framing shia rituals as political

writing

The Karbala ritual of radat (الردات الكربلائي سياسي, lit the karbala political responses) during Muharram is underdiscussed. Despite how many people try to use religion as a scrying sheet for political predictions in Iraq, very little discussion has been had on radat, a ritual that literally has “political” in the name! I recently tweeted about my favorite radat of late, and thought that I should elaborate on what it symbolizes.

What are radats

Radats are performed by mowkebs (موكب), which are affilations that perform ceremonies and services for pilgrims during Muharram. Each mowkeb is different, typically with a name such as Abbasiyya, Bab Baghdad, Bab Najaf, etc. Before Ashura, there are around 300 mowkebs in Karbala, with 75-115¹ of them performing majlis and radats. A radat is a chant performed around the Shrines of Abbas and Hussein:

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Radats are necessarily political, but many mowkebs are famous for writing political ones. In particular, mowkeb Abbasiyya, one of the largest, has been mentioned as a particularly famous for being political in radat.

A radat at its core consists of a sign and a group of people. A mowkeb is split into a few groups (2+ usually), and they march from the shrine of Abbas into the shrine of Hussein. Each group carries a different poem, and they repeatedly while walking between the shrines. Notably, radat is usually performed by native Karbala mowkebs, and typically cease after Ashura, as most rituals turn towards religiously focused rather than politically focused.

This particular radat

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In particular, this one is²

Transcription: جيران الوطن كلهم أفاعي علي أتامروا فرهدوا كاعي كل العالم يشوف بكاعي الطامع يحوف يحسين انت رايه الحق هداية

Translation: All of neighbors of the homeland are snakes Against me they conspire to steal my land The whole world sees The thieves which roam my land

Oh Hussein you are the banner The true guide

الوطن can be translated in a variety of ways, although most people I talked to believed it to refer to Iraq-the-nation-state as a whole. If we take this as true, two things follow:

• The chanters take the nation-state system as normative (that is, they are not haggling over the existance of Iraq)
• The chanters believe that they represent Iraq

The usage of جيران is also interesting, since it could plausibly refer to Turkey/Iran/etc. If read to mean Turkey, this would be read on the Sunni/Shia axis. If read as Iran, this would be read as a Karbalaei independence from Iran axis, or intra-Shia split.

I think reading it from this angle occuldes the actual meaning of the radat. The desire to map the radat onto our preconcieved splits is easy, but national cleavages are not local ones. Kalvays warns us of this type of analysis in civil wars by telling us that master-narratives are accorded too much significance, and actions in civil wars are not necessarily political, but instead do not always reflect deep ideological polarization. In fact:

It is the convergence between local motives and supralocal that endows civil war with its intimate character and leads to joint violence that straddles the divide betwen the political and the private, the collective and the individual.³

In a similar way, I think there’s the impetus to ascribe these narratives to local movements. The framing of the recent Sadrist protests as anti-Iran is redicious for similar reasons, Sadrists took to the streets not to protest Iran, but to protest for better conditions. Similarly, Muqatada Sadr himself is not anti-Iran, he is just as close to it as any other Shia leader in Iraq.

Karbala and Karbalaeis themselves have a complicated relationship with Iran. On one side, Karbala recieves money from Iran and Iranian pilgrims, which can be seen as a source of Iranian influence. However, another framing could be that Karbala is extractive, using its perch as a shrine city to extract resources from Iran. The relationship is ambigious, neither transaction nor ideological, meaning that the pro/anti Iran framing cannot be easily mapped here.

If we reject the master-narrative of sectarianism here, how else can we look at this radat? One framing is the narrative of universalism: the usage of watan and “the whole world sees” is a claim to that Imam Hussein is for all Iraqis. The master-narrative is to see the Shia as yet another partisan on the sectarian scale, with all three groups vying for resources and themselves. However, if we approach it from the logic of universalism, the Shia here do believe that they represent a particular Iraqi future, a different analysis opens. In the same way the UN espouses a human-rights based form of universalism, the Shia of mowkeb Abbasiyya are laying claim to a specific brand of nationalism. This framing is provides an escape hatch from wondering why people do not act on purely sectarian lines, and also properly accounts for Karbala’s complicated relationship.