhammad rasul allah” (I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God), which is also repeated twice. The last two statements, when combined, form the shahāda, which is the Muslim “witnessing” and testimony—or declaration of faith—that is recited daily by Muslims and is incumbent on the convert who is embracing Islam.2 Shahāda, therefore, “…literally means to ‘see’, to ‘witness’, and ‘to become a model’” (Husted 1993). Without question, like Judaism and Christianity, Islam venerates its martyrs and has developed its own distinct theology towards martyrdom. The martyr is, thus, a witness first, seeing ‘the truth’ and firmly standing by it. So much so that not only does the martyr verbally testify it, but is prepared to die for it, thus becoming a martyr. In this way, a paradigm is created; the martyr is exemplified, becoming an exemplary to others.

Due to the complex ethical, conceptual, and communal implications of martyrdom, we are confronted with the phenomenological necessity of interpreting the privational experience of death and the communality of inheriting the guilt and ressentiment of the martyr’s sacrificial service, a service that couples the testimony of both love and hate while realizing a state of belongingness and enmity for the martyr through levels of devotion and hostility. To break it down, these levels of devotion are emphasized through the heroized martyr’s testimony, while the contrasting levels of resentment and grief in the community of the hero’s remembrance become consequences to which the martyr is transformed and categorized as a martyr. The martyr’s emphatic communal belongingness is a direct cause for their intentional militant devotion and martyrdom, whether to God or their community.

3. A Shiʿi Articulation of Martyrdom

The original vehicle for creating, transferring, and defusing the memory of Karbalāʾ was the ‘memorial’ services that were carried out by the Shiʿi community, where they narrated, in Arabic, the incidents of the battle lamenting the death of Imam Husayn, his family, and his compatriots; Husayn was the son of Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib and Fatima Zahra’ (daughter of Prophet Muhammad), making Husayn the grandson of the Prophet and a focal figure in the Shiʿi community (Nakash 1993). Over the centuries, observance of the month of Muharram—which is the first month of the Islamic calendar—have traveled far from their origins at Karbalāʾ. In Karbalāʾ, 680 A.D., Husayn was brutally put to death together with 72 of his male companions on the tenth day of the month, hence, ʿAshuraʾ (a linguistic derivation of the Arabic word ‘ashra meaning 10). For this reason, Muharram is synonymous with both the first month and the tenth day. Husayn’s passion and death are considered the ultimate example of sacrifice for Shiʿi Muslims and scores of rituals devoted to ʿAshuraʾ have developed during the last 13 centuries, especially in Iran, where the sect of Twelver Shiʿism (in reference to the 12 imams, including Ali and his divinely chosen offspring) became the state religion in the 16th century.

According to Shiʿi traditions, these memorial services began immediately after Husayn’s martyrdom, initiated by the womenfolk of his entourage, even before they were sent to Damascus (Nakash 1993). It is well documented that during the Umayyad period, the mourning of Husayn’s martyrdom was only and strictly observed in secret (Ayoub 1978). Hence, according to Nakash, it was probably around this formative period of Shiʿism that the tradition of the ritualistic commemoration of ʿAshuraʾ was first established (Jafri 1979). However, over a period of 13 centuries, there developed five major and intense rituals centered on the battle of Karbalāʾ (Nakash 1993). These rituals include the memorial services (majalis al-taʿziya), the visitation of Husayn’s burial site and tomb in Karbalāʾ, specifically on the 10th (and last) day of ʿAshuraʾ and the 40th day following the battle (ziyarat ʿAshuraʾ and ziyarat al-arbaʿin), the public mourning processions (al-mawakib al-husayniyya or al-ʿazaʾiyya), the representation of the battle of Karbalāʾ in the form of a play (shabeeh), and the flagellation (tatbir) (Jafri 1979; Nakash 1993).

