Shafaq News

As the mourning month of Muharram opens across Iraq, processions of men will once again strike their heads with swords and blades until the blood runs, a ritual known as tatbir. What sets the practice apart from any other act in Shiite devotional life is not that clerics dispute it, but that they cannot agree on what kind of act 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 on which religious authority deliberately refuses to rule.

Most contested religious practices divide opinion into two ways: permitted (halal) or forbidden (haram). Tatbir occupies almost the entire span of Islamic legal categories at once, and understanding why requires a knowledge of how authority works in Shiism.

Ordinary believers do not interpret religious law for themselves; they choose a senior jurist —a marja’a, or source of emulation, usually a grand ayatollah— and follow his rulings on matters of practice. This relationship, called taqlid, means that two Iraqis standing in the same procession can be acting on directly opposing verdicts, each one religiously valid for the person holding it. One man's act of worship is, for the man beside him, a transgression. Both are obeying the rules.

The ritual itself 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, the third Shia Imam and Prophet Muhammad's grandson, killed at Karbala in 680, such as weeping and the recitation of elegies.

Jassam al-Saeedi, a researcher who studies the development of the rites, explained to Shafaq News that the oldest Husseini practice is simply weeping, and that many of the more physical rituals, including tatbir, absorbed influences from local mourning customs over centuries, some of them predating Islam.

At the permissive end of the spectrum sit some of the towering names of the Najaf seminary. The doctrinal anchor is an early twentieth-century ruling by Mirza Muhammad Hussein al-Naini, who held that drawing blood from the head with blades is permissible so long as the harm remains safe. A generation of leading jurists endorsed that position, among them Muhsin al-Hakim and, most consequentially, Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei, the most influential Najaf authority of the late twentieth century and the teacher of many clerics who lead the field today. In his manual Sirat al-Najat, al-Khoei treated tatbir as a legitimate expression of mourning, permitted on the condition that the participant is safe from serious self-harm.

Beyond mere permission, a further camp actively recommends it. The Shirazi school, led today by Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Shirazi and institutionally the most organized promoter of the ritual worldwide, holds tatbir to be not just allowed but meritorious, framing the shed blood as a display of the injustice done to Hussein that draws sympathy to the oppressed. Grand Ayatollah Wahid al-Khorasani, among the most senior living jurists, has defended the rites in similarly forceful terms. A small number of clerics have gone as far as describing tatbir as a collective obligation.

The opposing pole is just as authoritative, because the two best-known opponents arrive at prohibition by different routes. The late Lebanese authority Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadlullah forbade tatbir absolutely. His office's published rulings treat the cutting as intrinsically prohibited because harming the body is forbidden in itself: forbidden, in his framing, whether or not it leads to grave injury, and therefore disqualified from counting as a religious rite at all.

"A group came 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 said during a Friday speech (Khutbah).

Iran's former Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also prohibits the practice, urging followers to abandon it. “It is wrongful that some people hit themselves on the head with daggers to break blood. What are they in search of? How can this be considered an act of mourning?” he said in a speech in 2016.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most followed authority in Iraq, whose position is the most carefully constructed of all, issues no ruling. His office's consistent answer to questions on tatbir is that he expresses no opinion and refers the questioner to another qualified jurist.

Islamic researcher Sheikh Haidar al-Tamimi argues that some current practices give a negative impression in international media and have drawn criticism even from within the mourning milieu itself. “The clerics who prohibit on these grounds have promoted an engineered alternative, such as mass blood-donation drives held on Ashura, recasting the impulse to give blood for Hussein into a form that reads to outside observers as charity rather than self-harm.”

None of this is heading toward resolution, and the reason is circumstantial, because taqlid makes each believer answerable only to his own chosen jurist; the rulings do not compete to displace one another the way a court's precedents would; they coexist permanently, each binding on its own followers. The blood drives will run in one neighborhood, and the blades will come out in the next, a few streets apart, both performed in the name of the same grief.

Read more: Muharram in Iraq: New year becomes a season of mourning