Ashura = Violence
Ashura is the most important holy day for Shi’ia Muslims as it is at the very root of their schism with the Sunni. It commemorates the martyrdom of the third Imam, Hussein, and the battle of Karbala in 680CE.
It has unfortunately also come to mean violent attacks against Shi’ia pilgrims in Iraq, this MSNBC report, Iraq blast kills 10 worshippers on Shiite holiday, is just the first I noticed, but there will be more. There always are.
While I accept the possibility that I’m just weird, I don’t really understand why people seem to cling so tightly to their defeats, and remember so little of their victories.
3 comments
Defeat welds a people together more closely than a victory does.
Some cultures simply clasp their “oppressed” status to their chest and make it part of their cultural identity. This is by no means restricted to Shiite Muslims. For example, American Jews, for example, continue to insist that they’re oppressed (c.f. David Horowitz, professional martyr for the Jewish race), despite all evidence to the contrary (by all measures of social status, whether income, educational status, position in government, or whatever, Jews have done very well in America and that would not happen if they were as oppressed as Horowitz insists). Even supposedly sensible Jews (as vs. Horowitz) insist that they have been the victims of horrible, horrible discrimination in their lifetime, despite a total lack of evidence of said discrimination (i.e., driving a Mercedes, high six figure income, VP at a major corporation, yet still insists that he is “discriminated against”, sigh). And of course you have the professional martyrs of the black race such as Al Sharpton who insist that all the horrible things going on in the black community are the fault of white people (for the record, there is plenty of evidence that blacks are discriminated against in America — but it ain’t whites that make black boys wear their pants around their ankles, listen to rap music performed by black performers that glorifies ignorance and violence, and refuse to perform well in school because that would be “actin’ white”). Compared to all that, flogging yourself over a defeat that happened 1400 years ago is almost sane.
– Badtux the Sociology Penguin
I guess I just find it depressing. Learn the lessons of the defeat, but don’t fixate on it, because it turns you into a victim, and that doesn’t help you advance.
There are enough real problems and injustices in the world for a wide variety of reasons, that I find it a huge waste of resources to find offense wherever you turn. You are empowering your enemies and frustrating your allies when you do it.
Too often these old defeats are used to justify some evil that the defeated have committed against descendants of that long dead enemy.
I’m not a forgive and forget kind of person, but I want the offenses to have occurred in my lifetime. I’m not about to apply current social norms to ancient practices as doing so denies the part that passage of time and social education takes in civilization.