The martyr in Shiʿi Islam, as a model, exemplar, and paradigm, finds its ultimate expression in the figure of Imam Husayn ibn Ali, commonly recognized and referred to as “Sayyid Al Shuhadāʾ” (Master of Martyrs) and “Sayyid Shabab Ahl al Jannah” (Master of the Youths of Paradise) (Husted 1993; Ayoub 1978). Specifically, the ethos of Shiʿi Islam is one that is shaped by the suffering, sacrifice, and indeed martyrdom of Imam Husayn on the battlefield of Karbalāʾ (presently in modern-day Iraq). Thus, the paradigm that Imam Husayn had instilled as the martyr par excellence, in turn, influences, shapes, and even supersedes all those martyrs proceeding him (Husted 1993; Ayoub 1978). In terms of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of a ‘contemporary hero’, what is regarded as ‘heroic’ in the martyrs that proceed Husayn is their ability to achieve full and complete subjective existence in their own corporeality as an active prototype of their political and socio-historical milieu (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1964). It is necessary to note, however, that the “contemporary hero” is unable to accomplish Hegelian elements, which are transcendent, contain otherworldly goals, and regulate historical order (Merleau-Ponty 1964). In fact, the “contemporary hero” does not accomplish anything at all. Rather, it is the significance of such ‘heroic’ achievements which lies solely in the pseudo-hero’s ability to bring forth an inherited teleology.

4. Temporalizing Martyrdom

The main idea behind the conceptualization of the temporalization of martyrdom is built upon Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the “contemporary hero”—as opposed to his interpretation of the Hegelian hero (who acts against their own time—and who is not a hero of their contemporaries) and the Nietzschean hero (the Ubermensch, which involves a complete rejection of any overarching framework as a condition of historical action) (Smyth 2010). For Merleau-Ponty, the “contemporary hero” simply lives their time, which is the sense of their “contemporaneity” (Merleau-Ponty 1964). The idea behind the ‘time’ of the contemporary hero is that “our time”, as Merleau-Ponty frequently put it, appears as a time neither of faith nor of reason, but of one that is out of a joint between the two (Merleau-Ponty 1964). What is ‘missing’ for Merleau-Ponty, in both the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of heroism, is the “living contact with the present as germinal origins of the future” (Merleau-Ponty 1964). So, for me, the temporalization of martyrdom is actualized here because past martyrs are reheroized through a continuous rekindling with present martyrs, facilitating the production of militant heroes for the future, essentially strengthening a militant worldview, religion, and Gesamtperson and Mistein (Scheler 1973; Heidegger 1962). Necessary to note, then, is the constitutive nature of human action and experience. For Merleau-Ponty, this “reading of the present” is central to his proposed political hermeneutics. In a sense, this is not a philosophy of history, but a perception of historical phenomena that calls philosophies of history into question (Merleau-Ponty 1964).

The temporalizing of martyrdom, especially in the Shiʿi context, forces a closeness between what is understood as “life time” (Lebenszeit) and world time (Weltzeit) in Husserlian discussions on internal time consciousness. Blumenberg’s (1986) concerns of the concepts of world time and life time nicely fit into a discussion of temporalizing martyrdom.3 Life time (taken here as the limited time that is assigned to each martyr) and world time (taken as the time of the ‘first’ martyr who is always all-preceding) are utilized to allow for comprehension of how past martyrs are reignited and ‘brought’ back to life through present perishable martyrs.4 Since the gap between life time and world time is constitutive of human action and experience, characterized by the time of a decision, one way to maintain contact with such continuity in the present is through a method of transposition. In such a method, contemporary martyrs are generated in an effort to minimize the gap between the time of the first martyrs (world time) with their own time (life time). The discussion of time perception, the temporalizing of martyrdom, and the distinction between the lifetime of the martyr and the world time of martyrdom is not meant to bring closeness to the concepts of ‘life’ or ‘world’, nor promise to explain time, which is excluded. Rather, it is meant to point towards the estrangement of life as a result of tampering with the temporalities of martyrdom by an objectifying pseudo-rationality that provides a perception of power in exchange for the place life has in it.

