A day of mourning

Come Ashura and each mourner on M A Jinnah Road is more than a mourner — he is a protester and also a fighter.

When a bomb went off during the Ashura procession on M A Jinnah Road last year, Qaim Zaidi started searching frantically for his son and he had little choice to do that except to find him from amongst the dead. The boy, who was at the back of the procession, several paces behind him, had been perilously near the site of the blast and Zaidi feared that he had been a victim.

This year, again, mourners must brace themselves. The main Muharram procession with its estimated millions of mourners is a prime target for the Taliban. Only the other day, the Sindh Crime Investigation Department arrested a Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan militant planning to sabotage Muharram processions.

Meanwhile, the City District Government of Karachi, the Pakistan Rangers and government hospitals have been going into overdrive in their zeal to ‘secure’ the procession. Checkpoints have been erected to control the entry and exit; CCTV cameras have been installed to monitor the procession and hospitals have prepared elaborate contingency plans. Despite, or perhaps because of, this plethora of preventive measures, no one is really in doubt about how vulnerable the Ashura procession is this year. In their majalis, Shia clerics have been philosophic about the possibility of suicide bombing, acknowledging that while safeguards have been taken, the threat by its very nature cannot be eliminated by better security.

Come Ashura and each mourner or ‘azadar’ on the long stretch of M A Jinnah Road is more than a mourner — he is a protester and also a fighter. When the azadar walk out of their homes and join the procession, it is with the understanding that, had they been present at the battle of Karbala, they would have formed part of Imam Hussain’s (RA) army. To a follower, there are no anachronisms. The Ashura procession is a concrete recreation to the idea that evil, even if it were to hide behind piety, behind religious facades, must be identified and exposed. And if the procession today is Imam Hussain’s (RA) lashkar, then in many ways, the Taliban today in their excesses, rigidity and barbaric cruelty still broadly embody the characteristics — intolerance, cruelty and a penchant for barbarism — of the Imam’s enemies.

Those who suggest that the processions should not take place, are missing the essential point. The Taliban attack not just lives, but a way of life, and it is the latter which must be protected, and which needs to survive. As hundreds of empty schools in Fata and Balochistan testify, it is all too easy to relinquish a way of life in an ultimately empty bid to protect lives. While the fear of bombing is palpable, there aren’t many today who are debating whether or not to go to the procession this year. In fact, when he finally found his son — alive and well — the first thing Zaidi said to him was: “Looks like you’ll get to come again next year.” He is going to stick to his word.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 17^th, 2010.