The Politics of Mourning: Reliving Karbalāʾ in Performance and Fiction

Abstract

This article studies the performance of mourning for the martyrs of Karbalāʾ as the commemorative and ritualized cultivation of grief as perpetual reminder of the possibility of commitment against injustice. It takes Ismat Chughtai’s (d. 1991) Urdu novel Ek Katrā Khūn or One Drop of Blood as exemplifying the narrative-commemorative possibilities Karbalāʾ opens. The two philosophical lenses deployed are Butler’s notions of ‘grievability’ and mourning as a radical political act, and Nussbaum’s notion of tragic spectatorship. Through these lenses, the article studies the importance of mourning both in the realm of devotional performance and fictional narrativization. Finally, it engages in a philosophical reading of the figure of Zaynab bint ʿAlī in comparison with Antigone, which allows for new uncharted avenues of comparative work on Islamic and Western philosophy, culture, and literature.