In this case, the contemporary martyr cannot demand or claim the possession of a mystical truth as a result of their present attempt to curtail the extending gap between world and life time. In fact, specifically in the context of martyrdom in contemporary Shiʿism, the mechanism of temporalization is taken as an ethos that subordinates desires for knowledge in the pursuit of truth. Although structured to intersubjectively attend to the retention of the present martyr’s lifetime as the center in the confrontation between life time and world time, the method of temporalizing martyrs actually inhibits and further estranges the present life from its presentness. Not only does the life of the present martyr perish, but this perishing further denies the proliferation of the complete awareness of life in the present and the present tense of life since their death signifies the bringing forth of the past. Taken broadly, the process of subjugating the present obstructs the observation of the process of a community’s subjective and intersubjective maturation. Although there is a desire to attain a sphere of constant heroic presence through this methodic Shiʿi-based martyr-temporalization, it still lacks sustained touch with the present. The method of temporalizing the martyr is a limiting concept, not only because it is born out of the attempt to think of an existence, a worldview, and a community that is one with itself, but also because, by institutionalizing the temporalization of martyrdom, the foundations of a grim and hostile worldview are installed.

5. “Heroizing Our Martyrs”

The Habituation of a Procedural Ritual through Collectivized Intentionality

In order to understand the Shiʿi ritualistic process of martyrdom, it is necessary to grasp the mentality of the Shiʿi community, and this—according to many early phenomenologists—can be grasped by detecting a form of “we-intentionality”. In this way, the contemporary hero motivates and rationally substantiates the we-intentionality of their community’s militant faith and Gesamtperson through the bringing back of the past into the present toward the future (Scheler 1973; Ranly 1966). This view pertains to the perspective that historical unfolding, and not naturalistic progress, is the source of all development of this culture (Caminada 2019). It is represented, among others, by figures like Winckelman, Herder, and Schleiermacher, who touch upon conceptualizations and descriptions of a forma mentis of a nation or a cultural milieu, especially a group of people with Gemeingeist (Common Mind) (Caminada 2019).5 According to this historical and philosophical tradition, the Gemeingeist is to be understood as a supra-individual vessel of productive and inventive communal power (Caminada 2019). The creativity of the mind, its inventive potential, is thus not attributed exclusively to the individual but correspondingly to its position in a dynamic cultural and communal milieu (Caminada 2019).

Here, Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-towards-death’ has a specific significance and allows for meditations on phenomena associated with what is framed as an act of martyrdom through an onto-theological mythologizing conception of death and dying (El Bizri 2003, 2006, 2019). Such a perspective, taken from an acutely Shiʿi stance, also influences the rise of pseudo-religious Shiʿi transnational (and, to a certain extent, proto-fascist) militant movements in the modern epoch. The essence of Heidegger’s ‘being-towards-death’ is structured on the anticipation of one’s own death. To anticipate death is not to be passive about death but to “run towards it” (Heidegger 1962, pp. 287–89). The hero-martyr sacrifices one’s finiteness and worldliness as one who enters a different realm directed towards the sustainability of the community.6 Clearly, ‘being-towards-death’ is not an existential element of individual Dasein. On the contrary, in its martyr-based articulation, death becomes a way of life that binds the individual to the community as a result of overcoming one’s fear of it (Heidegger 1962).

Along with an articulation and representation of a Shiʿa community through a ritual of death and martyrdom, and in understanding Heidegger’s conceptualization of death, his communal, collective, and experiential lived notion of ‘being-with’ (Mitsein), its impact on and influence from being-in-the-world cannot be overlooked. If Heidegger’s concept of Dasein is already Mitsein, then the Weltanschauung—or the way in which being-in-the-world is—for a certain community is already one that is co-shared and co-existent between its members. For Heidegger, being-in-the-world and ‘being-with’ are taken to be co-ordinate properties of the basic structure of Dasein’s existence. In his analysis of the fundamental structure of existence, which is being-in-the-world, Heidegger had stated that being-with (Mitsein) is also equiprimordial as a constitutive structure of Dasein’s existence. In utilizing Heidegger’s communal conceptualization of Dasein, this paper will analogically identify the hermeneutics of communality—and dependability—of a Shiʿi Weltanschauung on the ritualistic and generational remembrance of Karbalāʾ, the suffering and sorrow of ʿAshuraʾ, and the death—and dying—of Imam Husayn. This phenomenological study will assist in further comprehending the tripartite ontological foundation of Shiʿism through the ritualistic and communalization of a ‘collective resoluteness’ in the form of being-towards-death [read: martyrdom].

