Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Deliver Us From the Flood
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Today is the Muslim fast day of Ashura. If you want a model for the complicated issue of interfaith relations, few days would offer more nourishment. Ashura was once a Muslim holiday commemorating Mohammad's gratitude to the Jews for helping his early rise to power. It corresponded to Yom Kippur and was a mark of Islam's respect for Judaism and Christianity. As Wikipedia puts it, the holiday marked all the things that happened on this day:

-- The deliverance of Noah from the flood
-- Abraham was saved from Nimrod's fire
-- Jacob's blindness was healed and he was brought to Joseph on this day
-- Job was healed from his illness
-- Moses was saved from the impeding Pharaoh's army
-- Jesus was brought up to heaven after attempts by the Romans to capture and crucify him failed.

Today, only Sunnis recognize this aspect of the holiday. Shias fast for a different reason; it marks the discrimination against them.

Many Shi'a make pilgrimages on Ashura to the Mashhad al-Husayn, the shrine in Karbala, Iraq that is traditionally held to be Husayn's tomb. Shi'as also express mourning by thumping their chests and crying after listening to Speeches on How Hussain and his family were Martyred. This is intended to connect them with Husayn's suffering and death. Husayn's martyrdom is widely interpreted by Shi'a as a symbol of the struggle against injustice, tyranny, and oppression. The regime of Saddam Hussein saw this as a potential threat and banned Ashura commemorations for many years. In neighboring Iran, the remembrance became a major political symbol during the Islamic Revolution, as also occurred in the Lebanese Civil War, and in the 1990s Uprising in Bahrain.

Some might argue, as one Muslim writer did this week in Seattle, that Ashura should be a holiday of peace. This is a wonderful thought, and the interfaith upside of the holiday, but it also has become a mark of tension between Sunnia and Shias, as happened with the 2004 bombing in Karbala, in Iraq, not long after I visited the country. This bombing is the one president Bush has been referring to in his recent speeches. As we have seen in Judaism and Christianity, relations among faiths often takes the back seat when there's fighting within faiths.

Labels: Interfaith Relations, Islam

Posted by B Feiler at 8:07 AM
Permalink Digg this Post Email this Post

0 Comments: