The Twelver Shi'a as a Muslim Minority in India

Pulpit of Tears

Toby Howarth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134231737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

One of the most important current debates within and about Islam concerns its relation with power. Can Muslims be fundamentally content without power or as a minority? This book considers the voice of an important Muslim minority through its sermons. Indian Shi'i Muslims are a minority within a minority, constituting about ten to fifteen percent of the population as a whole, but comprising of aboutfifteen million people. Ten sermons are presented entirely and many more are quoted in order to analyze the preaching tradition in full. This book is the first survey to present the Indian mourning gathering and explain the history of this extraordinary phenomenon.

Part I
Context

1 From Karbala to India
A history of Shî^cî preaching

This chapter looks at the historical development of Shî^cî preaching as it has evolved into the kind practised today in Hyderabad. The first section looks at the roots of Islamic preaching in general, and the following section looks at the roots of the Shî^cî mourning gathering and its message. In the section on The developmentof mourning gatherings in Iran and South India from the sixteenth century, I show how mourning gatherings for

usayn developed and spread from Arabia, flowering particularly in the medieval Shî^cî kingdoms of Iran and South India. After the collapse of the South Indian Shî^cî kingdoms, the centre of Indian Shî^cî culture shifted to the northern province of Awadh, 400 km to the southeast of Delhi where a Shî^cî noble had power. The section on Mourning gatherings in North India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries explores the emergence of the modern majlis sermon in Awadh from the eighteenth century. Finally, I return to South India, picking up the parallel history of the Shî^cî community and its majlis in Hyderabad and tracing its development up to the end of the twentieth century. Earlier sections of this chapter draw for the most part on secondary written sources in English. From the discussion of the modern majlis sermon as it developed in Awadh in the section on The birth of the modern sermon, however, there is less secondary source material available, especially in English, and I rely more heavily towards the end of the chapter on primary oral and written Urdu sources. As far as I know, this present study is the first to systematically document the development of the Indian majlis sermon either in English or Urdu.

Roots of Islamic preaching

The sermons that are the focus of this study have roots that can be traced back to before the advent of Islam. Oratory was a highly developed and much valued skill in the Arabian tribal culture of the pre-Islamic period that is known among Muslims as the Jâhiliyya [‘Age of Ignorance’]. Among the nobles of a tribe’s leadership would be a khatîb [tribal spokesman] who, along with a poet, would function as the tribe’s ‘voice’. Johannes Pedersen writes that the khatîb’s role was to, ‘extol the glorious deeds and noble qualities of his tribe, to narrate them in perfectlanguage and to be able likewise to expose the weaknesses of his opponents’ (‘Khatîb’, in EI2).

The Prophet Mu

ammad was himself an accomplished preacher, described on occasion by his biographer, Ibn Ishâq, as a khatîb (Wüstenfeld, 1860: 823). Traditions recount that the Prophet, in the year AH 7 or 8 (629 or 630 CE) made a minbar [pulpit] out of two steps and a seat. Before this time he used to lean against a palm tree while preaching (Zwemmer, 1933: 219–20). In these early years, the word majlis [lit. ‘sitting’] was sometimes used as a synonym for the word minbar (Margoliouth, 1918). The Prophet’s discourses were different from those of the old tribal orators. They were religious in nature and directed towards the building up of the new, pan-tribal Muslim community. However, there was some continuity in the role of the khatîb as it was brought over into the new Muslim community. Evidence for this continuity can be seen in al-casâ, the staff, bow or spear which was associated with those early tribal orators and upon which preachers at the Friday congregational Prayers still lean today.¹ A Muslim preacher at the Friday Prayers continues to be known as a khatîb, and, although it is not the usual term, a Shî^cî majlis preacher is sometimes also called a khatîb. Preachers are still valued for their eloquence and their ability to deliver an often complex and sustained discourse without any written notes.²

From the time of the Prophet Mu

ammad preaching was an integral part of the Friday congregational Prayers, attendance at which was obligatory for all free adult male Muslims.³ In the early years of Islam, this Friday preaching was the prerogative of the caliph or his representative.⁴ It thus became an important platformfor official public pronouncements. One of the features of the sermon was a blessing upon the caliph which the preacher included towards the end and which mentioned the ruler by name (Gaffney, 1994: 120–2). During the rule of the fourth caliph, Mu

ammad’s cousin and son-in-law ^cAlî ibn Abî Tâlib (hereafter simply referred to as ^cAlî), there was civil war in the Muslim community and ^cAlî himself was murdered. After ^cAlî’s death, caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty used the Friday Prayers pulpit from which to curse ^cAlî until this practice was stopped at the end of the first Islamic century (Margoliouth, 1918).