This understanding can also be found in Scheler’s definition of a communal ‘collective person’ (Gesamtperson), which, along with its world conception, is an exclusive experience—and construction—of a unique personality that is based on a certain social group or community (Scheler 1973; Ranly 1966). We should not reduce this ‘worldview’ to a mere mental construct, nor does its definition necessitate that the Gesamtperson should be conceived of as an amalgamated representation of individual personalities and world conceptions (Scheler 1973). Rather, the unified sense of an experience of the whole community living together, side-by-side, along with one another, as a single unit or nation is what the Gesamtperson represents. This is supported by Walther’s understanding that we-intentionality is embedded in a network of communal intentional habits, which should be considered as a network that shapes individual minds collectively.7 According to her, the ‘core of community’ is grounded in a concrete, intentional setting of affective intentionality, understood as habitual joining (Walther 1923). ‘We-experiences’, then, are important for the continuance of a social community. Only through such lived experiences does the individual become part of the social whole. These arise by living in a social setting, as well as through means of reciprocal inner joining between the individual community members (Mühl 2018).

With this in mind, the Gesamtperson is individualized through the principle of moral, ethical, and religious solidarity between all members of the group and as the bearer of genuine communal values. Scheler’s concept of Gesamtperson is supported by the understanding that the ontology of a community is inherent to its members specifically because the conceptualization of community is essentially based on the hierarchal order of social essences. For Heidegger, Mitsein (being-with) is an essential feature of Dasein (being-there), facilitating the conception of a community based on the fact that Dasein is always ‘being-with’. Scheler and Heidegger’s concept of Gesamtperson and Mitsein, when taken analogously, weave in a conceptualization of what Zahavi terms a ‘we-experience’ (Zahavi 2015, 2021). It is such an experience that is not simply given to a specific individual as ‘their own’ experience but as the community’s experience (Zahavi 2015). Paradigm cases that arguably involve we-experiences are ritualistic gestures and linguistic utterances that typically make communal communicative intentions and create unique communal meanings (Szanto 2016a). Accordingly, it becomes a matter ‘between us’ (the members of a given community), one that is ‘given to us’, acknowledged as a thing that ‘we’ are now experiencing ‘together’. Then, it is this we-experience character of ‘given-as-ours’ that intensifies the communality of the Shiʿi articulation of martyrdom.

In order to further understand this ‘we-character’ that is specifically ‘given-as-ours’ in terms of a Shiʿi understanding of being-in-the-world, a plausible relationship must be identified between habits, the emotions of rituals, and the habituation of these rituals. According to Giovagnoli (2018), in order to establish a relationship between habits and rituals, it is necessary to grasp a sense for the notion of habit, one that goes beyond the mere understanding of acts of repetitive behavior or the comfort of routine. What is required from this is an insight into habituated rituals and their impact on the Shiʿi Gesmatperson and Mitsein. For Graybiel (2008), habits exert a significant influence in the formation and structuring of social life since, for him, habits are viewed from an individual mode as a result of their idiosyncrasy with regard to personal behavior (Graybiel 2008). We can also consider habits in terms of the different relations of ‘habits-as-routines’ and ‘habits-as-learning’ to consciousness. The former entails an unconscious performance, while the latter reduces or eliminates certain elements of consciousness in order to concentrate on ‘higher’ goals while continuously preserving the possibility of their recovery for meticulous conscious attention. Contrary to the individuated mode of the habits, rituals are viewed through the collective. They present a routine-based dimension but also a stable, active, and intense disposition for action. This reflects the fundamental role rituals play in social and individual life.

