Detroit
The Muslim holiday known as Ashura, the 10th of Muharrem in the Islamic calendar, fell on January 7 this year. Ashura is an especially sacred occasion for Shia Muslims. It commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, at the battle of Karbala in Iraq in 680, when Hussein and his supporters were defeated in a rebellion for justice against the tyrant Yezid. On Ashura, Shias also express their remorse at the failure of his partisans to sufficiently rally to Hussein’s side. Islamic theology equates Ashura, because of this element of repentance, with the Jewish Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.

The Shia drama of Ashura and Karbala is known to the non-Muslim world mainly from grotesque images sent around the world by television, for as Shias mourn the death of Hussein, they often wail loudly, their eyes streaming with tears, and may beat themselves with their fists or flog themselves in contrition. Sometimes this flagellation is carried out with knotted whips, even during parades in New York; sometimes with chains, in Beirut or Tehran; and in the past the participants commonly drew their own blood by cutting their scalps with swords. Although in recent years voluntary bloodletting has been forbidden by Shia clerics, it tends to be revived when Shias find themselves in extremis.