Daily Times

Islamic mythology began to evolve with the faith but the incident of Karbala gave it a shot in the arm.

“Unhappy the land,” Brecht said, “that is in need of heroes.”

However, no land has escaped the fate of suffering from heroes, as per Nietzsche’s Ubermenschen, because none could avoid the scourge of unhappiness. The powerless people are living in an unjust society, where the reality is false and relentless find their refuge in their dreams; dreams, where one is free to realise his wishes. Yet, these dreams differ from those, which led Freud to the royal road of a bourgeois unconscious to redeem him from the guilt associated with repressed ego or libido.

These are the daydreams watched with open eyes by the ordinary people oppressed by the system; the dreams of living a better life, of a society free from alienated labour, where one can live with dignity. If hope is obsolete, it disguises itself into a hero.

The modern era is being choked by Nobel Prize winners. There are a few that left an indelible mark on human history. In the scientific world, Einstein gave a new dimension to physics. In the struggle for the liberation of humanity from a system based on exploitation and expropriation, Che Guevara became the beacon of hope for the humankind. Einstein is remembered with respect but Che’s name, engraved on human hearts, is loved. He will live as long as the inhuman system, against which he battled, survives. Even later, his memory will be cherished, not as a scar of an unhealed wound, but as a memory of a kiss left on beloved’s cheek.

Myths and stories are the part of human beings unconscious from his infancy. They open a window towards their past, the past that was better than the present. The exchange society has made everyday life so miserable that when people look back they compare the leisure time in the past with the present; a time when the consumer society was not ripe enough to inflict its plague on human beings, past continues to retain a subversive element. If present cannot improve and provide relief from tyranny, it must return to the past, the actual desire remains to conquer the present for a better future.

Being a part of the collective unconscious, every mythology fascinates the human mind. Greek gods had human traits. They were jealous, lusty and remarkably erotic. They fought with each other, not for power, but Eros. The goddesses were equally seductive, alluring and sensuous, but either gender was equally powerful. Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey was ensnared first by Calypso and later by Circe. Both were devastatingly beautiful goddesses. Both loved him and entreated him to stay with them. Yet, Odysseus preferred mortality. He loved his mortal wife, Penelope, his people, and the kingdom of Ithaca, where before Trojan War, he ruled. After fighting with gods and nature, he came back home, human will prevailed.

The existence of gods and goddesses was doubtless, their temples and statues, as their vestiges are intact.

The discovery of Troy, a Bronze Age city in western Turkey, the charred debris and scattered skeleton not only give credence to their existence but the evidence of wartime destruction of the city in 1180 BCE.

In contrast to the gods of monotheistic religions, they were revered and elevated to the status by their unique qualities. The Trojan War, between Sparta and Mycenaean Greece, was a possibility, fought not for the love of Helen but economic reasons.

Taking control of the Dardanelles connecting the Sea of Marmara with Aegean and Mediterranean, while providing access to the Black sea through Bosporus, was a great temptation. It opened the vistas of trade for the conqueror.

However, for some reasons, once the objective historical conditions are neglected, history loses its objectivity. Hence, romanticised and mythologised as part comedy, part tragedy. Homer did the same, and capitalism is following the suit.

Like any other religion, Islamic mythology began to evolve with the faith but the incident of Karbala gave it a shot in the arm. The written history, in reality, has little to reveal the tragedy. Since excavation was not possible, the western historians borrowed the historical notions from Ibn- Ishaq (born 704 AD), the earliest Islamic biographer who collected oral traditions. Ibn- Saad (784 A.D),Tabri (839), Ibn- Hajjar (852), Ya’qubi joined much later. Only, Ibn- Khaldun (1332) became the forerunner of modern historiography.

“Al -Hassan… abdicated the claim [of caliphate] in favour of his able rival and retired to al- Medina to a life of ease and pleasure’, Philip Hitti writes ‘a step he was induced to take by Mu’awiyah’s guarantee of magnificent subsidy and pension (Ibn-Hajjar), which he himself had fixed that included five million Dirhams from Kufah’s treasury (Ya’qubi) plus a revenue of a district in Persia for the duration of his lifetime.” (Hitti,2002)

‘His younger brother Al -Husayn’ Hitti adds, “who had also lived in Medina in retirement throughout the rule of Mu’awiyah in 680 refused to acknowledge Mu’awaiyah’s son and successor Yazid, and in response to repeated and reiterated appeals of Iraqis who had declared him a legitimate caliph…, started at the head of a weak escort of relatives… for Kufah. Ubaydullah, whose father Ziayad …. was the governor of al- Iraq had established outposts on all the roads leading from al -Hijaz to al-Iraq. On the tenth of Muharram A.H, 61 Umar the son of distinguished general Sa’d- ibn-Abi-Waqqas, in command of 4000 troops, surrounded al-Husayn with his insignificant band of some two hundred souls at Karbala, and on their refusal to surrender cut them down. The grandson of prophet fell dead with many wounds and his head was sent to Yazid in Damascus. The head was given back to al- Husayn’s sister and son who had gone back with it to Damascus and was buried with the body in Karbala.”( Ibid).

History does not go beyond that, rest seems mythology, yet it leads to several questions. Why imam waited for twenty years to reassert his right? What were the objective conditions in Kufah that changed the minds of the followers in favour of Husain? Fully aware of the coercive rule of Yazid, his power and their powerlessness on what grounds the Iraqis invited the imam. What made imam trust them and the most pertinent question is, which class imam was representing? Was he fighting for the underprivileged segment of society or was he relying on his inherited superiority of being a grandson of the prophet?

Imam was probably confident of his status and the support he mistakenly assumed he would receive from the people of Iraq, did not arrive. The power struggle remained one-sided, especially when the emerging aristocracy of Islam refused to identify itself with him. The oppressed people of Iraq neither were organized for a struggle nor had any reason to fight since the battle barring power struggle offered them no better alternative of improving their living conditions. Imam represented the same class, which in shape of Yazid was already in power.

‘For the oppressed ‘Walter Benjamin says ‘the memory of their defeated and slain ancestors is a deep source of inspiration for revolutionary action’. However, in the case of Imam, it further cleaved the Muslims into belligerent sects. The Imam lives in the hearts as a symbol of tragedy instead of becoming a source of the revolutionary upsurge for liberation, liberation from an inhuman system, which has lost its essence in the sacred grief and mystifying repentance.

The writer is a freelancer