In understanding rituals and rites, myths appear to display their function in uniting individuals in a group. Those individuals, now considered closely linked, symbolize and embody the myth in a particularly nonverbal form while allowing some sort of proto-legitimacy to be derived from the myth itself (Bonsen 2020). Since participating in rituals requires deep emotional involvement, without which it ceases to exist, it understandably requires different aesthetic components—depending on different cultures and different times—to evolve; the ritual necessitates phases of change to sustain meaning. An example of the context-dependence of ritual, the development of its impact, and the role it provides within its social order is offered by the idiosyncratic responses the Shiʿa have to the five intense rituals that take place throughout the 10 days of ʿAshuraʾ and specifically in remembrance of the battle of Karbalāʾ. This provides us with the understanding that rituals, through the assessment of modern myths, should be understood as public performances that are directed both internally and externally and, for instance, include ceremonies, which are characterized by a great degree of publicity and demand a certain level of communal attunement and, at the same time, claim to mobilize through the enactment of prayers disguised in speeches. In using the word “rite” or “ritual”, we tend to refer to religion (but also to myth), as religious experience embedded in rituals, in terms of the elements of its mystical dimension. Most importantly, however, it is through this embeddedness that we are able to acknowledge that the ritual, and specifically that of ʿAshuraʾ, has passed through a process of habituation. In such a process, we are able to detect the processes of rituals-as-learning, which, similar to habits-as-learning, entails the attunement to ‘higher values’ and are, thus, fundamental to communal longevity.

In the process of understanding habituating rituals, it is necessary to note the important function that habits play in individual life. According to Giovagnoli (2018), each person has his/her own habits; these habits pertain to how they perform certain actions that become (consciously or not) part of their daily routine with unique meanings associated with them. Their significance is rooted in their ability to achieve a certain reduction in the complexity of mundane life (Giovagnoli 2018). Therefore, habituated rituals, in this case, can be recognized as being sociologically intended, collectively orchestrated acts, as well as normative codified practices that evolve in their capabilities of forming and altering cultural patterns of contemporary Shiʿi society.8 As mentioned above, rites and rituals represent the values and standards of a given community. At the same time, however, they are considered functionaries of transmission that play a role in the institutionalization of hierarchies, roles, social cohesion, and a communal worldview. It is worth noting that these functionary elements are legitimized through their ritualistic peculiarity of containing forms of knowledge. For Voigt (1989), myths are essential to life. Their power lies in their ability to create a meaningful past out of an ongoing present for a coming future. Dörner (1996), on the other hand, defines a ‘political myth’ as a narrative of events of the past, where meaning is provided in its significance for the present. Specifically, in the Shiʿi context, then, the political myths facilitated through religious rituals are narratives that explain and interpret historical processes. With this in mind, to what extent can the collective habituation of rituals, as a perception of historical phenomena, call into question a metaphysics of religious experience (read: martyrdom)?

6. From Communal Rituals to Collectively Habituated Rituals

The term shahīd is preserved for (militant) heroes who have lost their lives in (militant) struggles against forms of tyranny or injustice. The term itself is of a particularly Shiʿi and exclusively Islamic coinage and origin (Dabashi 2011). The person shahīd is almost resurrected through these rituals, and rituals are emotionally loaded activities, often intensifying the emotions and pre-existing tensions among groups and group members. The givenness of such an experience as being specifically Shiʿi allows for the communal trans-fixation of its icons and metaphors and the subsequent communalization of its transmutation across ages and ideo-militant convictions (Dabashi 2011). This is to say that with the term’s invocation, the bearer automatically crosses a psychological and spiritual barrier and reaches out to past and present comrades of death. Through successive ritualistic transformations, Imam Husayn comes back to a devout Shiʿi martyr through a convoluted mutation of meticulously chosen and articulated metaphors and allegories—such as the tragic death of a paramount hero and the ennoblement of the age in which to access life-meaning—a sort of complex erupts. Dabashi offers the idea of a “Karbalāʾ complex” via an interface between his reading of Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex and Barthes’s notion of myth as a semiological system, with the obvious (and necessary) provision that the Karbalāʾ complex is predicated on filicide, not patricide, and that in subsequent generations, it mutates into multiple sites of symbolic (mythic) registrations (Dabashi 2011).

