By Mona Anis Today is Ashourah, the 10th day of Muharram, which is the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. This calendar uses as its point of reference the hijrah, or flight, of the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, from the city of Mecca to Medina in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century AD. Next Monday -- one of a number of deadlines in the countdown to war on Iraq -- it will be a full moon, good timing, the experts tell us, for unleashing the military might of the United States on Iraq and causing mayhem across the Arab world. Nearly 14 centuries ago, 60 years after the hijrah of the prophet and on a day perhaps like today, the final chapter of the "mother of all tragedies" in the history of Islam was being written. Mou'awiya, the first Umayyad Caliph, who had taken power after the death of Ali, the fourth guided caliph and the prophet's cousin and son-in-law, ruled over a flourishing dynasty from Damascus, and he wanted his son Yazid to inherit his rule, also becoming caliph. Mou'awiya cleared the way for Yazid's rule by poisoning Al-Hassan, the prophet's eldest grandson by his favourite daughter Fatemah, thinking that this act would ensure the compliance of the Ahl Al-Beit, the prophet's household, then residing in Medina. When Mou'awiya died, Yazid ordered the governor of Medina to seek bayi'ah, or approval, for his becoming caliph from Al-Hussein, the prophet's favourite grandson, younger brother of Al-Hassan and head of the prophet's family since Al-Hassan's death. Al-Hussein, however, refused, uttering the famous words, "Oh prince, we are the members of the household of the prophet. [...] Yazid is depraved and a degenerate. He is a drunkard and a killer. The likes of me cannot approve the likes of him." Yazid then ordered the Medina governor to kill Al- Hussein, but the governor refused, fearing God's anger if he did so. Fleeing persecution, Al-Hussein and his family left Medina for Mecca, where he received a message from the people of Kufa in Iraq. Kufa had been a centre of the fourth caliph Ali's rule during the latter's turbulent five- year reign, itself ending with Ali's assassination in the city 40 years after the hijrah. The message now asked Ali's son, Al-Hussein, to bring the Ahl Al-Beit to Kufa, promising shelter to them and to Al-Hussein and promising also to be Al-Hussein's "staunch, loyal soldiers" in his fight against Yazid. However, when Al-Hussein arrived in southern Iraq, where the city of Karbala stands today, he found that the Umayyad governor of Kufa had bought the allegiance of the population, and the stage was set for war. Al-Hussein and his entourage were besieged in Karbala, and denied food and water. Al-Hussein was given a stark choice: either grant bayi'ah to Yazid or die. Al-Hussein chose death, and he was killed along with 73 male members of the prophet's household who had accompanied him from Mecca. His head was taken to Yazid in Damascus. The women and children of the household were taken to Yazid as hostages, among them Al-Sayeda Zeinab, daughter of Fatemah and sister of Al-Hassan and Al-Hussein; Al-Sayeda Sakina, daughter of Al-Hussein; and Ali Zein Al-Abedeen, Al-Hussein's young son. The rest, as they say, is history -- one that has never ceased to fire the imaginations of tens of millions of Muslims, but none more so than the Shi'a, for whom the tragedy of the martyrdom of Al-Hussein and his associates is the rock upon which the Shi'a branch of the Islamic faith is founded. The Shi'a population in Iraq, said to constitute 55 to 60 per cent of the population, has a very special affinity with the tragedy of Al-Hussein. For centuries, this population has been the custodian of what the Shi'a call "the sacred thresholds" -- the southern Iraqi towns where Ali and his family lived and were killed. Najaf, where Imam Ali is buried, is the main centre of Shi'a theology, and any Shi'a clergyman of note receives long years of scholastic training in this city. Karbala is the city to which the hearts of all devout Shi'a turn, especially during the first 10 days of the month of Muharram, when pilgrims, especially Iranians, converge on the city to participate in the famous Shi'a "remembrance" processions, which enacts the drama of Al-Hussein, the siege of Karbala before his death and the siege's culmination on the 10th of Muharram. Twenty-five years ago, I visited Karbala, though not during the month of Muharram. There were many Iranian pilgrims in and around the two magnificent shrines of Al- Hussein and his half-brother Al-Abbas, who died with him at the battle of Karbala. Indeed, the magnificence of these shrines owes a great deal to the workmanship of Persian pilgrims who have sought to endear themselves to Ahl Al- Beit over the centuries by decorating the holy shrines. But that was before the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, and at that time Imam Khomeini himself was residing in Najaf, before Saddam Hussein expelled him from Iraq four months ahead of his victorious return to Tehran in February 1979. At the time of the Iranian revolution, many Iraqis felt ashamed that Khomeini, who had been living in Najaf for many years, had been denied Iraqi hospitality in the final days before his becoming leader of Iran. But no one then could have anticipated the intensity of Saddam's enmity towards the Iranian revolution. This enmity resulted in the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran and the expulsion of the numerous Iranian pilgrims who used to visit and reside in the heartland of Shi'a Islam in Iraq. Also expelled were the tens of thousands of Iraqis whose ancestors had been Persian subjects before the creation of the modern state of Iraq in the 1920s. Since 1980, when Imam Mohamed Bakr Al-Sadr, the highest-ranking Iraqi Shi'a clergyman and an associate and mentor of Khomeini's while he was in Najaf, was executed by the Iraqi regime for his refusal to denounce the Iranian revolution, numerous high-ranking Iraqi Shi'a clerics have been dying mysteriously, mostly in car accidents or assassinations, the details of which have never been cleared up. A recent United Nations report has said that "these murders are part of a systematic attack on the independent leadership of Shi'a Muslims in Iraq." It should, therefore, have come as no surprise when in 1991, as Iraqi soldiers were retreating from Kuwait in humiliating defeat during Saddam's "mother of all battles", southern Iraq witnessed a bloody rebellion against the central rule in Baghdad. The rebels deployed inside the holiest tombs of Shi'a Islam. In Najaf, they took over the tomb of Ali, and in Karbala they hanged the local leaders of the ruling Iraqi Ba'ath Party in an underground prayer room in the Al-Abbas Mosque. Saddam's forces then moved into the holy cities with tanks blasting holes in the famous gilded domes of the sacred shrines. Today, as Muslims everywhere commemorate the anniversary of the Karbala tragedy, my thoughts go to the people of Iraq, and especially those in the south, from where the anticipated US ground offensive against Iraq is to take place. How many more tragedies will the Iraqi people have to suffer before a free, independent Iraq can be born from the ashes of Saddam's rule, which has done everything it could to destroy one of the richest Arab countries, both in terms of natural resources and in terms of the history and culture of its people?
