IB World Religions 5.5.3. Reversion to Islam and the Shi'ah Experience of Karbala Notes

5.5.3. Reversion to Islam and the Shi'ah Experience of Karbala

Reversion and the fitrah

1. Muslims usually speak of reversion rather than conversion when someone enters Islam. The word rests on the belief that every person is born already submitted to Allah, so entering Islam is a return rather than a change of religion.
2. The ground of this is fitrah, the original disposition Muslims hold Allah places in every human being. A widely quoted hadith says that every child is born upon the fitrah, and that upbringing makes the child otherwise.
3. The Qur'an describes earlier prophets, Abraham among them, as hanif and as submitted to Allah before any community existed. On this reading a revert joins something older than the historical Muslim community rather than a new religion.
4. The vocabulary carries practical weight. Reverts are told they bring no inherited guilt with them, and a hadith often quoted to new Muslims says that accepting Islam wipes out whatever came before it.
5. Not every Muslim insists on the term. Many Arabic-speaking communities simply speak of entering islam, and the English word convert stays in ordinary use in mosques across Britain, South Africa and the United States.
6. The tradition treats reversion as an event and a process at once. The formal moment takes a minute, while learning prayer, Arabic phrases and the calendar takes years, and teachers expect that gap.

The process of reverting

1. Entering Islam turns on one act, the sincere saying of the shahadah, the testimony that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah. Shi'ah Muslims commonly add a clause naming Ali as the friend of Allah.
2. The declaration must be made with niyyah (intention) and with understanding of the words. No cleric or ceremony is required, and Muslims hold the reversion valid even if nobody else hears it.
3. In practice most reverts say it before witnesses at a mosque or Islamic centre, often after weeks of study with an imam. Centres commonly issue a certificate, which matters for visas, marriage and burial rather than for validity.
4. Ghusl, the full ritual washing, normally follows, and Muslims describe it as marking a clean start. Schools differ over whether it is required here or only recommended.
5. Uncircumcised men are usually pointed toward khitan (circumcision), though scholars disagree about whether it is obligatory and no school makes a reversion depend on it.
6. Learning follows the declaration rather than preceding it. New Muslims are taught wudu and the movements of salah, short suras in Arabic, and the shape of Ramadan and the two Ids.

Life after reversion

1. Reverts describe entry into the ummah as the strongest early experience, since strangers at the mosque address them as brother or sister from the first day. Many also report that the same welcome fades once the novelty passes.
2. Family reaction is often the hardest part. The Qur'an commands kindness to parents whatever their religion, and imams commonly counsel reverts against sharp breaks with non-Muslim relatives.
3. Many reverts take an Arabic or Islamic name, though nothing requires it. The Prophet is reported to have left most companions' names untouched, changing only those whose meanings were bad.
4. A recurring difficulty is telling religion apart from the culture of the mosque that taught it. Reverts frequently say they were handed South Asian, Arab or Turkish custom as though it were revelation.
5. Surveys in Britain, France and the United States report that women are the majority of reverts, and that reversion is often tied to marriage, study or friendship rather than to a single dramatic experience.
6. Reverts enter every branch. Most join Sunni communities, smaller numbers become Shi'ah, and Sufi orders in Europe and North America have drawn reverts since the early twentieth century.

Karbala and the third Imam

1. Shi'ah religious experience is shaped by one event above all others, the killing of Husayn, grandson of the Prophet and third Imam, at Karbala on the Euphrates in 680.
2. Husayn had refused allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler, on the ground that his rule was unjust, and he set out for Kufa after its people invited him. Umayyad troops intercepted his party and cut it off from the river.
3. Shi'ah accounts dwell on the thirst of the camp, the deaths of Husayn's companions one by one, and the killing of his infant son. Roughly seventy-two of his people died, and Husayn was killed last.
4. The survivors were taken captive to Kufa and then Damascus. Shi'ah tradition gives central place to his sister Zaynab, who is remembered for speaking against Yazid in open court and for carrying the story out of the desert.
5. Shi'ah Muslims read the event as a deliberate choice rather than a defeat. On their account Husayn knew what was coming and went anyway, so that the difference between just and unjust rule would be visible for ever.
6. He is therefore called shahid, martyr, a word whose root means witness. The Arabic ties the death to testimony, which is how Shi'ah Muslims describe what Karbala accomplished.

Azadari in Muharram

1. The remembrance is called azadari, mourning for Husayn, and it fills the first ten days of Muharram each year. Shi'ah Muslims treat these days as the emotional centre of the religious calendar.
2. The basic gathering is the majlis, held in a mosque, a husayniyya or a private house. A reciter narrates the events of Karbala, and the room weeps, since tears shed for Husayn are held to be an act of worship.
3. Poetry carries much of the weight. Marsiya, the long elegy perfected in Urdu at Lucknow, and nawha, the chanted lament, are performed to fixed rhythms that the congregation knows by heart.
4. Matam, rhythmic beating of the chest in time with the nawha, accompanies the chanting. Participants describe it as sharing bodily in a grief they hold to be still present rather than merely remembered.
5. Processions carry an alam, a replica of the battle standard, and often a riderless horse standing for Husayn's mount. Free water and drink are handed out from stalls called sabeel, in memory of the thirst at Karbala.
6. The form varies by region. In South Asia a ta'ziyah is a replica of Husayn's tomb carried and then buried, while in Iran ta'ziyeh is a staged passion play with actors taking the parts.

Meaning and internal debate

1. Shi'ah teaching treats Karbala as a pattern rather than a date. The saying that every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala is used to apply Husayn's choice to any situation of injustice.
2. Many Shi'ah Muslims also hold that Husayn intercedes for those who mourn him, and that grief keeps a bond with the Ahl al-Bayt, the family of the Prophet. Ziyarat, visiting his shrine at Karbala, expresses the same bond.
3. Some practices are contested inside Shi'ah Islam. Tatbir, cutting the scalp so blood is shed in mourning, has been discouraged or forbidden by senior maraji, who argue it harms the body and the community's reputation.
4. Organised blood donation now runs alongside or instead of it in Britain, Iraq and India, and campaigns present giving blood as the same devotion redirected. Supporters of tatbir answer that outsiders' opinions are not a reason to change worship.
5. Sunni Muslims honour Husayn as the Prophet's grandson and as a martyr, while generally not practising azadari. Many keep the tenth of Muharram as a voluntary fast, which Sunni tradition links to Moses and the deliverance from Egypt.
6. The lines are not always sharp. Sunni and Sufi participation in Muharram processions is long established in parts of India, Pakistan and Egypt, and Muharram observance is now visible in London, Toronto and Sydney.