In this sense, the understanding that rituals contribute to the creation of an identity through their systematic habituation is necessarily stressed. However, beyond the formation of the Shiʿi identity, there exists the emotional stratification between the individuals of the group within the manifold tensions of their interpersonal relations formed in ritualistic practices that have grown to habituated in-group exchanges. According to Eliade and Trask (1965), total involvement in rituals enables their participants to experience sacred reality, which then produces the rites that structure the lives of men in a given society. It is also said that rituals punctuate and structure the various times of everyday experience since they are prescribed symbolic acts that must be performed in a specifical way at a specific time. Through a phenomenology of a Shiʿi martyrology and an elaboration of the rituals of the taʿziya dramaturgy, Imam Husayn, as an iconic figure of revolt, sacrifice, and struggle, had been thoroughly reimagined within a culture that at once embraced and reclaimed Shiʿism. This allows for the careful unfolding of Shiʿi doctrinal and political history, from its medieval to its modern phases, in its liturgical composition and spiritual composure.

The affect of rituals involves a form of repetition. Since these rituals are repeated at regular intervals, they introduce a relative and shared sense of continuity and regularity into the passing of time. In the case of contemporary Shiʿism, ʿAshuraʾ—considered here specifically as a collective of “rites of intensification”—are collectivized communal group activities that reinforce the cohesion of the group as it copes with external events; they have important temporal connotations that cannot be surpassed. According to both Eliade and Trask (1965) and Elias (1994), our experience of time is developed based on our experience of sacred time through ritual. Rituals have important temporal connotations. Elias (1994) even goes further by placing the origin of the measurement of time in ritual activity. In terms of time, the prime function of rituals is the creation of a dimension of suspended time. World time, or “Vulgar time”, as Heidegger (1962) termed it, is annihilated during rituals since participants are ecstatically placed outside the mundane flow of everyday time. In doing this, group members and ardent ritual participants gain the capability of reorganizing their time in radical ways, varying from ritual to ritual. Time, as it appears in ritual, is not chronological in nature. What was for Kant the fundamental basis for human apperception is, in reality, and more simply, the repetitions that are based on the regular temporal alternation of natural phenomena. Time in rituals is ordered by repeated contrasts, each of which maintains distinct claims to recognition. Beyond the use of such transitions as the initial means to establish temporal regularity lay their importance as pivotal events around which social activity and group identity are structured. In this sense, rituals really do tell the time in the fact that they proclaim and categorize culturally significant periods and mandate the group recognition of specific moments in time while stratifying these moments with layers of spiritual interpretation. The process of correlating historical and quasi-historical events with dates in the ritual calendar continued well into contemporary Shiʿism. This assimilative mechanism had a significant consequence: the incorporation of historical events into the liturgy of the ritual calendar entailed the mythization of history, particularly ʿAshuraʾ. In this sense, ʿAshuraʾ became paradigmatic and transcended the chronological categories of past, present, and future. The integration of myth and history in ritual not only served to tell time but also to manipulate it. Through this analysis, rituals play a role in the ordering of time, and only then can they actually implicate social life. In its most fundamental sense, time is indispensable to rituals because of the essential attribute of ritualistic temporal repetition (Robbins 1997).