The Shî^ca, however, considered that ^cAlî and those specially nominated from among his direct descendants (known as the ‘Imâms’) were the sole legitimate successors of the Prophet. It was these men, in the eyes of ^cAlî’s supporters, who were the only ones qualified to lead and preach at the Friday Prayers. The majority of the Shî^ca held that, in the absence of a visible Imâm, only the normal midday [zuhr] Prayers on a Friday should be held, and that these should be conductedwithout a sermon (Momen, 1985: 170). This began to change, however, from the fourteenth century when some Shî^cî religious scholars began to argue that although there was no visible Imâm, his representative could legitimately hold the Friday congregational Prayers.⁵ From the beginning of the sixteenth century in Iran, following a ruling from Shaykh ^cAlî al-Karakî, these congregationalPrayers were re-established (Arjomand, 1984: 134–8). However, they remained a point of contention among religious scholars even after this time. In India only from 1200/1786 were the Friday congregational Prayers and Friday sermons re-established among the Shî^ca, a move that provoked much controversy.⁶

Sermons at the Friday congregational prayers were not the only kind of preaching practised in the early Islamic community. There were other occasions, often on a Thursday, at which sermons were preached, and these were known as majâlis al-wacz [preaching gatherings] (Margoliouth, 1918). There were also other preachers, different from the caliph or his representative, who preached in the mosques and were often officials there. Pedersen calls this these men ‘free preachers’, who were known in Arabic by the title of wâciz, mudhakkir [reminder or mentioner], or qâss [narrator]. These preachers would sit in the mosque, and people would gather around them to listen, often giving money to them afterwards. They would also, at times, preach while standing or sitting on the minbar. The task of these ‘free preachers’ was to encourage warriors in their religious warfare [jihâd], admonish them from the law and relate narratives from the Qur’ân and the hadî.* (Pedersen, 1953: 215–31; see also Pedersen, 1948). This tradition of ‘free preaching’ became an important activity in the early Islamic community and included exponents of the stature of

asan al-Basrî (d. 110/728). The admonitions of these men to repent of their sins and yearn for God often led to emotional responses by their audiences, as a description of a sermon by the great preacher Jamâl al-Dîn ibn al-Jawzî (d. 597/1200) shows: ‘The tears flowed, and when he left the minbar, the audience was shaken by commotion. “We had not imagined that an orator in this world might acquire such a mastery over the souls and play upon them as this man!” ’ (quoted in Pedersen, 1948: 241).

The message of Shî^c î mourning gatherings up to the sixteenth century

Although sermons at the Friday congregational Prayers were not generally preached among the Shî^ca, other sermons were common among them from the earliesttimes, and it is these sermons that are the direct ancestors of the preaching that we are considering in this study. These latter sermons were more like those given by the ‘free preachers’ than the sermons preached at the Friday Prayers. They took place at mourning gatherings which commemorated the death of ^cAlî’s son, Imâm

usayn, his family and followers at the Battle of Karbala in Mu

arram 61/680.

After the Battle of Karbala, the survivors from

usayn’s camp were led in a caravan from Karbala to Kufa, and from there to the caliph Yazîd’s* court at Damascus. After some time the captives were escorted back to Madina from where they had originally set out, stopping on the way at Karbala where they were allowed to mourn their dead. Shî^cî historians recount that all along the route that the caravan took, and especially once the prisoners had returned to Madina, gatherings were held to mourn those killed at Karbala. In these accounts of the journey, there is a persistent theme that people were drawn out of curiosity to see the ‘spectacle’ of the prisoners, but that these prisoners, especially

usayn’s sister, Zaynab*, and his son, ^cAlî Zayn al-cÂbidîn* (the only male member of the family to have survived the battle), used every opportunity when a crowd formed to ‘make speeches which would arouse great sorrow and cause much weeping’.⁷

Two of these gatherings that deserve special mention, because they are often referred to in contemporary Shî^cî preaching, are a meeting organized and addressed by Zaynab for the women of Damascus and a meeting for the residents of Madina addressed by ^cAlî Zayn al-cÂbidîn. Another important leader of the mourning movement in Madina and preacher at these gatherings was...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Transliteration, translation and notes on the text
• An introduction to the Shîca and the events surrounding the Battle of Karbala
• Part I: Context
• Part II: Sermons
• Part III: Analysis
• Appendix I List of sermons and preachers
• Appendix II Interviews
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography