Muharram

I know I'm risking sensationalizing an overly-sensationalized event (at least as the "Western world" would have it) - but it was too powerful, too intense not to share with you...

I was in Hyderabad during the Muslim holiday of Muharram, which marks the martyrdom Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad. The Hyderabad Muharram procession is well-known throughout India, and I still feel so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to witness it. Thousands and thousands of Shi'ite Muslim males, ranging in age from about 5 to 60, take part in a procession through the streets of the Old City. For the duration of the parade, they inflict pain on themselves, both as a sign of mourning for the murdered Husayn and as a sign of solidarity and loyalty to him ("if we had been there, this is what we would have withstood for you.") Some have blades attached to ropes that they rhythmically slash against their backs - most, however, beath their hands against their chests in perfect unison - right hand to left chest, left hand to right chest, right hand to left chest, and so on. It is all in time with this loud, rhythmic, pulsing music blaring from speakers on trucks and carts and pulleys. Many of the men and boys have razor blades stuck between their fingers - with each pounding of an arm, their chests become redder and redder, stained with fresh blood.

I sat up on a rooftop with the female students - a group of Muslim women had nicely motioned us up there, off the street. We sat for hours waiting for the procession to come. And as we waited, we talked to the women, who were eager to explain to us what was happening, eager to ask us what we felt about what we were about to see, and then eventually, what we were seeing. The roof became packed - spots on the side were soon going to be hard to come by. Zera, a young woman about my age to whom I had been speaking with some time earlier, motioned for me to come near her. I croutched down, sat huddled up in a ball on the ground, able to see the street below me through a perfectly arched window in the roof wall. Zera stood to my left, her cousin to my right, another woman behind me, leaning her elbows against the wall. I was completely covered on all sides - below me, the roof of a stranger's house on which I had been extended the most gracious of invitations to come and sit on, in front of me, my window out to the world, and then above me, behind me, beside me - black cloth. Burqa folds, enveloping me, isolating me, as if they were channeling all my energy, all my focus, all my powers of comprehension and feeling into that little window, onto the scene that was about to unfold before me.

The procession finally came - camels, elephants, throngs of people, jewels. And then the groups and clubs of males, and the music, and the waving hands and the music and the blood and the shiny glint of razors that you could see even from the rooftop when the boys moved their hands in a certain stream of light.

It wasn't at all what I expected. I don't know exactly what I had pictured in my head - probably something I distinctly remember pulling out of a Newsweek magazine when I was 7 or 8 to show my Dad - "Dad! In some places in the world, there is this religion, called Muslim, and they cut themselves and make themselves bleed!" When I was young, I think I pictured the agony in those photos, the chaos that must have accompanied such a horrific event, the putrid smell of blood, the tormented people participating, the horror surrounding such a sensationalist foreign awful painridden ritual. Mostly the chaos, though. And I know that last week, before I went to Muharram, I pictured chaos. Or frenzy.

But it wasn't either of those things. What stuck me most was how controlled the whole thing was - how the men all moved in unison with the pulsing rhythm of the music, how it was hard to restrain from silently beating on your own chest in time with them, how they fiddled with their razors, lined them up just right, and then started to move, to pound, to beat - as if it was a dance performance. Total control. Which actually is actually probably much harder than chaotic or frenzied beating - I imagine it is harder to continue, for hours on end, while you remain so acutely aware of your surroundings, your rhythm, your friends and peers - it is probably much easier to go crazy.

But it was controlled. And really, really moving. What a powerful statement, splayed out before me on the street - "If I had been there, this is what I would have endured for you." What faith. In the presence of such faith, I always wonder if I have that much faith in anything, let alone in someone or something that I cannot see or hear or touch. Enough faith to spill my own blood, again and again, in time with a rhythm, in a wound thats been opened a thousand times before...

A lot of the discussion after the procession focused on whether it was "right" or not, whether it was "good" or "bad" - a debate I would rather not be part of. The women on the roof immediately felt the need to defend what was happening on the streets below us, to explain the reason behind it - as if my foreign face carried on it a thousand words of condemnation. As I said, I won't enter the debate, other than to say I think it is far from my place to pass judgement on the people, or the faith, or the blood, or the reasons for such blood on the streets of Hyderabad that night.

I don't really have a point, here, I think. Just some rambling words drawing a picture of a little slice of one new experience I had. One new thing I saw. One new story, one new historical event brought into my consciousness. New to me, and therefore worth sharing. New.

But my feeling, while sitting there - the thing that I can write to you about with the least hesitation, the least fear of inaccuracy or of offending someone or of sensationalizing or of disrespecting - that feeling is not new. It is rare, but not new. I've had it a handful of other times - I would try to list them here but there seems to be no continuity between them, no meaning to anyone who would read this except for me, for I was the only one there, feeling this rare feeling, at all of them. Positive events, negative events - very large scale things (like Muharram) and very minute, passing moments.

It is a feeling of simultaneous reality and greater-than-reality. It makes my heart rest in my throat and my whole being feel like crying, but not in a sad or panicked way, but rather in an expression of not knowing what else to do. Of being faced with too much reality to find words for, so the only expression is one of tears. But it is not a sense of being overwhelmed - rather being perfectly situated in a precise moment that makes me feel alive, and makes life feel beautiful, no matter how "horrific" the scene that makes me feel that way may be. Does that even make any sense?

Maybe not. Point is, I feel deep gratitude for having seen it. For having been permitted to be at that place, at that time, with those people, witnessing that precise event. And deep respect for that which I cannot even begin to understand.