Martyrdom in Shiʿi Islam has a cosmic, soteriological sense where all martyrs immediately become part of a sacred history that has, as its core event, the death and martyrdom of Imam Husayn (Husted 1993). Perhaps the best example of this Karbalāʾ complex is the modern visual and performative staging of the taʿziya performances that take place annually. Here, the evocation of Karbalāʾ was left to the rituals of remembrance, death, enumeration, grief, martyrdom, sacrifice, and communality, which continued to develop around the annual commemoration of ʿAshuraʾ and the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. The importance of the rituals of ʿAshuraʾ in invoking the memory of Karbalāʾ cannot be overestimated, specifically because it is within and through these rituals that communal moods and aspirations are induced and regulated in the community in the functionalization of the symbol of Husayn’s martyrdom (Ayoub 1978). Thus, it would not be farfetched to say that, in these rituals, with all the public processions of grief, the exemplification of shahāda, and the processes of flagellation, the Shiʿi community, in unison, experiences the world ‘as lived’ and their world ‘as imagined,’ fused into one (Husted 1993).

7. Setting the Mood: Being-towards-Death, Resentment, and Heroism in Contemporary Shiʿism

A paradigm such as Husayn’s necessarily carries with it a universal vocabulary of symbols that are accessed through particular images, images that refer to episodes in his sacred biography (Husted 1993). Because of Husayn’s penultimate position as Sayyid Al Shuhadāʾ, the reservoir of images connected with his paradigm is utilized to animate and embellish the sacred biographies—both oral and written—of the martyrs who have followed him (Husted 1993). When these images appear within the biographies of other martyrs, the audience is immediately taken back to the image’s source: Imam Husayn and the contemporary martyrs at hand fade into the background (Husted 1993). It might also be said that in one respect, the martyr’s paradigm is a model (in every sense of the word) of the paradigm of Husayn and serves as a point of access to the latter. This has been the case with, for instance, Qassim Soleimani, who has been dubbed Sayyid Shuhadāʾ Mihwar Al Muqawama [The Master of the Martyrs of the Resistance Axis] by the Shiʿi militant group Hezbollah.9 His evolution to an enumerated martyr and, finally, to a model of Husayn, is a naturalizing process within the Shiʿi ethos of Lebanon in particular and the Middle Eastern region in general.

So, taking this in terms of Heidegger and Stein, albeit in very different ways, death and the process of dying, specifically those that die as martyrs, become a mechanism of reviving certain authentic communal links (Stein 2007; Orr 2014).10 In terms of Shiʿism, these authentic communal links are animated by way of heroically dying through martyrdom and in the ritual of its constant remembrance. This sort of revival can be found in Slaby’s conceptualization of grief, which is understood as the sharing in the other’s death.11 With his essential conceptualization of grief, death no longer stands as specifically individualistic. As a result, death becomes a collective feat. To this point, grief can be understood as an open-ended rehearsal of our capacity to be alone in the company of an absent other. Even Ricœur (2009) stated that the dying of the other and the mourning one goes through is the religious experience par excellence. Through this sharing, the fraternal and ritualistic mourning of the dead ‘other’ amplifies the anticipation of the grief and mourning others will have to fraternally and ritualistically undergo when we disappear. Accordingly, and similar to the instantaneous impact of grief when it comes to death, resentment should be regarded as an element in the ‘manipulation’ of time.

Not only is resentment regarded as being out of time because of its temporal affectivity, but it also induces a reality of death that is perpetually present. This continuous presentness of ‘dying’ can be considered a direct result of the collectiveness and communality of death through rituals of remembrance, as well as through the communal continuity stimulated by the sharedness of resentment and also grief. With this in mind, can we truly say that martyristic death is a phenomenologically private and individual event? Here, death is phenomenologically deprivatized through a ritualization of communal and collective grief, which is rooted in a feeling of guilt (Buber and Friedman 1958). In terms of Zahavi’s (2015) conceptualization of we-experiences, the ‘given-as-ours’ character of communal Shiʿi grief, which is rooted in the sorrows of ʿAshuraʾ, imposes an additional layer of resentment onto the communal members who eventually inherit it as their own ‘testimony’, immediately becoming witnesses themselves. Since Dasein, according to Heidegger, is essentially “…for the sake of others”, then in terms of Shiʿism, the being-with of Shiʿi martyrdom accentuates forms of sacrifice, further sustaining a collectivization of communal devotion towards a militant Weltanschauung, which is essentially “for the sake of…” the longevity and continuation of the community (Heidegger 1962, pp. 280–87, 302–6).

