Shafaq News
As the mourningmonth of Muharram opens across Iraq, processions of men will once again striketheir heads with swords and blades until the blood runs, a ritual known astatbir. What sets the practice apart from any other act in Shiite devotionallife is not that clerics dispute it, but that they cannot agree on what kind ofact it is: for some of Shiism's most senior jurists, it earns divine reward,for others it is an outright sin, and for at least one it is a question onwhich religious authority deliberately refuses to rule.
Most contestedreligious practices divide opinion into two ways: permitted (halal) orforbidden (haram). Tatbir occupies almost the entire span of Islamic legalcategories at once, and understanding why requires a knowledge of how authorityworks in Shiism.
Ordinarybelievers do not interpret religious law for themselves; they choose a seniorjurist —a marja’a, or source of emulation, usually a grand ayatollah— andfollow his rulings on matters of practice. This relationship, called taqlid,means that two Iraqis standing in the same procession can be acting on directlyopposing verdicts, each one religiously valid for the person holding it. Oneman's act of worship is, for the man beside him, a transgression. Both areobeying the rules.
The ritualitself is comparatively recent in the long history of Shiite mourning. Researchers trace organized self-cutting to roughly the tenth Islamic century,far later than the older expressions of grief for Imam Hussein bin Ali, thethird Shia Imam and Prophet Muhammad's grandson, killed at Karbala in 680, suchas weeping and the recitation of elegies.
Jassamal-Saeedi, a researcher who studies the development of the rites, explained toShafaq News that the oldest Husseini practice is simply weeping, and that manyof the more physical rituals, including tatbir, absorbed influences from localmourning customs over centuries, some of them predating Islam.
At thepermissive end of the spectrum sit some of the towering names of the Najafseminary. The doctrinal anchor is an early twentieth-century ruling by MirzaMuhammad Hussein al-Naini, who held that drawing blood from the head withblades is permissible so long as the harm remains safe. A generation of leadingjurists endorsed that position, among them Muhsin al-Hakim and, mostconsequentially, Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, the most influential Najaf authority ofthe late twentieth century and the teacher of many clerics who lead the fieldtoday. In his manual Sirat al-Najat, al-Khoei treated tatbir as a legitimateexpression of mourning, permitted on the condition that the participant is safefrom serious self-harm.
Beyond merepermission, a further camp actively recommends it. The Shirazi school, ledtoday by Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Shirazi and institutionally the mostorganized promoter of the ritual worldwide, holds tatbir to be not just allowedbut meritorious, framing the shed blood as a display of the injustice done toHussein that draws sympathy to the oppressed. Grand Ayatollah Wahidal-Khorasani, among the most senior living jurists, has defended the rites insimilarly forceful terms. A small number of clerics have gone as far asdescribing tatbir as a collective obligation.
The opposingpole is just as authoritative, because the two best-known opponents arrive atprohibition by different routes. The late Lebanese authority Sayyed MuhammadHussein Fadlullah forbade tatbir absolutely. His office's published rulingstreat the cutting as intrinsically prohibited because harming the body isforbidden in itself: forbidden, in his framing, whether or not it leads tograve injury, and therefore disqualified from counting as a religious rite atall.
"A groupcame and invented the striking of the head with the sword. This [phenomenon]did not reach us from earlier scholars, nor from an Imam or a Prophet. Rather,some of the believers were seized by fervor and struck their heads with knives,and people were taken with the act and so followed it," Fadlallah saidduring a Friday speech (Khutbah).
Iran's formerSupreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also prohibits the practice, urgingfollowers to abandon it. “It is wrongful that some people hit themselves on thehead with daggers to break blood. What are they in search of? How can this beconsidered an act of mourning?” he said in a speech in 2016.
Grand AyatollahAli al-Sistani, the most followed authority in Iraq, whose position is the mostcarefully constructed of all, issues no ruling. His office's consistent answerto questions on tatbir is that he expresses no opinion and refers thequestioner to another qualified jurist.
Islamicresearcher Sheikh Haidar al-Tamimi argues that some current practices give anegative impression in international media and have drawn criticism even fromwithin the mourning milieu itself. “The clerics who prohibit on these groundshave promoted an engineered alternative, such as mass blood-donation drivesheld on Ashura, recasting the impulse to give blood for Hussein into a formthat reads to outside observers as charity rather than self-harm.”
None of this isheading toward resolution, and the reason is circumstantial, because taqlidmakes each believer answerable only to his own chosen jurist; the rulings donot compete to displace one another the way a court's precedents would; theycoexist permanently, each binding on its own followers. The blood drives willrun in one neighborhood, and the blades will come out in the next, a fewstreets apart, both performed in the name of the same grief.
: Muharram in Iraq: New year becomes a season of mourning