By taking the whole spectacle of Husayn’s martyrdom as the epitome of heroism, it becomes a necessity for the hero’s sacrifice to be taken as a testification of his religious and spiritual allegiance to God and community. This is to say that the hero first makes the shahāda (testimony) to God. After the completion of such testification, what I will term the religious shahāda, the hero becomes a witness to his own testimony through the community that venerates him. It is through this testimony that the hero automatically becomes a vessel for the collectivization of a communal identity. This is to say that when the martyr is heroized as a result of his own religious shahāda, his testimony and sacrifice become that which is communally owned, and his deed becomes an act that the community has become witness to, completing a form of communal testimony, or what I term the collectivized communal we-shahāda. In other words, the Shiʿi community automatically inherits this profound enigmatic sense of guilt for the brutal death of Husayn in Karbalāʾ (that he had rendered such a service/sacrifice in their stead) and an exceptional sense of resentment (because they had not died or suffered with him in defense of their faith).

In pondering the questions related to the roles that guilt, resentment, and martyrdom (read: heroism) play in setting a mood of being-towards-death in contemporary Shiʿi communities, one cannot but agree with Améry (1980) that more than guilt, resentment appears to be larger than just a logically inconsistent condition: it also an unnatural one. In the constancy of this contemporaneous Shiʿi ritual of grief, resentment, and guilt, the living of the present with the past and of the dead with the alive, there is a sense of unnaturalness that cannot be shaken off. Absurdly, the affectations of ritualizing resentment, as well as guilt, demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Taken in terms of Husserlian temporality, the temporal retentive forces of resentment and guilt overshadow and, to a certain extent, influence the ‘protentive’ elements that may (or may not) sprout out as possibilities in the mundanity of one’s own life. Through these annual rituals, which the Shiʿi community has habituated, resentment is continually charged, creating a certain mood. To a certain extent, one can say that the continuous realization of this reinforced and recirculated ‘mood’ produces a universally applicable and Shiʿi-focused equilibrium of world morality.

Resentment, taken as a byproduct of the contemporary Shiʿi rituals of grief, guilt, and martyrdom, blocks entire aspects of certain genuine development towards the future. It induces a time-sense entrapment, in which time is twisted around and disordered, as resentment prompts the desires of two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened. Death, when approached in this way by the contemporaneous hero (read: martyr) or witness, appears to come from without and beyond their own fate. Here, death is experienced by the other as both a threat and an opportunity. When taken strictly from the contemporary Shiʿi context, these were the conditions under which death collided with the continuity of a Shiʿi worldview and became a mechanism in which a contemporary martyr is instantly transformed into a vehicle for the witness—in this case, the other members of the Shiʿi community—and wherein death lay before them while spirit still stirred within them.

These fallen heroized martyrs were sacralized as the epitome of communal mechanization towards the further unification of their community, religiousness, spirituality, and imagination. To die in the name of the people, of God, to instantly be transferred as a vehicle for the reproduction of communal longevity coupled with righteousness and defiance, was the binding force of an already disillusioned community struggling between political fractures and cultural chaos. More than anything else, these heroes implied a blood-based bond. However, the communal understanding of the radical and sometimes pseudo-fascist politicization of this onto-theological mythologizing conception of martyrdom has the potential to cut short the proliferation of sectarian religious militant movements, the mechanisms of which allow for the continuation of the processes of the sacrificial deaths of members of the community—and their emulation—to exemplify certain ‘higher’ communal values. These values, in turn, facilitate and reignite certain moods that the contemporary Shiʿi milieu, in my opinion, wrongly advocates, aspiring to universalize it among its members, but this can only be pointed out here.